"However, there was a road from Slovakia to Bohemia around that house, and there were cars with Soviet liberators, so to speak. And one day, actually it was during the holidays, we didn't go to school, and one day my mother came into our room and told us to get down on all fours immediately and we had to walk through the house behind her to the kitchen so that nobody would see us in the windows. And just in front of our windows was this road that led from Žilina to Těšín, to Český Těšín. And in fact, in front of that window, a car stopped, and there were armed soldiers sitting on it, and they had guns under their feet, and helmets on their heads, and that memory has stayed with me terribly. And actually it's a memory, I don't remember what my parents explained to me or what they said to me, but the fear there was enormous and actually to this day I don't understand that people forget that."
"Four kilometres there, four kilometres back. I was in a tiny class where there were twelve of us, and it was two classes together actually. The teacher took turns teaching one class and then the other class. There were six of my classmates, and actually about six or seven of us who were a year up. And there were Poles in that school with us, and we hated each other madly as kids. We used to yell absolutely nasty swear words at each other. And I didn't really understand it as a kid, because part of the family was Polish. My mother's aunts and uncles, with whom I still have a very nice relationship, spoke nothing but Silesian, but I had to speak Czech. So I listened to it all, I understand everything, I speak Polish, but because of my parents’ prohibition, I actually never spoke Silesian.”
Zuzana Sléhová, née Trojková, was born on April 30, 1960 in Frýdek-Místek. She grew up in Silesia, but they spoke Czech at home and in the small classroom where she went with the Poles, the Czech and Polish children hated each other. In August 1968, military vehicles passed under their windows from Slovakia to Bohemia. Zuzana Sléhová wanted to study art, but did not get into the Academy of Fine Arts. So she studied mechanical engineering at the Czech Technical University. Because of the cadre assessment, she did not get the promised job and for several years she worked as a cleaner. She and her husband started making glass earrings in the 1980s, which they sold on the Charles Bridge. After the Velvet Revolution, they exhibited and sold them all over the world. She was at the beginning of the Roztoč association in Roztoky near Prague and designed carnival masks for them. To this day (2024) she lives in Roztoky, where she devotes herself to art.
