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The first time I drove a car was involuntarily, against my will. I was in tech school, first year, and was doing brigade work at one farm machinery repair company where they also did cars. I sat down in a Tatra car, and as I was sitting there, some guys came and turned the ignition key. The car started, and I started and panicked. I was twisting and turning everything I could, but that didn’t help me any, and I and the car ended up in a tree. I demolished the front nicely. That was in about 1952. I got a driver’s license for small motorcycles at the age of 17. But I didn’t begin driving a car until 1970, when my wife and I bought a Trabant. The first time I rode in a train was likely still when we lived in Utekac, but I remember a train ride in Hungary in 1942, on the route from Rimavska Sobota to Budapest.
My and my brother’s [Pavel Spitzer] childhood, as is described here, was very turbulent. There’s a four year age difference between my older brother and I, and in childhood that was a big difference. In a certain sense we lived side by side, but each his own life. We didn’t begin to have a normal childhood until after the war, but there was a large age difference there, and so we had different interests. My brother’s name is Pavel, and my mother had him from her first marriage. He was born in 1932. We see each other, and the older we are, the more we like each other.
Another thing that’s necessary to mention is that in order to save us, our parents converted to the Protestant faith in 1942. After that I also attended Protestant religion for some time, until I closed the door on any sort of religion. We learned some Hungarian and German from our parents, but it wasn’t any sort of purposeful teaching. The older I am, the better I remember my knowledge of Hungarian from my two-year stay in Hungary. Apparently I’m already under the influence of ‘old-age memory.
My and my brother’s [Pavel Spitzer] childhood, as is described here, was very turbulent. There’s a four year age difference between my older brother and I, and in childhood that was a big difference. In a certain sense we lived side by side, but each his own life. We didn’t begin to have a normal childhood until after the war, but there was a large age difference there, and so we had different interests. My brother’s name is Pavel, and my mother had him from her first marriage. He was born in 1932. We see each other, and the older we are, the more we like each other.
Another thing that’s necessary to mention is that in order to save us, our parents converted to the Protestant faith in 1942. After that I also attended Protestant religion for some time, until I closed the door on any sort of religion. We learned some Hungarian and German from our parents, but it wasn’t any sort of purposeful teaching. The older I am, the better I remember my knowledge of Hungarian from my two-year stay in Hungary. Apparently I’m already under the influence of ‘old-age memory.
Location
Slovakia
Interview
Tibor Engel