For the twenty years of the first Czechoslovak Republic the Morava was not a state border at all. Hodonín, a few kilometres across the water, was in the same country; people worked, shopped and married on both banks without paperwork, and the old customs line that had made Skalica rich simply evaporated. The town lived on wine, crafts, small industry and the market. It also got something it had never had — schooling, courts and public life in its own language, in a state that treated Slovak as a language of government rather than a tolerated dialect. Those two decades are why so many families here still have relatives on the Czech side.Dvadsať rokov prvej Československej republiky nebola Morava štátnou hranicou vôbec. Hodonín, pár kilometrov cez vodu, ležal v tej istej krajine; ľudia na oboch brehoch pracovali, nakupovali a ženili sa bez papierov a stará colná čiara, z ktorej Skalica zbohatla, sa jednoducho vyparila. Mesto žilo z vína, remesiel, drobného priemyslu a trhu. Dostalo aj čosi, čo nikdy nemalo — školy, súdy a verejný život vo vlastnej reči, v štáte, kde slovenčina bola rečou úradov, nie trpeným nárečím. Tie dve desaťročia sú dôvod, prečo tu dodnes toľko rodín má príbuzných na českej strane.
