Gizela Boriková

* 1927

  • “They did not fire the (German – ed.’s note) workers, because there would be nobody left to work in the factories. But those workers who did not obey gradually had to leave for Germany. Then there were no people who would replace them. Foremen from the porcelain factory therefore went to Slovakia with a campaign to invite young people to come to work to the Czech border regions, because there were no jobs in Slovakia. When I married in autumn 1946, my father-in-law and my sister-in-law went with the first group, and they arrived here (to Karlovy Vary - ed.’s note) and then they wrote home that there was work, there were empty apartments, lots of furniture and everything else, and they urged us to come. We did not have anything; we just married and we lived in my parents’ house. Two months after our wedding we moved to Bohemia. We lived in Stará Role.”

  • “My dad was an orphan. He did not get anything from anybody. What he had was what he had built with his own hands: the field and the house that he built when he married. But he had to leave. Hungarians from southern Hungary went to Slovakia, but not all of them, only the wealthy people. They had to leave. (In contrast to Germans – ed.’s note), they were allowed to take absolutely everything with them. My parents had about three wagons, and they even carried manure and straw with them, because they had cattle. (Three or four families shared one train car; lots of animals could fit in there). The journey to Hungary took about two days, and the animals had to eat something. It had to be terrible.”

  • “The interrogation began. When was it? How did we get to know each other (the priest Václav Divíšek – ed.’s note)? Why did he keep coming to us? The investigator repeated the questions hundred times, waiting for me to make a mistake. I was sitting there for more than three hours. I breastfed my baby at that time, and I had so much milk that I thought that my breasts would burst when the time of my usual breast-feeding came. I told him: ‘Let me go home, my breasts are bursting, I will faint here.’ It hurt me. I have never experienced a feeling like that, because I always breastfed and I did not know what it was like to withhold the milk, if such thing was even possible. He replied: ‘Pshaw. Who will breastfeed your boy when we imprison you? We will place him to an infant care institute and that will be it.’ You can imagine how I felt.”

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    Karlovy Vary, 23.03.2015

    (audio)
    duration: 01:40:42
    media recorded in project The Stories of Our Neigbours
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There are jobs, empty apartments, lots of furniture…

Borikova dobove.jpg (historic)
Gizela Boriková
photo: archiv pamětnice

  Gizela Boriková, née Meszárošová, was born October 12, 1927 in Bratislava. She came from a large Hungarian family that lived in the village Takšoň (present-day Matúškovo) in the Galanta district in southern Slovakia. Her parents Julius Meszároš and Gizela Lenártová farmed on a large farm. Gizela and her five siblings helped with farm work. After elementary school Gizela studied the lyceum in Nové Zámky, but she did not finish her studies because schools in Slovakia were closed down in 1944-1945 and the buildings were converted into military hospitals. In autumn 1946 she married Štefan Borik and together they went to settle the abandoned Sudeten region. They found a place to live in Stará Role near Karlovy Vary and they began working in the local porcelain factory Bohemia. Gizela’s parents and her siblings were relocated from Slovakia to Hungary in November 1947 due to their Hungarian origin and they were exchanged for Hungarian Slovaks who were repatriated to Czechoslovakia. Gizela had two daughters and one son, and for about nine years she stayed at home as a housewife and she was taking care of the children. In 1955 she began working as a shop assistant in a grocery store in Stará Role. She also completed her formal education and she earned a vocational certificate as a shop assistant. Her youngest daughter was born in 1956. When her maternity leave ended, she began working as a shop assistant in a butcher’s shop which was run by the state-owned company Pramen and she worked there until her retirement in 1981.