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My wife was from the village of Visnova. The Cachtice Castle rises high above the village. She studied academic high school in Nove Mesto nad Vahom, and then at the Faculty of Medicine of Comenius University in Martin. My father-in-law was truly angry at us. He said that the entire village would stone him to death. We persuaded him to tell them that he hadn't known anything about it. Later it came out that people in the village had been waiting as to who'd start with this sort of wedding. After that many continued in this fashion. You know, in villages there are various customs and to-dos around weddings. Wedding preparations already begin two weeks beforehand. They invite several hundreds of people... The best thing is when you pay a hotel, and they arrange everything. Back then the entire wedding cost us about a thousand crowns [in 1953 the equivalent gold content of the Czechoslovak crown was decreed by law to be 0.123 grams, which remained in place until the end of the 1980s – Editor's note]. All told, there were ten of us. So our wedding was in June 1965. We had two daughters. Marcela in 1966 and Michaela in 1969.
After the wedding we moved in with my parents in Zilina. My wife worked for some time at a Zilina hospital, but we weren't very well off financially. I had no money, she had no money. We needed to become independent. We wanted to live on our own. One company in Zilina was building an apartment building. They had this condition, that if a company doctor came to work for them, they'd assign him an apartment. My wife took the job. Thanks to that, we got a three-room apartment. She worked there until she reached retirement age. Luckily her health is good, and she's still working, as an audit doctor for a health insurance company.
My parents lived in Zilina for the rest of their lives. My father died in 1986, and my mother in 2002. Both are buried in the local Roman Catholic cemetery. My grandmother Etel Lanyi lived the last years of her life in the Hungarian town of Szeged. She died at the age of 101, and is buried in a Jewish cemetery in Szeged.
After the wedding we moved in with my parents in Zilina. My wife worked for some time at a Zilina hospital, but we weren't very well off financially. I had no money, she had no money. We needed to become independent. We wanted to live on our own. One company in Zilina was building an apartment building. They had this condition, that if a company doctor came to work for them, they'd assign him an apartment. My wife took the job. Thanks to that, we got a three-room apartment. She worked there until she reached retirement age. Luckily her health is good, and she's still working, as an audit doctor for a health insurance company.
My parents lived in Zilina for the rest of their lives. My father died in 1986, and my mother in 2002. Both are buried in the local Roman Catholic cemetery. My grandmother Etel Lanyi lived the last years of her life in the Hungarian town of Szeged. She died at the age of 101, and is buried in a Jewish cemetery in Szeged.
Location
Slovakia
Interview
Jan Hanak