She has both Polish and Czech roots from her parents and lived her whole life in Belgrade
Stanislava Jovanović-Slavinski, birth name Nowakowski, was born on 24 May 1951 in Belgrade, then Yugoslavia. Her father was Polish. A member of the Land Army and a participant in the Warsaw Uprising, he feared for his life when the Communists came to power, so he came to Belgrade in 1948 with his mother and sister (his mother was of Serbian origin). There he worked as a journalist, translator and interpreter. The grandfather of the witness, Josef Nowakowski, was a victim of the Soviet massacre of Polish officers and intellectuals in the Katyn Forest during the war. Stanislava‘s maternal ancestors have Czech blood; the Frait and Škarka families, as Czech immigrants to Serbia, left a significant mark on local culture and industry. The witness´s parents divorced quite soon and Stanislava grew up with her mother and her relatives. Czech was spoken at home after the divorce, but Stanislava received her school education in Serbian (then Serbo-Croatian). She wanted to study art, but eventually worked in tourism after graduating from business school. She worked at the counter of the Putnik travel agency and as a tourist guide. She married her husband of Czech origin and they had two daughters who are not able to speak Czech. In the 1990s, Stanislava was involved in Czech and Polish regional associations, and she married Petar Jovanović-Slavinský for the second time, but was already a widow at the time of recording in 2017. In 1999, she experienced the NATO bombing of Belgrade.