"Once every two years we were allowed to go to Hungary if we got a special stamp that they put in our passports for departure to those friendly socialist countries. We always used to go there once every two years during the holidays for a week. We traveled by train from Kraków through Slovakia, through Košice, and I remember how we stopped at the Slovak border at night and how the Slovaks were tearing everything apart, the ceiling in the train, looking for what we were taking there. And we always carried something, because it was not possible to exchange forints. There was only some ration, but it was terribly little. My aunt always wrote to us what we had to import, what we would sell there and then we would have some money for it. For example, we took half a case of Nivea creams. That was the pointless communist system. There was nothing here in Poland, food was rationed, but there was as much Nivea cream as you wanted, for example. While in Hungary it was in terrible demand. So we took Nivea cream and traded it right at the Keleti pályaudvar station. For example, at one time we had such black tape recorders from East Germany, and there were as many as anyone wanted. So we took it to Hungary, where there was a lot of interest in it. But when they found it at the border, they also wrote it down with the device number and it had to be taken back. So everyone hid it as best they could so they wouldn't write it down and sell it. I did not understood it at all as a child. When the customs officer came to the shop and asked what we were carrying, I said: 'A tape recorder.' Then my mother almost killed me because they wrote it down and we had to take it back."
"My family was affected by the war, because my grandmother, when she was expecting my mother in her forties, the Germans shot her husband and father in one day. She already had one three-year-old girl and was expecting my mother. Grandma never wanted to talk about it. From what I know they were arrested on the street and then executed. Then we always went to the monument that the communists built for the murdered Poles. So, my grandmother was left alone in the middle of the war, pregnant and with one little girl. But she never wanted to talk about it, she never showed any hatred towards the Germans. She didn't comment on it at all. So, I don't know much about it, neither does my mother. Grandma just didn't want to go back to it."
"I remember the day the Pope was elected. We've all took it very seriously. Mom came home from work, she was doing something, and suddenly started shouting from the room that Wojtyła had been elected as the Pope. And then I just remember the crowds in the streets and how everyone was running and the bells were ringing. Everyone was just very happy. I also remember how we all sat down to watch the news and they announced in such a grave, serious tone that he had been elected, as if it were the greatest tragedy to ever happen to the world. Then I remember how the Pope came for the first time a year later in 1970. So, we all went to that mass and with my parents and we all cheered and screamed so much and I remember crying that I couldn't see him. At that time, I was eleven years old and I climbed a lamppost. Some kind of communist militiaman grabbed me and pulled me off the pillar. Not for any ideological reasons, but that it was dangerous. And I cried that I would not see him. Finally, I saw him at the opera and I was happy."
Slawomir Sulowski was born on March 8, 1968 in Krakow, Poland. During World War II, the Nazis executed his grandfather Andrzej Rogal and great-grandfather Wojciech Skowronk in this town. Like many Poles, his life direction was significantly influenced by the election of Karol Wojtyła as Pope. He experienced his visit in 1979 in Krakow. A year later, he joined the community of religious youth in the Light-Life Movement, which greatly deepened his relationship with God. At the secondary grammar school, he decided that his further studies would go in this direction. From 1987 he studied at the Pontifical Theological Institute in Krakow. In May 1993, he was ordained in Krakow’s Wawel. He then worked in Zawoja for three years and in Skawina near Krakow for a year. In June 1997, he left for Moravia, where he served as a chaplain for two years in Přerov and ten years as a parish priest and then dean in Vlkoš. Since 2009, he has been working as a dean in the Šumperk parish.
