Anna Blašková

* 1934

  • "You know, our job. Those athletes, oh my goodness. All those athletes who were awarded, I measured and weighed them. I directed them when they had rashes, what to wear. When they had girlfriends. I comforted them , when they broke up. Such names, all of them are what they were subsequently named. Those athletes were honored. Satan, then Višňovský. They are all so honored. They all played in America. Such small boys. I then did twenty years of health and physical education sister."

  • "He was tall, he wrote books. Then he ran away, he had to run away, because he was Tis's companion. So he ran away, but Tis was caught. He ran away to America, and then they felt there, he was a high-ranking priest, but they felt such nostalgia for home there, then the holy father, I don't know which pope it was. The eleventh or the twelfth? He freed them from that attachment to the church. That they no longer had to remain celibate, so then he got married. He also had two sons, and they also now, not now, long ago, It's been ten years. They were at my mother's sister's funeral. It's been more than that, I don't remember exactly. Those sons there, that they have white technology all over America, that they are entrepreneurs. And what did he actually do? Was he a historian? He also wrote books. He was also friends with Dominik Tatarko, the writer. They simply fought so that the Slovaks would finally be something. Well, in the end, it turned out that they followed through, that they promised themselves to Hitler. Do you know? And then the Slovaks suffered for it. For wanting to be more like Czechs. That they wanted to have their homeland. Yes, and he taught in Bratislava? Or where? He was in Bratislava. He was highly, highly educated. Yes, he had to teach when he was a university professor."

  • "Because my mother's cousin was a university professor, associate professor. He was ordained at the tomb of St. Peter and he had connections with Štefánik. So also because Štefánik was once, my mother's cousin Polakovič had a house like that in the garden. And Štefánik also came there. Mama as such a little girl, quite tiny that they, they didn't want anybody to go into that room there. So Mama carried what they needed in there. She was such a little girl, but I don't remember exactly, just that she was quite tiny, that they told her : Be careful not to spill it. Because they didn't want someone else there to hear or something, I don't know. And what was the cousin's name? Štefan Polakovič."

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    Bratislava, 10.05.2023

    (audio)
    duration: 02:18:05
    media recorded in project Stories of the 20th century
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I want them not to say that I was a bad person after my death

Witness Anna Blašková during recording.
Witness Anna Blašková during recording.
photo: Photo by Dominik Janovský

Anna Blašková was born on January 23, 1934 in Chtelnica. Mother was originally from Chtelnica and father Ľudovít came from the nearby village of Dechtice. In addition to Anna, they raised seven more children. Anna spent the pre-war years and part of her childhood in Chtelnice, where everyone helped her grandparents in the fields. They mainly made a living by raising smaller farm animals and were able to grow basic food themselves. According to the witness, in 1941, Ľudovít’s father unknowingly bought the store from the arizator, in which he did very well until the end of the war. After the war, he learned that the shop used to belong to Jews who were no longer alive, which he found very difficult. He had a mental breakdown and the family experienced a rather difficult time. It was Anna and her sister who brought him back to sewing, and he started doing well again. But since he refused to listen to the orders of the communists, he was taken to forced labor in the Karvina-Ostrava mines, while his mother and children were evicted from their house in Hlohovec to the village of Siladice, where they lived very modestly. After graduating from high school, Anna decided, despite her mother’s disapproval, to continue her studies at the medical school in Nitra. In 1953, she became a registered nurse. During practice at the hospital in Nitra, she met her future husband, Juraj Topoľ, who came from the Czech Republic and was a very good gynecologist. Together they moved to Topoľčany, where the husband got the position of district gynecologist. Juraj’s work as a doctor was extremely exhausting, due to which he got a severe flu, to which he succumbed in 1971. Anna was a widow for six years and raised her daughter alone. She later married her second husband, Ernest Blašek. After Juraj’s death, she worked until her retirement in 1989 as a nurse in the physical education clinic.