Tag #135318 - Interview #101499 (Gotterer Borbala Piroska )

My mother looked after me when I was little, there was no kindergarten where we lived. We lived near the train station and the kindergarten was 2 km away and I couldn’t go there. We lived near the train station because my father worked at the shipping of the merchandise at the Groedl factory. When I was 4 years old I ran away from home: I was bored, and I knew there was a village near the town and I wanted to get there. I liked to walk when I was little. So I started walking on that 2 km country road that went to the village, but I didn’t know why I was going there. And a Romanian peasant came with his cart from the opposite direction, and he saw that I was walking alone, that nobody accompanied me. I was walking and singing and I was doing just fine. It was spring, almost summer…then the peasant stopped the cart and asked me where I was going. But I couldn’t say where I was going, I just mimed that I was walking. Why was I walking? But I couldn’t say anything to him in Romanian, because he was Romanian. What is your name? Yes, I could tell him my name. My parents didn’t find me immediately because the peasant didn’t know where to look for my parents, because I only told him my name, but nothing more. The peasant announced the militia that he had found a child. And then the peasant took me home with him, and the militia looked for me. That’s how they found me and took me home. And then mother said that that couldn’t go on like that. Actually that’s why I went to school when I was 5 years old, even if school started when you were 7, so that I wouldn’t desert!