"We lived in a room that seemed awfully big. Everything was white, of course. Then I remember one little girl had her mother with her, so we were a little envious. And I also had one slightly unpleasant experience. I woke up crying at night. I was thirsty. The governess came and asked why I was crying, and she brought me milk. Of course she did it in good faith, but I started crying, saying I didn't want milk, I wanted water. But she forced me to drink the milk. It seemed a bit unnecessary, although I guess we were thin and milk is good, but for us water was for thirst. I remember Christmas, too. The first time there was St. Nicholas or something like that. I was small, but I noticed that there were rumours that the governess who organised it that way was sent elsewhere afterwards. The next Christmas it was Father Christmas. Of course, there was always Santa Claus in our house too. And my dad, when he brought something and wanted to divide it between us, he said, 'How do I divide it? Like God or like man?' We looked at him incomprehensibly, because he never talked about God. And he said that the Lord gives to everyone differently. One man more, another man less. And man tries to give to everyone equally. That was my father."
"My dad would be unhappy all his life that I wasn't in the party. And he asked why. I remember when I came to Czechoslovakia as a budding doctor, there was a Czechoslovak holiday and the national anthem was played. Then I sat down and my colleagues said to me, 'Get up, the Russian anthem is still playing.' I did not like that. And other things like that. So I said to my dad, 'I would have signed up, but they would have fired me in a minute because I would have spoken up. I'd say what I didn't like and how it should be done differently, and I still wouldn't be in the party. So, give me a break. I have the views I have, and so I'm not in the party.'"
"I was born in the mountains because my mother had to run away because of my father. And she was also involved in his political activities. It was in some small town in the mountains, so I don't even have a birth certificate from Greece. But I managed to find out something when the Greeks let me into Greece after a lot of trouble. It was about 1983. And a relative, I don't know anymore if it was an older cousin, took me to church to see the Pope. He didn't find a record of my birth, but he showed me a record of when my mother and father got married. It was in 1943. They had been married since that year, and then I must have been born. It didn't matter if it was 1944 or 1945. Today it doesn't play any role at all."
Sultana Gawlik, maiden name Mavranza, was born around 1945 in northwestern Greece. Her parents fought on the Communist side in the Greek Civil War. Her mother died in Greece in a bombing raid, her father managed to escape to Poland. In 1948, Sultana Gawlik was transported with a group of Greek children to Czechoslovakia. She started going to school in an orphanage in Klokočov near Vitkov. In 1952, she met her father and brother through the Red Cross. Her father took them to his new family in Valbrich in northwestern Poland. From the second to the seventh grade she lived mostly in a home for Greek children near Szczecin. She studied medicine in Wroclaw. In 1972 she moved to Czechoslovakia with her husband and two children. She worked in a pulmonary sanatorium in Jablunkov, after 1989 also as a director. In 2023 she lived in Návsí u Jablunkov.
