"I was so weak, I was weak and so we were hoeing there. We were hoeing and planting beets, hoeing and planting potatoes. During harvest time we would work on a combine harvester. I was usually on the top and I was untying bundles for the person who was operating the thresher and I was handing them to them. And then some of us were at the bottom or we would take turns. With straw, we were tying it into bundles, that´s how we did it. That was during the harvest. And i remember one time on 24th of December we were picking beets from under the snow. So yeah. And in the winter we would make ropes from the straw and things like that. But when we were under the Charity, we were not doing this anymore."
"Can you tell me more about the psychiatric hospital, what were you doing there?"
"What was I doing there? I was working there as a nurse and I had responsibility for the whole ward, because they hired a civilian nurse as a replacement for me, but he was so useless he wasn´t able to write or add up anything correctly. So I was doing all this for him until 1962, because we had psychiatric patients there and we were performing insulin shock therapy on them. That was a very difficult job. You would inject the patient with insulin and when he went into coma, we would leave him in it for a couple of minutes and then we would give him sugar. And with the sweet that we would put into his stomach he would, well he would go into coma from that insulin and would wake up with the sugar. And to put the probe in when they were unconscious, that was a very difficult job and nobody wanted to do it, so I used to do it. Because those younger girls, or older ones that worked like me, we were already being replaced by civilian staff. So they were learning and I was doing the insulin shock therapy and the probes."
"I started to... oh but i was doing this during totality as well. I was spotted somewhere secretly and they told our priest, we had a priest, and they told him that I´m visiting, that I´m meeting with the youth. And he said: ,Oh please, she has such a bad asthma, that she is wheezing all the time.´ That they must be wrong. But it was the truth. But he covered for me, because he was afraid that they would take me away. Because I was at a risk of that happening before. They really wanted me back in the hospital, so they spent two hours on me, just to convince me to give up my nun habit and go back. But they were not successful. When I once made a promise of faith to God, how could I ever give that up?"
Mária Vrbová, by religious name sister Nonnata, was born on the 7th of January 1930 in Krásny Dub, (part of the village Horná Súča) near the Slovak-Moravian borders. She was raised by her grandparents, as her parents lived in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia after the separation, where they also died. She attended elementary school in Horná Súča and got her higher education later in Žilina and Trnava. At 17 years old she made the decision to become a nun. At 18 years old she applied for entering the community of The Company of the Daughters of Charity of Saint Vincent de Paul. Less than a year later she began attending their seminar. After entering the community she moved to Martin to finish her nursing school and to work as a nurse in the local hospital. After finishing the seminar, she was sent to Bratislava to work in the hospital in the operating room as a nurse. When the whispers began of the orders possibly being dissolved and the nuns being removed from hospitals, the community moved her into a psychiatric hospital in Pezinok, where the removal was not to be a threat for a while. She remained there until 1962, when she was deported along with the other nuns into Kláštor pod Znievom. There she worked in agriculture on local fields, where she developed a strong asthma. After a while the nuns went under the wings of the Catholic Charity. Many were moved into Bohemia to work in homes for the eldery. Sister Nonnata was not able to go due to her health issues, so she stayed in the Slovak land. She was moved into a charity home in Močenok, where she was doing administrative work until 1992. Then she was once again able to work in healthcare, and she did so in Rajec. Today she is spending her retirement years in Belušské Slatiny in the community of the Daughters of Charity of Saint Vincent de Paul.
