Today, they’re going to move us

Until the late 1940s, three villages in southern Moravia were settled by a population originating in Croatia. For political reasons, the presence of the Croats at the Austro-Moravian border became undesirable after 1948 and the Croats were displaced. The demise of the Croatian element in the indigenous villages was gradual. Marie Čtvrtlíková recalls the events. By the time this was taking place, she was a little girl and she slowly began to realize that something bad was happening: “When they were moving uncle Jurdič, his daughter Anna was two years old. She cried so much when they were loading her little bed onto the truck platform. She cried: ‘My bed, my bed is going away!’ In this fashion, they moved our entire family, all our relatives, except for my grandfather and us.” The displacement of the Croats was carried out in several waves between the years 1948-1951. Those who were still left in their homes remained there until the end in the hope of being able to avoid the same inevitable fate. “Then we got an eviction notice and had to move as well. On that day I was in Drnholec but I could hear a car coming from a distance. I ran across the field as fast as I could to be with my mom. When I came home, my mother was just preparing the dough for the cake. She still managed to bake it. She sent me to the cowshed to feed the cows. So I went to give the cows some hay but the men who were moving us were just throwing hay on the car and one of them said: ‘jab her on a pitchfork and throw her in there too!’ This has really stuck with me,” she recalled. It was very difficult for the Croatians like Čtvrtlíková to come to terms with the loss of their homes. For many years, they were forbidden to set foot in the abandoned villages in the border zone.