Beata Westrych Zázrivcová

"My maternity leave was coming to an end at the time, and I got to the point where I started summarizing what was behind me and thinking about what to do next. I asked myself what I would like to do for the rest of my life. And so I started searching not for what should support me, but for what I want to do. The artistic side was still alive in me, and when I saw an advertisement for a job position at the Bratislava Puppet Theater, I decided to apply there. As we talked about the relations between nations, I also had such an unpleasant experience there - a lady from the Czech Republic worked in the personnel department, who did not want to accept me only because I was from Poland. In the end, they accepted me because part of the interview included a practical assignment, and since my creation was the best, they took me."

"When I was already working in Slovakia, we went to a festival in Berlin. I especially remember the impression of visiting the Berlin observation tower. Suddenly you have a bird's eye view of a city that is divided by a wall. As you look down on the city, through the center of which a wall passes, you say to yourself that it cannot last this long - because that wall divides people who speak the same language and make up one nation, and someone built such an unnatural barrier there. I remember that it was this sight that gave me the idea that the communist regime must fall. You don't know when it will happen, but any thinking person will tell you that it is not a natural situation and that it will happen one day. So I see what happened in the late 80s as the fact that people decided to fight for it, and they fought for it all over Europe."

"My mother told me a story about how her paternal grandmother hid a Jewish child with her. In order not to find them out, mom often went to visit her grandmother - they lived at the other end of the city at that time. They were afraid that the Germans wouldn't find out that it was a Jewish child, so if they happened to see him playing in the yard, the grandmother would simply tell them that the child was their granddaughter. During the occupation, the mother essentially functioned as a pretext and cover in a situation where a neighbor or someone from the neighborhood would report her grandmother as a Jewish child playing in their yard. That way, thanks to her mother, she could reply 'she's my granddaughter.'"

"Grandma had a friend who survived Auschwitz. Like her, she became a widow at a very young age, so they became friends and visited each other. It was in the post-war period; grandma was already employed then. When we visited her as children, this friend of hers was often there. We knew about her that she survived the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. I remember that she didn't want to remember this period, it's strange, but people who had such traumatic experiences closed in on themselves and didn't want to talk about it. The only thing I remember is that she once showed us the number she had tattooed on her arm. It was horrible. When we were children, she didn't want to talk about it at all, she only opened up to us a little when we were older. I remember when I was getting married, we had a wedding in Poland, so I went to introduce my husband to her because she was a close friend of my grandmother. Then she sat down with me and my husband and we talked about it too. It is possible that she opened up to us because her husband was Slovak and yet our nations are close. And then, in this context, she told us that life in the camp was so terribly difficult that she doesn't want to remember it much. We wanted to find out more about it, but she only replied 'you don't want to know what I went through there'."