“Well, and there was such chaos. The prison guard didn´t manage it at all. We were unweaving stinky feathers at night, it was a twelve or ten-hour brigade, and it was full of chatting, swearing, stink, and so on. I just remember – and they also told me – that I nodded off and suddenly I screamed: ʻGod, I´ve been in hell already!ʼ”
“So that was exactly the week before Easter. It could be Monday. Every now and then there were warnings, hooting, but that was it, because the bombs fell somewhere else. But this time we knew, we had to run down to the cellar, or to basement that was under the level of terrain. We had heard the hooting, the bombing was about to begin and we felt stairs pulling down behind us as we ran to hiding. None of the nuns were hurt; maybe we only had some shards caught in our scruffs (of the neck – ed. note) as we were running. We heard the roar when being in the cellar, it was something terrible. We couldn´t even glance outside, so we prayed. Well, what else could we do?”
Rozália Danková was born on April 26, 1920 in Svätý Kríž nad Hronom (today Žiar nad Hronom). There, she attended the local elementary school. After finishing secondary school in Banská Bystrica she decided to study at the Roman Catholic Women’s Pedagogical Institute in Nitra. She almost died at the end of the Second World War during the bombing of Nitra. During the war, she took care of injured Soviet soldiers. After the war she became a teacher, and later, after the change in the regime she worked as a nurse in Trenčín hospital. In 1955 she was deported to Smečno in Kladno district. In 1955 she was deported to Smečno in Kladno district; three years later she was arrested and convicted of “subverting the republic”. She served her sentence in a correctional institute in Pardubice. During the Prague Spring she was invited to Paris. When she came back to her homeland in 1977, Rozália started working in old people’s home in Přelouč, and later in Bílá Voda near Javorník. After the Velvet Revolution she returned back to Nitra. Stella Rozália Danková passed away on August, the 14th, 2017.
