Antonie Bencová

* 1939

  • "They should live in such love and comfort that they can give it away, even to the next generation. We may not be able to do that, but it would take people who can give out love, comfort and understanding. I don't think we've quite done that. But I really wish they could live that way with each other."

  • "Some people saw it that way, that we were different, maybe. But mainly we had the problem that we were always called Romanians. Those Romanians, those Romanians, there are those Romanians again. So I explained a lot at the beginning that we were Slovaks and that we came from Romania. Then I started to explain that in Romania those people are people too and that those Romanians are not so ugly for the Slovak people who are there. And that no matter what, that they are not ugly to them, I can't say that. They have their schools, their churches, their famous shops where they speak Slovak. I don't know if that's a swear word. They are human beings, some are Romanian, some are Hungarian, some are Slovak. There were enough of those people. But not in adulthood, not in childhood."

  • "It was horrible because my husband was driving this big car in the woods, and he came back and said to me, 'Wake up, it's war.' I looked out of the window, the Benc family had this big farmhouse, so I looked out of the window and there were tanks pointed at us by the farmhouse. So I woke up quickly. They were already there. I came home from work at night and they were there by 7 o'clock in the morning. My husband was like that, he kept saying it was terribly wrong. That the brothers shouldn't do this to us, but again he was like, here to these boys, he said, 'The boys are there.' He made tea, took them bread, he spread it and everything. Maybe he was telling them, 'Go home, what do you want here, go home.'" He saw it from his point of view, he was older and he saw it differently, I was just scared. We saw it wrong."

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    Horní Planá, 30.06.2021

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Years later, we were still seen as „those Romanians“

Antonie Bencová in 2021
Antonie Bencová in 2021
zdroj: Post Bellum

Antonia Bencová, née Muchová, was born on May 13, 1939 in Marca in today‘s northwestern Romania. Her ancestors, who came from eastern Slovakia from the vicinity of Spišská Nová Ves, had lived there since the 18th century. After the end of the Second World War, in 1946, her parents decided to heed the call of President Edvard Beneš and move to Czechoslovakia. The journey to the South Bohemian border region was not easy. After returning to the country, they lived in the village of Psí Koryto (now Koryto) in Prachatice until 1947, but after a year they were forced to return to Slovakia. Here the family settled in the south of Slovakia in the then Šahy district in the village of Fedýmeš (Hungarian: Ipolyfödémes, Födémes, now Ipeľské Úľany). However, they were experiencing great poverty there, so in early 1949 they moved permanently with the whole family to Lipno in the Czech border region. Because of the repeated moves, the witness did not start school until she was ten years old. After graduating from the town school, she became a cook in Náchod. In 1960 she married Jaroslav Bence, the son of a kulak, with whom she had two daughters, Hana and Jaroslava. The elder Hana was not allowed to study at the Veterinary University in Brno, which she chose, because of the cadre profile, and not only because of her father‘s kulak origin. Antonie Bencová worked in the gastronomy all her life. In 2021 she lived in Horní Planá.