"And in the morning at seven o'clock, silence everywhere like an unwritten law. The first people to the shop, as I went from the night shift, the first to the butcher, that's how it got, meat was rationed, once a week ten blankets per person. And that was going to stand in the queue, and we, when we couldn't stand, we were at work, so one went and she, as many times as we were on duty, she sent us ten dekagram per person. So the first one to the butcher, the canned goods were, like those, I don't know where they were from, minced meat and stuff. So of course when he saw what the line was, he looked at how much he had, he gave it out. There was no payment. Well I went to the convenience store, it was already a convenience store... No, it wasn't a convenience store yet, it was a store. So it was, all cleaned off the shelf by the time I got home. The boy was home, then the tanks started coming and people were pointing at Austria. So it was already closed there, so they had to go back again, and they wandered around the streets a little bit again, and again somebody showed them where to go."
Anastázia Hübner was born on 9 November 1928 in Gbely, Slovakia, into a farmer family. She had eight siblings, with twenty-four years separating her from the youngest. She was educated at the municipal and town school in Gbely. She remembers the proclamation of the Slovak state and remembers the bombing of the area around Gbely at the end of the Second World War, during which they went to hide in a neighbour’s cellar. The area was liberated by the Red Army and the family housed soldiers, including officers, in the house. After the war, the witness graduated from a two-year housekeeping school, and in 1949-1953 she studied at a medical school in Brno. She was placed in Valtice, where she worked all her life as a midwife. She remembers the persecution of the nuns who worked at the hospital. She secretly went to baptize children. She married in 1957 and has a son Igor. She lived through the occupation by Warsaw Pact troops in August 1968 while working the night shift at the hospital. In Valtice, people were turning signs towards Austria. In 1990, on a trip to Rome, she had the opportunity to meet Pope John Paul II, who celebrated Mass for them at Easter. In 2019, the witness was living in Valtice.
