"And I had a friend and I was standing in line for food at Zbrojovka and he started complaining about the queue. And I said to him, 'If you hadn't voted for the Communists in '48, we wouldn't be standing here.' And he said to me, 'Dude, I was in prison for that.' And he had two sons, and when the sons grew up, we went to the main station, and he put them on the train to Vienna, and he got them the necessary papers and acquaintances and so on. And actually I sat on number three, he sat on number one, and we made sure that they didn't get off the other side of the train. And years later when I met them, they both got together and they had a translation office in New York. And their family is still earning their living today."
"Another thing I know about my dad is that during the war he was something of a high voltage fitter in Germany and that he used to go all over Germany wherever necessary when the Allies were destroying power lines, as is happening now in the Ukraine, so my dad would just go around Germany and put up the poles."
"O eternal deceased, I am at my wit's end. Years after your death, I have your face at home. Oh, my God, why? It's in a plaque, normal size. It's in a memorial plaque and I'm shaking with trepidation. I'm not cheering, Svetlana has escaped, I don't know where. At your coffin it is empty. Stalin's beard is looking at me from all sides, screaming at you. Unfortunately."
Poet Leoš „Bacon“ Slanina was born on 13 March 1946 in Židenice, Brno. His mother Hermína Slaninová (née Farenštajnová) was a Romanian Jewess. She survived the horrors of the Holocaust and settled in Brno after World War II, after meeting his father Jan Slanina. Leoš Slanina worked at the Brno Armory, where he met Jan Novák, the informal leader of the Brno bohemian movement at the time. At the turn of the 1960s and 1970s, the witness became part of the local artistic group that enabled him to develop his poetic talent. Among the personalities who influenced him most artistically were Zeno Kaprál, Ivan Wernisch and Jaroslav Erik Frič, whom he considered his main tutor in writing poems. In the 1980s, Leoš Slanina moved to Prague, where he became acquainted with representatives of the Prague dissent, led by Václav Havel and Martin Jirous, as well as with local bohemian figures such as Bohumil Hrabal. During that time, Leoš Slanina expected that communism would sooner or later fall. After the revolution, he was finally able to publish his poems, which he had written during the normalisation period. In 2023 he was living in Brno.
