My birth name Kaufmann fills me with pride, even though I no longer have contact with the Jewish branch of my family
Download image
Mária Blechová, née Kaufmannová, was born on April 10, 1951 in Senica nad Myjavou. Both parents – mother Agneša Horňáková and father William Kaufmann – came from Jablonica. Grandfather Leopold Kaufmann is a descendant of a family of Jewish merchants who worked in Vienna. There he met his grandmother Helena, who served the Kaufmann family, and after their marriage they moved to Jablonica. They had two sons together, Aladár and Viliam; Leopold died when they were still young. Grandmother then took a midwife course and went around the villages as a midwife. Grandfather on her mother’s side, Štefan Horňák, went to America to work. Her mother came from a peasant family of nine children. Mária Blechová has four siblings. They were all baptized and raised in the Catholic faith. From Jablonica, the family moved to Senica, where his father bought a house and set up a photography studio. As a child, Mária often accompanied her father when he went to take photos. Her father fought in the Slovak National Uprising, and at the Tri Duby airport they fought in the trenches. He returned home from the front with poor health. He died in 1960. Her mother, a trained seamstress, also took photographs and worked in the studio. Even after the studio was nationalized in 1948 and transferred to municipal services. Mária left home when she was 14 to her aunt in Bratislava, where she studied at elementary school for another six months. She then studied at the Slovnafta vocational school in chemistry, where she met her husband Miloš Blech. After graduating from school in 1969, she married and got a job in the Slovnafta laboratory. In 1970, her daughter Miroslava was born, and five years later, her son Juraj. She worked at Slovnaft for three years and then for 14 years at the Institute of Petroleum and Hydrocarbon Gases. In 1981, she was in a Western country for the first time – in Hamburg at the invitation of acquaintances who later became business partners. In 1990, she and her husband founded a company as a subsidiary of a German company for the sale of laboratory equipment. In 1997, she and her German partner broke up and Mária founded a new company, Ilabo, together with her daughter. Her husband died in 2021 and she had to close the company after the Covid pandemic. Today, she helps her son in his business and also works as a Pilates instructor, which she has been doing since the 1990s.
