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My name is Maria Roberts, and I’m 83.
I grew up in Hungary, and during the second world war, we had a very hard time. We were refugees. The Germans and Russians were fighting in Hungary, so we had to get out. My father sent us out from Hungary.. all the young women from our village.. we were coming out. We didn’t have a home.. no nothing.. we didn’t know where we were going to sleep at night. We had a very hard time. We didn’t have anybody to look after us. We didn’t know where our next meal was going to come from. I didn’t have any relations with me. I was an only child, and my mother died when I was about 15 months old, so I was all on my own. We made friends, you know, and we stuck together, but nobody who belonged to me, no.
So, my father, and other parents, were anxious that the young women had to leave, because they heard what kind of things were happening. The Russian army was brutal, and they were raping the women, so my father sent me out with the others.. ALL the women from our village, we all came out. The village was called Balatonfuzfo. But I also used to live in Budapest, which is where I was educated. But my father was the deputy manager in a paper factory in Balatonfuzfo, so we had a home in Budapest as well as in the village. The village was about 80-100 miles away from Budapest, right by a lake.
So we went to Austria, in lorries. Germans took us in their lorries. We just arrived there, all of us from the village. Oh, it was chaos. Women of all ages, and children as well. It was unbelievable. This all happened in 1944, and in 1945 we settled.
And then, we met- my husband Ken and I- in 1945.
(Ken Roberts: Well the war ended in 1945. I was in Italy at the time, and we went into Austria, and that’s where I met Maria, in Austria.)
Yes. We met there. I was with a friend, who had an English soldier as a boyfriend. Through her, I could get into an English lorry. And he- Ken- was on the same lorry. And I was a very strict type of person, none of that mucking around. And I could see this English soldier, and it was raining, and he took his cap off. And I thought ‘Well, stupid. Fancy taking his cap off.' So, me, quite an old fashioned person I was, not like today’s young women, I said ‘Soldier. Put your cap on. It’s raining!’ So he put his cap on, and he thought I was going to start talking to him. Well, I didn’t say it because I wanted to talk to him, I just wanted to say ‘Well, you silly thing, you’re going to catch a cold!’ So he put his cap back on, and when I stopped talking, he thought ‘Oh, she’s stopped talking.’ So he took his cap off again. I suppose he thought if he took his cap off, I was going to start talking again. But I didn’t. I thought, if you want to catch a cold, catch a cold!
And when we got to the British soldiers canteen, where they were having their meals, well, of course, my friend, had her boyfriend, who she married later, and they’ve got family. Her name was Elonka. Well, her boyfriend fetched some food out for her on a plate. And then he (Ken) fetched me some food. I suppose he thought, ‘Nobody’s taken her any food’, so he fetched it for me. And that’s how the whole business started. That’s how we met.
And later on, we met over a little bridge, a little teeny river, and a teeny small little bridge. We were in a village, and I was going somewhere, and he was going somewhere, and we met accidentally over this bridge, and that’s how it all started. And then we started to see each other, and it’s from there that it started off.
We were married in Austria in 1946, in a Britsh church. We had to have permission from the British Government to get married. They didn’t know who I was, or anything, so they checked my father out, to find out whether he was a Nazi. Well, of course he wasn’t. He’d never been in any party, so they checked him out, and he was alright. So when they could see there were no German Nazi connections with me, then the British Government allowed a Hungarian to marry a British soldier. So that’s how I came, as a British soldier’s wife, I was well looked after then.
We had a honeymoon in Venice, which cost £8, in the Excelsior Palace outside Venice, in an island called The Lido. In peace, it was a millionaire’s place, but at that time, the British Army had taken it over, so they put us in there, and charged us £8 for the week. You couldn’t even get a ticket to get in there now I think!!
So that’s how we started the whole business. We started out our married life in one of the homes that the British were occupying in Austria, and then, of course, later on, when he came home to Britain, they fetched me home with the other wives, and we went to live with Ken’s father, because we didn’t have anywhere to go. We had a bedroom to ourselves in his father’s house. Later on, we bought a little terraced house in Gibson Street, in Wrexham

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