Olga Jaroňová

"I remember the last day of the war. It was raining, it was cold, it was ugly. It was the last day of April. We had to blackout all through the war, we weren't allowed to have light anywhere. And someone was banging on our door. And when Daddy opened the door, a German soldier came in saying he needed to bandage his leg. I can still see him wrapping his leg. He had a wound, so he was bandaging it. He showed us a picture of his family, his wife and children, and he started crying and complaining. That's how I keep seeing him. And when he bandaged his leg, he left. And on the morning of the first of May, the sun was shining. Azure sky. And the Red Army soldiers had arrived. I see the first one riding his bicycle and shouting: 'Where's the fascist? Where's the fascist?' And the rest of the army behind him. And so they stayed with us. I know they killed a cow there, cut it up, and then they cooked a huge pot of soup in our kitchen. They stayed with us for about a week before they moved on with the front."

"When 1938 came, I know that the order came to leave Slovakia within twenty-four hours. And we were in the boarding school. It was in September. We hadn't been there a month when my mother came to get us. She took us to Daskabáty, to my father's birthplace, to my father's brother. There was a small house of their parents who had passed away. We moved into that house. Daddy stayed there for about a month to pack up and move everything. And I remember those holidays. Daddy was very progressive. He had a big library and he was one of the few people who had a radio, even though there was no electricity. He had an accumulator by the radio, and batteries, and I don't know what all to make it play. We had an awful lot of people coming to listen to it in 1938. They listened even bellow the windows. So the news from the radio spread around the neighbourhood and in the barracks."