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interview // german // 4:51 Min // 16.06.2008
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You always hat to stick up for yourself and you were never accepted. At the inn you were laughed at or reviled as a betrayer of your home country. My father was playing music at the neighbour’s, when somebody took his trombone and broke it. Then he said: “Go home to Laibach or wherever you belong.” Things like that happened quite often. Or once, when we were at the inn, some youngsters came, about 16-17 years old, and shouted: “Bugger off!” and “Betrayers, what are you doing here?” Although my husband was recognised as a partisan, that happened as well. Over at Maddau, when the resettled families had their annual meeting in the public cinema, it was decided to have a silent protest march up to the cathedral. Although the bishop did not allow that, we still went up there anyway and there, at the police station, the police were already waiting with the fire brigade. When we got up there, there was a barrier. So some of our people jumped up and tried to clear the way. All of a sudden somebody shouted: “Water on!” or something. And then they pointed these hoses at us and instead of a greeting, they soaked us. On the other side the English were standing and I got so annoyed and said: “Oh, these are our confederates?” We laughed into their faces as our women - our mothers were crying and screaming. At that time I said: “If I could, I would jump into his face and rip his face apart.” In this situation, Austria being liberated, we being liberated, and you still have to face things like this, made us furious. But that’s the way it was. – Terrible, I thought more than just once.
Well, up to 1955, they were able to learn German and Slovenian in school, as it was a bilingual area. All of a sudden, with the treaty, it was different again. A state treaty was around 1957. The teachers went out onto the streets with the children and protested that they couldn’t teach and learn Slovenian and so on. So afterwards our children had to be subscribed by their parents, if they wanted them to learn Slovenian. Only the oldest ones didn’t have to. But, of course, the lessons weren’t the same as the German ones. They had only a few lessons. That was another discrimination of the Carinthian Slovenes.
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