Eva Karvašová

"I went to Železnô every year and it was the Masaryk League against Tuberculosis and I was always pushed there as a malnourished child. Well, I experienced the 1944 in Železnô, in August, just before the uprising, when we didn't have to go to bed at night, because we could watch how they set fires on Prašiva hola opposite Železnô, so that they had somewhere to drop Russian planes. All that reinforcement from drugs and everything to weapons. The partisans came to Železnô, we did not have to go to the dormitory to sleep, because there were tired men who were already partisans. And those who came on horseback, I waited for those horses, not for those partisans, but for those horses. Because that's how they threw reins and I went to feed them in the stream and I fed them, it was a joy for me. Some stayed there the whole uprising in one cabin under Salatín. We got by car, the car went to Bratislava, so we got to Piešťany. But we went through Bystrica, where the Germans were already armed at the National House, they already had machine guns. Bystrica was already occupied and we had two signs, one for the partisans and the other for the Germans, so we could pass. "

"My husband had his own secret agent. He had to leave the Academy of Performing Arts, and he had to have the lowest salary, exactly what my father ever did - when they were nationalized, he had to have the lowest salary and he was not allowed to have rewards, so my husband under communism . And my husband had his own agent, who went to my boss. They became friends. So always: "say hello to your husband." I say, "Thank you very well, all right,". He then called once that he was retiring to see if he could come and introduce his follower. Well imagine that! He also came with a follower, I made them coffee, gave them cognac and that's it. what could we do? The phones were listening to us when I wanted to say something so they knew, so I said it on the phone. They also watched my first husband. When I was married to him and my father came from Piešťany, they knew we had lunch in Carltone. I still had it for a while and it was politics. ”

"They came to the radio when I was dating Peter Karvaš and they gave me to decide whether I would keep in touch with the right-wing opportunist or I would have to go away from the radio. So I said: Well, it's not worth it so as not to associate with a right-wing opportunist, so I left the radio. Then there was peace. Then they knew, I say, you can't use me for any of your work. You can't use me. Because they wanted me as a cooperating person so I could travel and I would I don't know what. "You are going among writers, you know what they're talking about. Don't be angry, don't use me for that." Not so. My father told me, you can always say no, I'm not willing to bring on other people, I'm just not willing to do some things until they start torturing you, then you can't know how long you will last and how long you won't. But until then, you can always say no. And a lot of people didn't say that. And then we weren't enough to wonder who did everything. Close people. Then there were the shocks. "

"He, as a Czechoslovak, has been in the resistance from the very beginning, from the 1939. People came to us at the pharmacy with a suitcase, because when the uprising was about to take place, the medical supplies were regularly in those suitcases. And the Snežienka partisan unit that was in the Inovec Mountains all went there. Eventually, it happened that at five or six in the morning I woke up to someone calling the pharmacy, we used to live over the pharmacy, so my father took a bathrobe and went downstairs and it was the Gestapo: You will come with us. And he had a pharmacist in the pharmacy to whom he bought the presidential exemption, a Jew. And he went out, he used to live down there at the pharmacy in such a room, and they, when the Gestapo, when they noticed him, said: You will come with us too. So they took them, one nice morning and fortunately my father only went to Ilava, but the pharmacist Deutsch to Dachau. The father was then imprisoned in Ilava. I remember I didn't know what he looked like. I came home from school and I see a man with a chin leaning against the wall, who is crying. I wonder who it's supposed to be, so it was my father from Ilava. And when it was after the war, I walked around our pharmacy in Piešťany and suddenly it took my breath away, because there was a guy standing in a German uniform. Well, I was completely scared. And it was our pharmacist who, when he survived in Dachau and when the Americans came there, occupied it, they had nothing to wear, so they dressed him in a German uniform. That's how he came to Piešťany. "

"I went to school in Piešťany, I went to the first folk school at the age of seven. The first was called the State Folk School in Piešťany. Then two years passed, a new school was built and the Milan Rastislav Štefánik School was called. At that time exististed the Slovak state, it was already in 41. When they found out, I don't know if the officials or the ministers that they had nothing to look for in children of Evangelical or Jewish origin at the Milan Rastislav Štefánik School. It didn't make sense because Štefánik´s father, as we all know, was an evangelical priest. But it was also the time when Andrej Hlinka said that Lutherans, ie evangelicals, were an ulcer on the body of the Slovak nation. It so happened that we then traveled to one class - as in Kopanice, Piešťany was then a district town and we went to singleclass. We went to the second, third and fourth class, because there were four classes of the folk school. And we had a principal and one teacher who were excellent, so we went to high school without written exams, we didn't need to at all. And then I went to the grammar school in Piešťany, it was an eight-year high school with a high school diploma, and I went until year 1952, when we had a graduation year. And we had a prom, great. Then handwriting, and after handwriting, the week before that academic week, our classroom came, who teached us from the first grade, so he knew us all very well and came to class and told us that he had to tell us that about ten of our class will not be able to graduate. So we wanted to know why, so he had it written, so there were girls and boys who ... One was from a very religious family, the other was the daughter of a notary, the third was the daughter of a tradesman - a painter, and that continued it, I was the daughter of a pharmacist and a Democrat, also a big mistake. Paľo Mach, his father was imprisoned, he was the minister of propaganda in the Slovak government, and he was imprisoned in Leopoldov at that time. So he couldn't graduate either. Then there was a daughter whose father wore a German uniform. So we were all in one bag. ”

"Ordinary life in the five regimes depends on the family environment in which a person grows up and who shapes him. I was born halfway through the existence of the Czechoslovak Republic. At that time no one wanted to, and did not take the serious growing threats of Nazism. At that time, the 32nd year, no one really took it seriously. I grew up in such an environment that either I was with my grandparents in Budapest, so more precisely, I was born in Piešťany and there I had a beautiful childhood, really beautiful, or I was in Mikuláš, where there was a sea of ​​all relatives and all aunts, everyone raised me. And then I lived in the Tatras, so I experienced so much good ... Here I have written that: It was so much good, so deep inside me, as if my protective shell had grown in the future. And the fact that I tried and experienced many different environments and also a genuine life on a large farm in the village, with all the work and everything that went with it, taught me to adapt to the circumstances, whatever. That is my big advantage. That whether it's done well or done badly, I'm at home everywhere. At that time I didn't know yet how to take advantage of these benefits and changes were already taking place ... I just take the amazing things with great joy and the other things in such a way that they just can't be changed and that they are and that one has to survive."