A doctor?s comment: ?You are content to be the person you are ? in spite of arthritis in your knees, depression and other health problems.? So where do these handicaps come from?

In the winter of 1953, a man was sent by the religious in Vienna, telling us that he was to bring us across the frontier between Hungary and Austria. We just had time to burn any letters in German and the ones from Rome, for foreign correspondence was looked on as spying. But the very next night the police came to arrest us, for they had found our names and addresses on that man.

I was accused of trying to cross the frontier without a passport, to join my sisters in Austria. As the escape did not succeed, I had three years in prison. The gaolers often made fun of me: wasn?t my prison life the same as in the convent? Poverty: two camp beds for four people in the cell, no personal toiletries, little food. The endless interrogations wormed out all the details of our life and were intended to make us betray others. The fear was exhausting, the swearing and coarse language were hard to take, and being searched was still worse. During the night, often at about 2 a.m., we would hear cries and the noise made by iron chests. How many of our best men, politicians, priests, brave Hungarians lost their lives there! I had been in four different prisons, and the hardest time was the four months of solitary confinement. I have carried the consequences all my life. In another prison, we worked on electric sewing-machines, and the work was almost therapeutic for me.

After three years in prison I returned to Budapest, as I had been able to find work there. Doubts about my vocation came to me at that time. But in 1956 a fresh attempt to cross the frontier succeeded for the four of us, and as though by a miracle, we reached Rennweg, in Vienna.

So who am I? I was born in 1923, at Bercel, a village in the north of Hungary, of an old Hungarian family. We were three girls and one boy. My mother was a Lutheran, my father liberal in his attitude to religion. Our education had been confided to the care of foreign tutors, who were strict, as my father had instructed them to be. From the age of ten, I continued my education in convent schools. After eight years of school and one at a home management course, I was ready to marry, but none of the boys appealed to me.

Then came the second world war. The Russians came to Hungary, and to avoid falling into their hands in the countryside, I spent some months at the Sacred Heart, in the cellar, with my sister who was still a pupil there. Meanwhile, they had taken over our house. My parents were living with my grandparents, and I went to take charge of five orphans whose parents had been killed by the Russians. After a year, in spite of certain doubts expressed by the superior, I entered at the Sacred Heart. I was full of great zeal and youthful exaggeration; I wanted to give my life to God, as I had seen the Mothers doing.

In 1949, we had to leave the big house and the school, which had been confiscated by the State. Until 1950, as our numbers had greatly diminished, we were living in the other house. The communists finally drove us from there and deported us to a camp. There were then eleven of us. The superior, who was Swiss, and three Austrians, one of whom was seriously ill, left Hungary. The seven others remained ?three professed and four aspirants, with families in Budapest and in the country. Every Sunday, those of us who were in Budapest met together, taking our religious life and our work very seriously.

I had found work at first as a seamstress, then doing accounts. The year 1951 had been very sad for many people in Hungary. The communists wanted to eliminate a certain social class by deporting a number of families to the country, where they were lodged in henhouses and barns. And so my parents, who were then sixty years old, and my brother, were deportees for seventeen years. There, by a tragic accident, my sister and an aunt were drowned in the river when they came for a visit.

In 1957, before my probation, I spent some time at the Trinitŕ dei Monti. Perpetual vows gave me certainty about religious life. All the same, perpetual profession was followed by ten very sad years. I suffered from fits of depression, and was paralysed by it until the day when a doctor found the remedy that brought me relief and hope.

Two other things helped me: the religion classes I gave in the primary school in Vienna, and community life in small communities after Vatican II.

And now I?m eighty, and I live with my sisters of the same age at Riedenburg. I have plenty of time for prayer and I can practise being a ?good patient?. I hope that my sense of humour, which has never deserted me even in the hardest moments, will help me right to the end.