Antonín Tropek

"It was about eight factories here, bigger workshops, scattered, when we came here, in one hall, all over the town, it was scattered. And there were Germans, domestic workers. And maybe my father got somebody's - Jakub Winter was his name - the hall is still standing... There was a carpenter's shop, and they made cases there. And a box factory, where they packed the tools. So Dad got a job there with this gentleman. And our neighbour, he was a machine locksmith, so he got a job at Müller's, and they made metal parts for tools, mechanics and things like that. Well, that's the way it went on in those workshops, who did what, so some of them went into production normally, and that's the way it was scattered all over the town."

"So the announcement came that we were to arrive at the airport in Budapest. The Russians were already there, that is, the Russian soldiers, and they had these American 'UNRRA cars ', I don't know what they were called, but they were huge vehicles, and they loaded us up and took us to Slovakia, to Komárno. And before that, my brother, he had already graduated from primary school there, and he was supposed to go to the first grade of municipal school, but he didn't speak Slovak, so he had to go to Komárno two months early to boarding school. Then we arrived in Komárno, and they put us in a wagon and we got dinner there, we slept, and then they put us in two families in a wagon and took us up, all over Slovakia, Moravia, up as a transport. As soon as we left Slovakia, my dad, he knew Slovak, because he was older, and then he asked how it was possible, that we had wanted to go back to our birthplace, where my dad was born, and my grandfather. And he was told that we were going to resettle in the borderland. But we didn't know that at all...!"