In 1972, a month earlier, he was released from Ilava. We went with my brother-in-law to take him from Ilava. We came home, we sat there at night, we talked. And in the morning the security came for me and took me away. So we did not understand what was going on … I didn't think about anything else. They took me on the Februarka street where I sat down and suddenly began asking questions about the Kalinovci family. These are our good friends. Ladislav Ján Kalina and Agnes and Julka. And they inquired only about them, and started to have such anti-Semitic remarks, I was very offended. They interrogated also my sister, whom they did not interrogate even in connection with my husband. And they also asked her about them. And so we found out, I always answered them no, so they were pretty annoyed and I had nothing to sign… around lunch they let me go home.. and we found out, they were arrested that night. Once more they interrogated me, because they presumed they heard my voice on some interception device, but it wasn’t true, it was about some passports. My husband had a condition for three more years, they followed him, we didn’t even want to meet anyone, out of fear of their persecution… and when he returned from prison he just kept to himself, he was in bad physical shape, had terrible cough, it was very bad at that stage.
Because we had connections with the writer’s Union in Moscow, but nobody knew Solzhenitsyn’s address. Nobody had met him in person. In Slovakia, his books One day of Ivan Denisovic and Matriona’s cottage were published in Tatran. And then, it was time to connect with him, but how? Slovenka had anniversary,I recall I was working for them as an externist, they told me to write to some authors, that we can publish something new. We didn’t know Solzha’s address. I found it through one worker in their Writer’s union. I stated I would need a text for Slovenka, it could also concern women, do you know his address? She gave it to me- Projezd Jablockova, Rjazan, I think three. I had it somewhere in a notebook, I had found it recently. So i wrote him and he sent us the first excerpt from Cancer. It was published in the Sunday (weekend) edition of Pravda by Jozko Ruttkay. We wrote a letter in thank to Solzhenitsyn and in this way we started contact with him. My husband went to that trip from Kulturny zivot with Rudo Olsinksy. They had his address, they underwent an adventurous voyage finding him. He was writing to both of us, to me and Palo.
"September 1, 1972, they came at 8 in the morning, three men rang the doorbell, they came with such paper, prosecutors’ order for a home search. We were at home, they we’d be there. So we had to sit and they searched our house, they took our correspondence, manuscripts, which we had here, Russian, it was a great loss, we never got it back. We had here the manuscript of professor Kosterin, he was writing a great book on Crymean Tatars, about their eviction, about the crimes that were perpetrated on them. He had a Tatar wife, Palo had such contacts back in 1969. "
Translator Marta Lickova was born in 1926 in municipality Badan in central Slovakia. During Second World War, she completed studies at the Business Academy, where she met her future husband Pavel Licko, who actively participated in the Slovak National Uprising. After the war, they moved to Bratislava, and with husband they joined the communist party. Marta started to work as a translator from Russian, which she mastered already during highschool studies. In the late 1960s, she managed to get in touch with the forbidden Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who provided her husband with a manuscript of the novel Cancer, which was subsequently published in English in 1968. In the same year, Marta openly expressed her disapproval of the invasion of the Warsaw Pact Army into Czechoslovakia and with Pavel they left communist party. During the following normalisation, she was repeatedly interrogated by State security (StB), their flat was regularly inspected by the police. She could not officially work as a translator until 1989. She worked as a referent on the economic department of Datasystem, in a computation technology company, where she remained until her retirement. She still works as and translator, having translated numerous books in her long career.
