Michal Hronec

"Of course, the mining of the fact that they are in Hungary was felt only in the fact that the municipality - only a person of Hungarian nationality could and did work at the municipal office. If one of the Slovaks wanted to work like, let's say… Postman, for example? For general bulls… Because not everyone had breeding bulls. They behaved in the municipal office. If he wanted to be the caretaker of these bulls, he had to change his name. For example, if his name was Kančok, they changed him to Hungarian in Kancsó. And when he wanted to be a cop… Thus, the gendarme was one and the cops were the other, because at that time it was like this… well, but as in our country it is divided that there are cops and these… and the second group. So there was also… who was a gendarme, there could only be a Hungarian. That is, all the gendarmes who served in and around the village. And the police officers, who distributed all sorts of invitations from the municipal house and supervised the order in the village as far as the streets were concerned, and so also if they wanted to do such a function, Ondrej Hirka, for example, had to change his last name to Herendy Andráš. Then he could perform this function, but he also had to learn Hungarian. So the Slovaks and our ancestors eventually survived this mining there. I'm not exaggerating this because when I was growing up to the age of five, they also put me in kindergarten, where we were trained in the Hungarian language in the afternoon. They just hung a plate, a spoon, a knife on the wall - we sat like children - and I had to repeat it twenty times, plates and plates - and we really remembered it when we repeated it twenty times. And when we ran out into the yard, to ventilate… so there were ladies, i.e. educators… but they also had to make a surname, for example, there was one of my family who was called Čemanová and lived to be 104 years old, but she had to change last name and her name was Cseteová. She could not wear her original surname Čeman. And when they walked between us and we flew around the yard like five-year-old boys and here and there, however, we immediately started speaking slovak, because I didn't have to speak to anyone in hungarian until I was five, nor did I know hungarian. That's how we usually get slapped. "

"And his father was in his service at the age of ten. Until he was twentieth, he was, he was still a servant, or in fact he was a shepherd, then he was a farmer, and then he was like a farm worker. He knew how to manage… that is, digging corn, mowing and so on. So that's probably how my father lived. And my mother lived with my grandfather, who had returned from the war. She got a stepmother with whom the two children came, so it was already a family of four. Then a common girl was born to them, who died as a child, I don't know. So the grandfather raised these tiny four, four children. And then my mother got married when she was less than eighteen years old, she still had to get a permit from the municipal office in order to get married. Because youths used to go to such old ladies or "nannies", we called it… who were mostly widows. This is how they made a living by renting the front room to the youth. The young people went there to have fun, some girls went there to sit. Well, the young men went to choose between the girls and here and there someone played such a musical instrument, we called it "tambory" and so they danced. Well, and always a girl or a boy, when he chose that boyfriend, he told the old lady who organized the meeting to the youth to whisper when the concerned person went home, to tell this person to go to her because she wants to talk to you. ! So then, they met, talked, arranged a date, and then most of the time marriages were formed. In addition, in richer circles… in circles of large farms, larger farms, they went there for courting. The parents got married and agreed on who to marry or whom to marry their daughter to, so they went to ask. But for the poor so much, these kinds of marriages didn't work. So our parents met like this… my mother said that when she saw my father, she said to that “widow”, as we called it… that “hantirke” ’, in our dialect dictionary,“ He will be my husband."