Anna Matiová

“I’ll tell you the truth, when we were children we weren’t interested in it at all. I was fourteen, when I finished school and we only heard that the Hungarians were about to come, so we went there, where was such a gate near the playground. And the two men came, one was Maďar and another one was Bito, and they were riding horses. They we wearing such clothes and people welcomed them with salt and bread and shouted, ‘Esküszünk, esküszünk, hogy rabok tovább, nem leszünk! Esküszünk, esküszünk, hogy hogy rabok tovább, nem leszünk!’ And in our language?” “We swear.” “‘We swear we won’t be slaves anymore.’ Well it was like that. They came from there, from Trstená village, they came with a flag, with the Catholic flag with the Virgin Mary, and as they were welcomed here, they went to the Catholic church. They entered it and started praying and singing in Hungarian.”

“When I came to Geča, nearby the church there used to be a big bridge and then it had been dynamited, it was called Ždaňský bridge. Well, Ždaňský bridge had been blasted off, and when I was at home, the small bridge near Malá Čaňa was dynamited as well and it was such a large concrete bridge. I recall that even pictures dropped down of the wall, so close it was, because we lived really near. I had such experiences after the Russians’ arrival.”

“They wanted to have an order. So in the church, you know, when we go to the church for a mass, it was celebrated neither in Hungarian nor in Slovak, but in Latin. And immediately after we had sung in Slovak, we were forbidden to do so, even though we were allowed to sing in Hungarian. If somebody could sing in Hungarian, they did so, but those who couldn’t, didn’t sing at all. And among the Catholics there were not many people speaking Hungarian. Among the Calvinists there were more people speaking Hungarian, therefore their situation was also much better.”

“Well, after their arrival, of course, the life was not that bad, actually we fared quite well during the first two years and even though we hadn’t much money, everything was cheap and it got better after they had come. Later, as I remember, everything changed. I finished school and then I went to the town to find a job. Because otherwise we had no money, we went for work. Just like nowadays people go for work to foreign countries, we went to the town, we served as housemaids there.”