Gizela Boriková

“They did not fire the (German – ed.’s note) workers, because there would be nobody left to work in the factories. But those workers who did not obey gradually had to leave for Germany. Then there were no people who would replace them. Foremen from the porcelain factory therefore went to Slovakia with a campaign to invite young people to come to work to the Czech border regions, because there were no jobs in Slovakia. When I married in autumn 1946, my father-in-law and my sister-in-law went with the first group, and they arrived here (to Karlovy Vary - ed.’s note) and then they wrote home that there was work, there were empty apartments, lots of furniture and everything else, and they urged us to come. We did not have anything; we just married and we lived in my parents’ house. Two months after our wedding we moved to Bohemia. We lived in Stará Role.”

“My dad was an orphan. He did not get anything from anybody. What he had was what he had built with his own hands: the field and the house that he built when he married. But he had to leave. Hungarians from southern Hungary went to Slovakia, but not all of them, only the wealthy people. They had to leave. (In contrast to Germans – ed.’s note), they were allowed to take absolutely everything with them. My parents had about three wagons, and they even carried manure and straw with them, because they had cattle. (Three or four families shared one train car; lots of animals could fit in there). The journey to Hungary took about two days, and the animals had to eat something. It had to be terrible.”