"My brother was in Germany right after graduation, the middle one. He worked there in East Germany and said to come to Germany. Then he went to the west and told us to come to Germany so we could work here, make some money. We also had to pay for the apartment and we wanted to buy a car. Improve our situation. Basically, it was about going abroad, curiosity. We got my passports and Vášáry gave me a permit for a year, officially I still have it at home. Ďuro also managed to get the release for a year. We came to East Germany and had a visa. At the time, they were giving them, and we could go with this visa without control from East Berlin to West, because we had such a visa that they could not even check us. So we used to live in East Berlin and we started working right away. We arrived on August 11th and on August 22nd we both had a job. I worked in a factory and Ďuro worked on a construction site, he tied iron. That was in August. And in November, there was a regulation that everyone who is abroad must leave, they must return because they will be convicted. We never wanted to emigrate, but then my mother wrote that we should stay there, that the situation was getting worse and that there was someone else who also had a visa and also told us that if you have the opportunity, do not return. And then we couldn't travel for 20 years. "
"Then we went on our honeymoon. We were in Yugoslavia, in Dubrovnik. I went back to work and there I started to feel that it was pro-Russian, there it was terrible against the director, as some acted and started to promote that the Russians finally came and two opposite poles were formed and it was no longer tolerable and that Vášáry was so loyal, very good man, a very good director and suddenly the hatred towards him and I could not understand it. Those groups created a cell, that we should do something about it. So we went and slammed into those tanks, I also had a picture of how I climbed on one tank and one took pictures of us, he gave it to me and I don't know where the photo is and he wanted it back from me, so he wrote me but I don't have it.
It was very sad, I have to say, I wouldn't want to experience it anymore, how those tanks went, how they stood in that square there. Then the one who shot him at that post was my neighbor, we saw each other every day. It also has a memorial plaque there. Then came Palach in Prague, who set himself on fire. It was a terrible time. Terrible. Terrible. "
"The labor camp was that these people, as a bourgeois sect or a bourgeois class, these rich people who lived like this, my father was not rich, but he owned something in Slovakia, so completely humiliating them mentally. They were given uniforms, green without any linings, and they had to work hard, digging canals and young soldiers standing over them, and that was to get them down, mentally humiliate them, throw them out of the house, that was the communist re-education. "
Eva Petrášová, born in Figuschová, was born in 1943 in Zvolen. She comes from an upholster’s family, whose company was nationalized in 1948 and Eva‘s father was taken to a labor camp for more than 2 years. She graduated from the Faculty of Physical Education and Sports (FTVŠ) in Bratislava and worked as a gym teacher all her life. In August 1969, she and her husband, whom she met the year before, emigrated to Germany and still live in Stuttgart, Germany. Eva never let go of Slovakia, bought two houses in the village of Ratková and founded a civic association, which she chaired for twelve years. She has worked hard all her life and is grateful that Germany has made her who she is today.
