“We waited for the vetting from the early morning. It was already evening and the hallway was dark when it was my turn to go. There were five people in the room designed for the vetting. One of them, a woman, not old but very unpleasant, stood up and asked me: 'Comrade Slabihoudová, tell us - do you agree with Palach burning himself?' I thought to myself that I will not answer such a stupid question and I stayed quiet. She continued: 'If you did not agree, what did you do to prevent it?' That question was even more stupid. She told me: 'Please sign here, confirming that you were passive'. I signed and I was no longer a party member."
“We were there when they were digging the Kopraš-Slavošovce tunnel. Those people working there were called 'barabovia' (workmen). My father was a construction engineer and Mr. Frič was the owner of the construction. Those workmen were highly superstitious. They believed that if a woman crosses an unfinished tunnel, it will collapse. My father wanted to cure them from being that way, so he persuaded the driver of that narrow-gauge railway to cover me and my mother with a blanket and take us from Kopraš to Slavošovce. We were the first women to cross the tunnel there and back again. It did not collapse which created quite a stir."
“The entire time during the war, my father listened to foreign news. Every day; both Moscow and London. That was punishable by the death penalty. We had a secret radio under the stairs. We could not speak of it. And this one time, a neighbor ringed the bell. I was a child so I told him: 'It´s good that you are here; London is on.' Father was very worried. Only after the war was over, I learned about that neighbor being a police officer, but he did not report us. After the incident, my parents kept it from me. Father always locked himself in the room and told me he was going to do magic."
Mrs. Dagmar Šályová, née Slabihoudová, was born on August 19, 1939, in Prague. As a child, Dagmar experienced the bombing of the Apollo refinery and the Prague Uprising. Despite keeping the Czech citizenship, she has spent her life in Bratislava where she attended an elementary school and the grammar school on Grössling Street. After passing her school-leaving exam in 1956, she applied to the Faculty of Civil Engineering at the Slovak University of Technology. In time, Dagmar got her doctorate degree and became a docent there. Due to the vetting during the normalization period, her habilitation thesis was put on hold and she waited almost twenty years to become a docent. She currently lives in Bratislava.
