Urban Albert

“He came back one morning. It was early dawn, and we had this one little dog, and he was awfully persistent. The dog barked and barked, so I went outside, it was still dark, and I said: ‘There’s someone coming our way.’ We went to have a look, and it was Ignác! In a Russian coat. The moment he came, we quickly took it off him. It was full of lice. Mum dressed him up straight away. Many of them came back like that. As far as I remember, after the second world war, there were five or six people who didn’t return just from our vicinity. Our neighbour didn’t come back, then my dad’s sister’s son, and another neighbour, and the two Morong brothers. Of those who were drafted before my brother, almost none returned.”

“After the war, when the Germans went away, all this was left empty. There were Bulgarians here, Romanians. There were lots of different people in the border regions here. The Czechoslovak government found out that there is an awful lot of Slovaks all over the world. So they went around the world saying, if you want to, you can come to Czechoslovakia. They even dropped leaflets by plane. What all they’ll give us, how they tricked us. People set off there. First, they came for work, then they went back and took their families. The first people with their families went in ’46. They received a farm, some fields and cattle, but that was all confiscated again anyway. They came the next year saying, if you want to come, you can register and you won’t travel by your own means, but by a transport.”