Agnesa Lang, née Stern, was born to parents of Jewish origin on March 31, 1946 in Nové Zámky, which fell to Hungary after the Vienna Arbitration.
Both parents found themselves in the ghetto of Budapest towards the end of the war, along with their eldest son. The second son, Peter, who was born during the war in June 1944, died on January 6, 1945 at the age of seven months, just two weeks before the liberation of the ghetto. Agnesa spent her childhood in loneliness, because of her Jewish origins and her father’s trade. After she graduated primary school in Nové Zámky (1952 to 1961), she entered high school and she did the baccalaureate in 1963. She continued her studies at the Faculty of Medicine in Bratislava and graduated in pediatrics in 1969. At that time, she and her husband, Tomáš Lang, whom they married in 1966, already had a son, Juraj, born in September 1968. When she took up employment after graduating from university, she was offered a position in the ophthalmology department, due to the occupancy of positions for pediatricians. Due to the reassignment, she had to make an additional attestation and apply to the Ministry of Health for a change of classification. She passed the first attestation in 1974, the second in 1979 in Košice with Associate Professor Veselý. Meanwhile, in 1971, her daughter Miriam was born. She learned about Charter 77 only after the coup, but she felt the impact of her ignorance and non-involvement in dissent when applying for primariate after the coup. Both Mr. and Mrs. Lang, including their children, were heavily involved during the Velvet Revolution in the hope of democracy. In the 90s, however, disappointment came in the form of meciarism and the disintegration of Czechoslovakia, now from right-wing extremist parties in parliament.
The full story of the witness can be found in the online archive Memory of Nation.