Peter Zajac

“Well, it was a very peculiar upbringing. It was like a combination of the first-republic upbringing and at the same time of upbringing inclining towards proletarian internationalism. It was unbelievably intertwined. However, I would say, we were raised very well, as none of us three (siblings) had never had any tendency to enter the communist party or to apply for the membership. It is very interesting that as we observed it at home, – although only from the distance, since our parents didn’t talk to us about that – that’s how we behaved later. They were moving away from the regime and once we matured, we had no temptations to get close at all. That was the unintentional consequence of our upbringing.”

“I worked as a prose editor and I started to publish works of my contemporaries, what was great. It was really nice job and I enjoyed doing it. However, in 1971 the censorship of texts began, some of those texts had negative reviews, so they couldn’t be published anymore. In 1972 I was fired from that publishing house, because I was quite stubborn and I was an editor of the texts that became banished. They were printed out, but couldn’t be distributed. For example, there was a book of reports of Peter Repka named Vstaň a choď (Stand Up and Go), or Anton Baláž’s novel Bohovia ročných období (Gods of the Four Seasons), what was more of a Solzhenitsyn’s type of text, but many other things that I had reviewed, as well. I had there also some manuscripts, which were then published twenty years later, like works of Pavel Hrúz, Ivan Kadlečík.”