"We were so worried about father, because of course it's naive to lock forbidden books in a chest in the attic. That's probably where the secret policemen would go first if they came to us. And the sisters packed me with the books they thought were the most harmful, everything that had to do with Masaryk. I know he had some interviews with Masaryk in there, and the Slánský´s trial was already going on at that time, and Dad had a cyclostyled transcript of the trial. Well, just books, such...I don't remember what kind of books they were, but my sisters packed them in my school bag, stuffed the books in there, and when it was getting dark they sent me to the Váh, where the Váh flows through Ilava, and I used to go to drown those books. I would sink them and drop them into the Váh. So it seems crazy to me when a little girl, six years old, five years old, goes to the Váh, a kilometre and a half, in the dark, mustn´t be seen, with books that we thought were harmful. My father, if he'd known... would have protested terribly. But we protected him like that."
"But it was hopeless to get out of Ilava. There were such huge walls and between the wall and the inner fence there were dogs. There were German shepherds barking, they were let out there...I can't imagine how they [prisoners] would get out. And especially...I mean, there weren't many escapes, not many, really. I remember, for instance, one prisoner climbed up the chimney, the prison chimney, high up. And he was there for maybe three days. And they weren't able to get him down, then suddenly he wasn't there anymore, but how they got him down...I don't know. Like, they started burning tyres, so there was all this black smoke, and the prisoner went down a little bit lower, but he was still standing on these metal spokes that go up the chimney, and when they stopped heating, he climbed up the chimney again. He was singing and dancing up there, and I know, you could see he was opening his jacket like that, like let them shoot me..."
"Someone just started shooting. Like, so they wouldn't push against the tank...I don't know, I've got it so faded, I just remember the burning sun on that street and that it was noon. That it was noon and all of a sudden, there was no incident, nothing. The people were yelling at the soldiers, like, get out, there's no counter-revolution here. I don't even know if the man survived or not. I know that a girl a few meters away didn't survive, she was on the stairs of the Comenius University... there is a lecture hall where graduation ceremonies are held and so on, and they shot her on those stairs. At that moment, actually, but I don't know whether [it was] sooner or later, I can't say anymore. Someone carved her name into the marble. Even during the occupation, on that very day, or the next day, somebody was sitting there and carving her name."
"And I'm afraid of that moment...right now people are still helping, but I'm afraid of the moment when it suddenly will turn into anger against them...the fact that they hit our sore point, actually. I think for a lot of people, somewhere in their subconscious...there's a habit in our country of turning on the person. Havel showed us a mirror, right away, in that '89, to the nation, and by the second or third month, there were already people saying he couldn´t pronounce „r“, and they had already started...and that's something terrible in our nation. And it's even worse in Slovakia. That we are not capable of self-reflection, that we are not brave enough. The fact that we are small [nations] makes it hard to do heroic deeds, that's also true, but when a person like Havel appears, who is clearly...but there in Ukraine, now there are several thousand, several million Havels... And I'm waiting and I'm afraid of the turn in our country, when it will turn, when people will start to be worse off, because we will sit wrapped in blankets, because we will be cold...and we will not be able to compare that they are dying there...And we are just sitting in blankets...There they count the dead and we count the money..."
Zlatica Dobošová was born on 29 January 1946 in Brezno nad Hronom into a middle-class family, her father was an architect and her mother a teacher. From the age of four she grew up in Ilava, a small district town in western Slovakia. Many of her childhood memories are linked to the Ilava prison where opponents of the communist regime were imprisoned in the 1950s. Her later life attitudes were largely influenced by her Christian upbringing, but also by her parents‘ positive attitude towards T. G. Masaryk and the coexistence of Czechs and Slovaks. She graduated from the secondary school of arts and crafts and then was accepted to study classical painting and restoration at the Bratislava Academy of Fine Arts. As a fourth-year student, she witnessed the arrival of Soviet tanks in the centre of Bratislava, when Soviet soldiers shot a young man and a 15-year old girl in close proximity to her. She finished her studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, where she arrived just a few days after the August occupation. She then settled permanently in Bohemia. While being still a student, she was part of an international restoration team that helped to save the precious paintings of the Uffizi Gallery after the disastrous flood of 1966 in Florence, and she also participated in the rescue of frescoes from Gothic churches in the Most region. Zlatica Dobošová is an important restorer, especially of Gothic frescoes and panel paintings. Among other things, she restored frescoes of the pilgrimage church in Křtiny and the church in Tasov. In November 1989, together with the artistic community she became actively involved in the political events. Shortly afterwards she moved to Levý Hradec aiming to restore the frescoes of the local church, which dates back to our earliest history. She then devoted herself almost selflessly to the work for seven years. Zlata Dobošová is divorced and lives (2022) in Levý Hradec.
