“Father went to check on our house. The trees were bare, it was at the beginning of April. The trees were not green yet so we could see through their branches. As the front was approaching, the Russian airplanes were flying lower and lower. Father was walking down the street leading to the stadium and our house. We were in the woods and we were watching as a grenade fell right in front of him and wounded both his legs. Fortunately, he wasn’t far from our house, so he somehow dragged himself home. But what to do next? There were no people, only some kind of emergency medical service. They provided some basic treatment for his wound. He had to go to bed immediately because he was bleeding severely. He couldn’t return and we were left alone – in the woods.”
“They loaded us on a wagon and we had to move out. We had to leave everything there. All our crops and animals. It was still autumn, before All Saint’s Day. We had to leave everything. Our year’s crop for which we worked so hard, hay, potatoes, beets... Everything had already been ready for our cattle. My father was about fifty-two, and they made him leave his house. He was a farmer all his life and now he had to leave. And the people in Šulekovo didn’t even know us. They took us in; they said we could live with them. The lady was a widow, and her son was disabled. She saw that my father was hardworking, and because she didn’t have a husband, my father would help her in her field.”
“Father was very pale after the accident. He was lying on the bed when a Russian came in and said: ‘You German, you German.’ And he was poking him with his automatic rifle. We didn’t even know what a ‘German’ was. And father was repeating that he was Slovak. But we couldn’t understand each other. And the Russian soldier was still poking him with the rifle because he thought that my father was a wounded German soldier. Then my mother waved at our neighbour who lived up the street. He was younger and he could talk with the Russian a little. He explained that my father was a ‘khozyai’ – a farmer, and he was pointing at my father’s clothes. At any time, the Russian was ready to pull the trigger and kill my father. But he didn’t.”
Rozália Encingerová, née Zajíčková, was born in 1930 in Dúbravka. After completing four years of lower secondary education, she went on to work on the family farm. As a pupil, she witnessed the bombing of Bratislava in June 1944. Her family home was later occupied by German officers for three weeks. When the Soviet army was approaching, she and her family spent three days hiding in the woods. Her father was seriously wounded in a grenade explosion. After the establishment of the Communist regime, he refused to join a collective farm and that led to the family being designated as ‘unreliable’ and evicted from the frontier zone of the republic. They left for Šulekovo, a village near Hlohovec, where they lived with another family for three years. As an adult, Rozália returned to Dúbravka and she got a job in a glass factory where she worked for ten years. Her parents then moved into an old house in Lamač where they spent two years and demanded the restitution of their property. In 1955 Rozália got married and moved to Devínska Nová Ves. In 1957 her parents got their house back. After her four kids were born, Rozália has mostly been taking care of the household. She still lives in Devínska Nová Ves.
