Dušan Slávik was born in Bratislava on January 10, 1922. During the Second World War, he participated in the Slovak National Uprising, was captured, and sentenced to death. However, he managed to flee and in the spring of 1945, he joined the Czechoslovak army fighting alongside its allies. After the war he graduated from the Faculty of Law of Comenius University in Bratislava. In 1949, for the second time in his life, he was sentenced to death for political reasons, allegedly for spying and treason. His punishment was later changed to life, and in 1960 he was granted amnesty. While in prison, he was trained in using a lathe and upon leaving prison, he worked as a manual labourer; only at the time of political liberation in 1968 was he allowed to become a lawyer. He worked as a corporate lawyer in the construction company Investprojekt only until the beginning of normalization, he was still referred to the workers' profession, and later he managed to become a lawyer for the newly established SOS villages. Dušan Slávik joined the political prisoners club K 231 in 1968. In 1988 he belonged to the founding personalities of Masaryk's Society in Brno and at the end of 1989, he participated in the re-establishment of the CSSD. He died on April 19, 1992 in Brno.