"By an unexpected turn of events a teacher of mine went on a maternity leave and was substituted by a nun named Pavla Kloknerová from Ladce. She commuted by a train to Ilava. So I applied to her, if I could enter The Company. She was very excited by my request, but at the same time thought, and frankly, so did my parents, that these are just child fantasies. My dad was, when I told them about it, with my mom together when I arrived from school that day, so I used the opportunity to ask them, if they´ll allow me. Well my father told me right away, that he was held captive in Russia for 3 years and told me what they did to nuns back there, that they deported them, but to Siberia. And he said to me: ,Are you gonna be able to withstand it under these conditions?´ Well me, being the big hero, I said if the others made it, so will I. So then I applied in Ladce and sister...I commuted by a bike to Ilava, so naturally I was very trained and thin. I weighed maybe about 42 kilos. So the sister asked if I don´t have the tuberculosis. And I said that nobody in my family had it, I was protesting (laughter). So then they called in the nun that brought me in, to ask her what to do with me because I wouldn´t change my mind. She also said: ,You are still kinda small.´ And I replied: ,Well but sister Pavla isn´t much bigger either.´ So the mother superior laughed at me not being held back by anything and said that she would write to Nitra, so I could start the nursing school there."
"Well, it began to feel more free, we noticed that the administrator is not sitting around every corner spying on us, nor on the old priests. Because it was a house for the eldery priests you know, so you don´t get it mixed up. Yes, as patients they were, yes. You didn´t even realise. She would just walk from the train station and she would already, when the nuns were bringing in milk cans in the morning and during one period there were also Franciscan Sisters there with us, before it all cleared up. Well and she said: „When a vincentian nun is walking, I can see that all the way from the station, but when it´s a franciscan one, I always think it´s just a grandma.´ Because you see they had all black habits (laughter). So she was spying on us all the way from the station as she was walking (laughter)."
"And after 1955 they came to deport us, wanted us to sign whether we are staying in the hospital, but without the nun habit, that we are the most welcome work force like this, to which we replied smiling, asking if the nun habit is such a problem. So then we...they signed a contract with us, or like a paper saying we are ending the work contract and at 3 in the morning buses came, an ambulance too, because we had one nun sick with cancer, so they took her with an ambulance and the rest of us were taken by the bus and they put our luggage in trucks. I personally travelled in the truck with my luggage along with one more nun. In Žilina we were passing nuns that were taken from Levoča, deported from the hospital in Levoča. We did not go to Bohemia, they did, but we were deported into Belušské Slatiny, there is a post office like a kilometer away and there, after a couple of weeks, the administrators sorted us into about 12 charity houses all over Slovakia."
Eva Galbavá, by religious name sister Notburga, was born on 24th of December 1930 in Malé Košecké Podhradie, Illava disctrict, into a family of land farmers. After finishing the local elementary school she started a secondary school in Illava. There she encountered a nun named Pavla Kloknerová, who was a member of The Company of the Daughters of Charity of Saint Vincent de Paul. She inspired Eva to enter the nunhood. Eva entered the community in 1947 in Ladce and put the nun habit on three years later. She attended a nursing school in Nitra and after finishing it in 1950 she started working in a hospital in Martin as a roentgen laboratory worker. In August of 1955 despite the pressure of communist regime to leave the nun habit behind in order to keep working in the hospital she refused, and for that she was deported along with the other nuns to Belušské Slatiny. In 1957 she was moved from there to Podolínec and after 3 weeks moved again, this time to Močenok, where she was assigned a place in the kitchen. After 7 months they moved her to Pezinok, where she remained until 1969. After that she was once again moved, this time to Modra, where she worked as a social carer until 1972, when she was moved into Slovenská Ľupča to be, once again, assigned a place in the kitchen, In 1974 she came back to Pezinok, where she suffered a heart attack. Despite that she spent another 30 years working in a home for eldery priests in Pezinok. In 2004 she returned to Belušské Slatiny, where she is now spending her retirement in the community of the Daughters of Charity of Saint Vincent de Paul.
