Božena Wortnerová

"My father-in-law went to America in the 1920s, but he was not alone. His grandmother had fourteen children and most of them went to America. Then in the twenties he went there too. He apprenticed himself as a goldsmith-clockmaker, and when he got his apprenticeship, he didn't want to be there anymore. He hated cities, he liked the countryside. So he came back and did watchmaking and goldsmithing in his own. In '48, they took his goldsmith shop away from him. Then they came with a paper saying they were closing his watch repair shop. We used to get parcels of clothes from America, so he told them, 'I don't mind, farming will feed me and America will clothe me.' And he was arrested. My mother-in-law didn't go to court because she had a heart problem. My husband said, 'I'm not going there either.' I said, 'We have to know what they arrested him for, why they took him.' So they told him that they found a pot of cream on him, that he should have handed it over, and all that nonsense. And when asked if the children were in the Youth Union, he replied, 'The Youth Union under the communists is like the Hitler Youth during the war!'"

"My father-in-law was arrested in summer clothes, sandals on his feet. He was sentenced to a year and a quarter, in Banská Bystrica. When he was released, they let him go home in the same clothes and sandals, in the winter on December 8. The suit that his grandmother, my mother-in-law sent him didn't arrive until three months after his return, they didn't give it to him. When he was traveling through Slovakia and the train had a break somewhere, he went for a hot meal, which the Slovaks paid for. At that time the Slovaks didn't like us very much, but they paid everything for him when they heard he was coming out of prison. He never told us at home how they were treated there, because he said, 'I don't want to go there a second time, so I won't say anything!'"