Pavol Foltýn

"My mother felt this for the first time, because the so-called Horthy White Terror began in Hungary, after the suppression of the Hungarian Republic of Soviets. So one terror was replaced by another... the red terror was replaced by the white terror. And in Hungary, the first signs of anti-Jewish measures, which were called "Numerus clausus", had already begun. So it was a limited number of people who could have a university education. So most of my relatives got their degrees outside of Hungary. They were thus educated either in Czechoslovakia or in Germany. One of my mother's cousins was one of the first female engineers who graduated from the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering and worked as a mechanical engineer first in the city of Ózd, then in the smelters of the Salgotaria company, and then started work to the Goldberger company, which produced textiles. Since she was a machinist, she needed to supplement her education and thus also graduated from a textile college. So she had two diplomas, both as a textile engineer and as a mechanical engineer. In the end, her fate ended somewhere in a concentration camp.''

"In Hungary, we had access to other goods, to more beautiful and sometimes even better goods, but there was that unfortunate border. Nothing was allowed to be brought in, nothing was allowed to be brought in... they let us go with eight hundred forints, I don't know who remembers it... for exit clauses and such obscenities, and we knocked each other like aspens when we went to the border, because the Slovak customs and passport control came. It was humiliating, and so devastating. And I will never forget when we were young guys and we got on the express train... the express train left Košice at six in the morning, so at half past eight we were already in Miskolc, where we got on the number two bus and went to Tapolc. Since several of us knew each other there, we slept under a blanket at the cottage of one of our friends. So I went to Hungary with only one towel and nothing else. And when the customs officer came, he asked me: 'Where is your luggage?' And I said: 'I don't have luggage.' a toothbrush and then one towel and a swimsuit!' ... 'And where are you going?' I answer: 'I'm going to swim in Tapolca'. They couldn't understand it, because there were always people with bags."