“There were all kinds of social events, so people got together and socialised. It was mostly the family. Everyone had many children. That is how it used to be and you know I tell you, we lived in a poverty, only eating what we got from the field, we could not go to the shop immediately, there was no electricity, but people were happier than today. We got everything we need now, but sociability is lacking to others, so that they communicate with each other, as we used to do. I was only fourteen years old back then, so young, but we were already meeting up, as today we go to the discos. But we didn’t drink nor smoke anything. We sat down in the field and played harmonica, chatted and in the evening we went dancing.”
“We were really poor. We ran out of stock and daddy was gathering grains around mills to buy something for us. He used to burn the wood coal a lot, so he had some savings and used them to buy something, before we had ours. I remember that in 1944 we sown winter barley just near our house and soon it matured, we beat it, dried it on large sheets, he brought it to the mill and then we had it. It was worse than ripe potatoes and rye. So, such a life it was, but no one lamented.”
“They used to call her Margita Židová and together with a Slovak she had a son called Karel, who then lived in Bernartice, but is already dead. Their name was the Temniaks, but they were not married. As they were taking the Jews, the Germans took them along too. She was a really talented tailor and whenever we needed anything, she managed to help us out for a small fee. The Germans took her to Borod, where she quickly married. Yet it didn’t help her and she ended up in Osvětim.“
Františka Trojáková, née Danielová, was born on 30th September, 1933 as the eldest of nine children of Štefan and Marie Daniel. He knows his native village only under the Slovak name of Feketanské. It was likely a part of the village Negreni, in Slovak called Feketov and was located in a county of Cluj in bihorsko-salajský region in the North-Western part of Rumania. It belonged to the local community of Slovaks; there were around 30 thousand in the region back then. The family then lived in the village of Šarany (Rumanian Şerani) and since 1941 in a village of Valkovanské, a part of the village of Sub Cetate (Hungarian Valko Varja). They lived in a wooden house without any water and electricity. Their fields and pastures were in a steep and hardly accessible hills; the nearest shop or school was several kilometres walking through little paths and the wolfs were still endangering their sheep herds. In 1947 the family re-emigrated to Czechoslovakia and they settled in a border village of Kunčice, where the witness married Jan Troják in 1952. Later in 1962 she moved with her husband and three children to Javorník, where Františka Trojáková lived also in 2017.
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