“I had a feeling that I was living in vain, that the awful evil which happened should have happened to me as well so that I would not be aware of anything anymore. You cannot avoid these thoughts. The thoughts come even without your will, whether you want them or not, good or bad thoughts; this is well known. At that time the only thing left for me was that I didn’t know why I had remained alive. What was the reason. Only later, when I began writing, I knew that the reason was that I needed to leave an objective view of the whole war period for the following generations… So there were various books, and their titles…”
“It was truly a dream… Even now I still cannot explain it and nobody was able to explain it to me. But I really did have a dream in October 1944 in which I saw my mother in a great crowd of people who were very miserable and there were children among them, too, there were only women and children. And mom told me: ‘Magda, I say good-bye to you, I will not be here anymore.’ When I turned around, I saw my father in another group of people. Later it was found that it was very probable that they had really died at night between October 12th and 13th 1944, one after another, in the so-called shower rooms which released toxic gas instead of water. The gas was allegedly produced in Žilina. I couldn’t ascertain whether this was true, but there were rumours that it was produced in Žilina.”
“I thus really saved my cousin’s life by it. I knew that if people were so starved that they had been eating only bread and tea, I could not give her even bread and butter, because it would damage her intestines. Her body was thus slowly getting used to normal eating. But she didn’t stay in Slovakia afterward; she was not able to, because what had happened to her was ingrained too deep. I don’t want to sound disrespectful, but the Slovaks were holier than the Pope, and it was really them themselves who recommended the mass transports to the death camps.”
Marie Magdalena Horňanová-Jodasová was born in 1920 in Žilina. Her parents were Jewish and they ran a shop with clothes, textiles and haberdashery goods. From 1935 Marie attended the Prague music conservatory where she studied piano. On October 28, 1939 she took part in the anti-Nazi demonstration in Prague, during which the student Jan Opletal was shot to death. From 1940 she continued with her studies in Bratislava, where she graduated from the music academy. She survived the war thanks to forged documents that her family obtained. For several months she was hiding with her husband and two little daughters in a hiding place near the village Istebník. She lost twenty-six members of her family during the holocaust, including both her parents. After the war she moved to Prague with her family, where she taught future music teachers at the Higher School of Pedagogy. Her husband Ladislav Horňan, a secondary school teacher of mathematics and physics, was forced to work as a blacksmith’s apprentice for a certain period of time in the 1950s as part of the campaign “Seventy thousand from administration to production.” They raised three children. Marie became a widow in 1990. When she was eighty years old, she began writing. She authored and published several novels, some of which contain autobiographic elements.
