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When I married, and we settled in, the first thing I did was sell the piano, and I haven’t sat at a piano since then. I don’t know now how old I was, 15 or 16, when my parents said, now I have to learn a foreign language – aside from Slovak, German and Hungarian, which didn’t count as foreign languages. Then everybody was learning French. The language of diplomacy was French. They sent me to sign up at a language school.
The language school was on Hviezdoslavovo Square then. The classrooms were off of a pretty long hallway, they were just rooms, because not too many took one course, a maximum of six or eight. There was a list for Italian, for English, naturally for German and French.
I look around, thinking, ‘where’s the French,’ and I simply couldn’t get to it. There were so many people standing in front of the doorway. I check, and everyone is waiting for the French, to get in and sign up for it. I went on, the next one was English. Nobody was standing there, I knocked and went in. They greeted me very nicely, and I signed up.
I was the exception, because I took English. I immediately went to my girlfriend at the time, who was a Christian. I only had Christian girlfriends. (Six of us are still friends today, I’m the only Jew.) We convinced her mother that it would be much better if she studied English.
We showed up, and there were only two of us in English class all day. We had a very darling teacher. She’d lived in Bratislava for two years, and didn’t know a word of anything except English. From the start, she only spoke English with us. I can truly say, that after two terms we could make ourselves understood, but we kept on with it. I stopped going after two years, but I still read a lot [in English].
After school, I got a position in the Klinger factory, in the foreign department. It was an Austrian factory, which was quite a large plant here in Bratislava, where 220 employees worked. Here in Bratislava, they produced two things, garden hoses and straps.
A lot of English knowledge was required, since the products were primarily exported to India. The entire correspondence was in English. My boss was a Czech from Prague, who spoke English like he spoke Czech. If I hadn’t known English, he wouldn’t have let me work for him. I had to type his English letters as fast as he dictated them. I really had to know English.
The language school was on Hviezdoslavovo Square then. The classrooms were off of a pretty long hallway, they were just rooms, because not too many took one course, a maximum of six or eight. There was a list for Italian, for English, naturally for German and French.
I look around, thinking, ‘where’s the French,’ and I simply couldn’t get to it. There were so many people standing in front of the doorway. I check, and everyone is waiting for the French, to get in and sign up for it. I went on, the next one was English. Nobody was standing there, I knocked and went in. They greeted me very nicely, and I signed up.
I was the exception, because I took English. I immediately went to my girlfriend at the time, who was a Christian. I only had Christian girlfriends. (Six of us are still friends today, I’m the only Jew.) We convinced her mother that it would be much better if she studied English.
We showed up, and there were only two of us in English class all day. We had a very darling teacher. She’d lived in Bratislava for two years, and didn’t know a word of anything except English. From the start, she only spoke English with us. I can truly say, that after two terms we could make ourselves understood, but we kept on with it. I stopped going after two years, but I still read a lot [in English].
After school, I got a position in the Klinger factory, in the foreign department. It was an Austrian factory, which was quite a large plant here in Bratislava, where 220 employees worked. Here in Bratislava, they produced two things, garden hoses and straps.
A lot of English knowledge was required, since the products were primarily exported to India. The entire correspondence was in English. My boss was a Czech from Prague, who spoke English like he spoke Czech. If I hadn’t known English, he wouldn’t have let me work for him. I had to type his English letters as fast as he dictated them. I really had to know English.
Location
Slovakia
Interview
Katarina Löfflerova