Mária Pipašová

Mária Pipašová neè Cingeľová

Born 14. 5. 1919 in Terchová, died 2010 (?) in Bratislava, cremated and the ashes disposed of (her daughter Margaret refuses to disclose where & how). 

Memorial plaque in Bratislava-Rača (desecrated & destroyed in 2016).
Husband Rudolf, children Mireille (my wife) and Margaret (also known as Petra); second child, a boy, died in infancy.

Here she is with George Hatvani in 1992 in Bratislava:

Here she is at work with a colleague:

My sister Hanka has been a childhood friend of her younger daughter Margaret and, presumably, she is more familiar with her than me. My knowledge of her is rather limited. I am actually unable to recall speaking with her even once, except for fleeting greetings in the street. I am waiting for Mireille to give me something to work with.

All I can remember of her was that she was shy and not very communicative. Also I saw her in a group picture at school in Modra, near Bratislava. Before WW2 she went with her father Jozef Cingel to work in Belgium where she met and married her husband. On return to Czechoslovakia they lived for a while (a year?) in Obsolovce and eventually they moved in 1947 to a railway house in Bratislava. From that house she moved in about 1962, with their two daughters, to a flat in Strkovec while her husband remained in the railway house. They divorced in about 1958, but she remained in the railway house until she married (around 1962) a man called Hrčka who had 5 children from his previous marriage. On one occasion I tried to call her but he on answering the 'phone refused to bring her, accused me of being impolite and rude, and abruptly ended the call.

She worked around trams and buses in Bratislava. I visited her in her flat at Bratislava-Dubravka in 1994, counted about AU$400 in AU$50 notes into her hands as a present from Mireille, but do not remember speaking with her. George and his then girlfriend Julie lived in her flat for a few days in 1992, while she was living somewhere else. When, with George, we tried to pay her a visit in 2005 she refused to see us.

In a letter to us dated 1983 a similar incident has been mentioned by my mother: a family friend from Prague was on a business trip to the Tramway Company in Bratislava. My sister Hanka sent her regards through him to Maria Pipasova, who also worked in that Company. He found her, but to his surprise Maria Pipasova answered that she does not know any person by the name Hanka...

And that's my entire recollection of her.