"I don't remember, I remember when he brought me a scooter. But my mom bought the scooter to bring me something. But only when I was almost an adult did I realize that my mother bought the scooter, because it was red, wooden, had two wheels in the back and Nitra was written on the front. But I couldn't read back then, so I couldn't read it, and I really thought my father brought it to me as a gift. Of course, I didn't recognize him and he didn't recognize me because my mother cut my hair. I had beautiful curly hair, and suddenly there was a boy. And my father thought my mom traded me for a boy. He brought it like a scooter, but it occurred to me after many, many years when I was an adult that my mother actually bought it somewhere in Nitra, it was already a Nitra souvenir at that time.I didn't realize until I was an adult. "
"And when Christmas ended, there were conversations between my husband and my father again. My husband was already completely processed, I still haven't been processed. But my husband has already written to his parents in Jablonec that if his brother wants to, he can eat sausages in our apartment in Prague. And that was such a signal that if he can eat those sausages, we won't come because we won't need them. And they sensed it. But they didn't feel it just because of it. My father and my father-in-law agreed between four eyes, without anyone in the family knowing, and for many years no one knew that when we'd be able to visit them in the west, we would not return to Czechoslovakia. But neither of us knew, and these two fathers de facto died, without never telling anyone of us. I only learned this from my mother-in-law, when she was already a widow, and neither my father was alive nor old Chvojka. So they actually agreed, and the news that Jirka could eat sausages was clear to my mother-in-law that we would not return. So he went immediately and took some pictures, silver cutlery. What they could secretly take, they took and something was given to them by those who took over the apartment: photos and what was really personal. They didn't sell it, but they sold the whole original Meissen onion, a scooter, and they put Kapko's niece in the apartment. "
"My mother was asked where my father was. She said she didn't know. They started to be violently insisting, but I didn't hear that, and they were looking for a father, I was in my children's room. They couldn't find him in the whole apartment. I don't remember that Pour, he was in the hall, but I remember the SS man because he entered my room. I was with my educator in my children's room, I was sitting on the changing table, she was standing next to me, and on the other side of the changing table, there was such a sofa with a flounce underneath. You could pull out a drawer with duvets from there. The SS man looked under the ruffle, began to move the drawer, wondering if there was a father hidden there. And he wasn't. But with this SS man standing in front of me - he was such a tall, skinny man - I will never forget that picture in my life because a uniformed man comes to my children's room, so it must be traumatic even for a two-and-a-half-year-old child. This picture was then confirmed to me by my mother. "
Christine Stark was born on January 21 in Nitra. Her father came from a Jewish family that converted to the Catholic faith in 1915, when he was six years old. The mother was from a Hungarian Catholic family. His grandfather operated three cinemas in Nitra, screening the first sound film in Slovakia. His father studied in Vienna and Prague, where he worked in film studios in the 1930s, but in 1938 he had to return to Nitra, where he met his mother. After her parents’ wedding in April 1939, her grandfather rewrote the cinema to Christina’s mother, saving them from the Aryanization. The family was protected from deportations by exceptions, but after the suppression of the SNP, the grandmother and grandfather were deported to Auschwitz, where they also perished. At the beginning of December, her father was deported via Sereď to the surviving Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, and at the end of May 1945 he returned to Nitra. The cinemas were nationalized on the basis of the Decree on Film Measures in the summer of 1945. Due to a false accusation, the family had to leave Nitra in 1949, as well as a large family villa on “Hlavna trieda”. They moved to Bratislava, where Christine’s brother was born in 1952. At that time, they fell victim to Action B - the forced eviction of “unreliable citizens” from towns to small villages. The father managed to find a job and an apartment in the Czech Republic through a Czech relative, in Jablonec nad Nisou, where the family moved in 1953. Due to relocation and the monetary reform, they lost most of their savings. The father was regularly summoned for State security interrogations, and Christine, despite her outstanding achievements, could not study, the only school for which she was able to qualify was the mechanical engineering high-school where she graduated in 1960. Two years later then she married a descendant of the Chvojka family, who were displaced to northern Bohemia after the company was nationalized. The husband was placed in Prague. The father immediately took advantage of a slight relaxation of social relations and in 1963 asked for legal eviction to Israel, which was his only way out of Czechoslovakia. A year later, her parents and her brother left the republic and settled in Germany, in Cologne. Christine and her husband travelled to visit their parents in December 1965, and their father persuaded them not to return. They were convicted of illegally leaving the republic in absentia and amnestied in May 1968. In 1969 they moved to Switzerland. During her successful career, Christine has represented a Swiss company in Eastern Europe since the second half of the 1970s, and in the 1980s also directly in Czechoslovakia, where she was summoned for interrogation by the State Security Service. In 1981 she took her parents to Nitra. After the revolution, she discovered that the house in Nitra was still owned by her mother. After retiring in 2006, she moved back to Cologne, where her brother lives with her family and where she feels at home, even though she regularly returns to Prague.
