Ondrej Mazan

* 1940

  • He was, my grandfather, he was in the first world war. He also told a story that there was fighting in such a way that when there was a break, or a holiday, or something, there was calm on the front. And I think they even talked to each other or something, the two sides. Well, once there was my grandfather, somewhere in the corn on the toilet, and from the other side there was an Italian soldier as well. Well, the two of them noticed each other, only my grandfather jumped up earlier to grab the rifle. And that Italian, after pulling up his pants, he brought to his unit as a prisoner, but then he got a permission to go home for a short time. That was, well, quite a nice episode, because it wasn't really about anything. After all, the prisoners were collected and so on, after all, war is war. That was the Italian front, on the Piave.

  • And then we went to see a car wreck. That was our dream. You know, in those days, bring some western car... or whatever. The guard of the parking lot: 'come on, take a look, boys'. And that we can also disassemble something? Of course, you can ... we had a screwdriver, combinations ... we even went a little crazy. Then we showed it to him, the guard and he said give me ten marks or five marks and that's it. And then at home, when I came back, I remember, everyone around me: "Well, how was it there?" Imagine, we were at a car wreck. And I got into one of those cars, I turned the knob on the car radio and it was playing! Damn, they scrapped a car with a car radio that works and with a battery. Shit, we couldn't even imagine in those years, in the eighties, that someone would put a car in a car wreck that wasn't even crashed or something, and the lights work and the radio works. Oh damn!

  • Otherwise a good guy, he just blindly believed it all. He was short, fat, and under his armpit he carried the biographies I wrote about them, on these of mine... you know? So he took it to the party meeting. I didn't do anything with it. Of course, I wrote only the best ... so, he goes to that party meeting and has those papers under his armpit. And I say: "Karol, show me what you've got!" And he stomped, his eyes almost popped out and he just stammered that: "I won't give it. I won't give it. I won't give it!” He believed in it terribly. And I say: "I wrote it, you...!" "I won't give it!"

  • Well. We were assigned, I think, three wagons. Because we, the Slovaks, who went from there, were privileged to be able to take everything with us. Furniture, livestock, or a piglet, just animals, and even the wood, which was the wood stock in the yard. So, we got, I think, it was three wagons. The truck was taking us to the railway station. And then the postman came and gave my mother a letter. She opened it and read. Her brother, wrote from the Czech Republic. 'Please, don't even come here. There is terrible misery here', and I don't know what else was written there. Well, that was a dilemma. My mother was afraid to show the letter to my father, because two trucks had already left for the station with our things.

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    Šaľa, 22.03.2023

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Mommy, the whole sky is on fire

Ondrej Mazan was born in 1940 in Békešská Čaba in a Slovak community that had lived here for almost 300 years. He became a citizen of Czechoslovakia as a small child. They were resettled with the whole family as part of the population exchange in 1947. He went to elementary school in Komárno, secondary electrical engineering school in Bratislava. He completed basic military service in the Czech Republic near the German border as a radio operator. His career life includes employment in large companies such as Connector assembly company in Bratislava, Duslo in Šaľa and TOS in Galanta. Currently (2023) he is retired and lives in Šaľa.