Věra Harrerová

"For five years I went to what we called Preparandia. From there I went from fifth grade to high school. Unfortunately, I couldn't finish the Prima because at that time it was 1938 and Levice, as I told you, where I lived, fell to the Hungarians. My parents found out at seven o'clock in the evening that they had to move out by seven o'clock the next day. Each family would be assigned one military truck, and they could load what they could from their apartment and their family onto that truck, and by seven o'clock they had to leave the town where I was born. So you can imagine that at two o'clock at night, but I remember it all, they loaded me next to the driver with my mother, my dad was watching the furniture in that back compartment, and we drove to the village where they just dropped us off. We were fortunate because my dad worked in the district office and had friends nearby, it was about thirty kilometers from that Levice, that we were settled there. My dad had to go from there every day to another small town to work, where the Slovak district office was transferred. And every day I walked three kilometers to the next village. There was no school where we were evicted, in Pečenice. And I ran to school every day, summer, winter, all year round. Can you imagine, when from all the comforts I had at home in those Levice, suddenly we were in a tiny village and I went to school with children every day."