I feel like a Czech and a Moldovan
Stáhnout obrázek
Ljubov Bratu is a member of the Czech minority in the village of Holuboje in southern Moldova. She was born Ljubov Cucuianu on 27 November 1970 in Holuboje, in the former Soviet Union, to a family with Czech-Moldovan-Romanian roots. Her mother is Czech, née Lněničková, and her father is Moldovan with Romanian ancestry. Both parents worked in the local kolkhoz before the collapse of the USSR. Czech traditions were maintained in the family mainly through her maternal grandmother. During her childhood, Ljubov did not perceive any barriers between children of different nationalities; little Czechs, Moldovans and Russians played together. She graduated as a kindergarten teacher and later retrained as a first-grade primary school teacher. In the early 1990s, the collapse of the USSR impacted her life. She perceived it primarily as a period of chaos and material deprivation. Her husband was conscripted into the Moldovan army during the war in Transnistria, but soon returned home. Ljubov Bratu teaches at the Jaroslav Hašek Primary School in Holuboje and is a member of the regional association and the Perličky ensemble. She senses that the trend among young people is to leave the region to go abroad, as her adult son did.
