I started my business in 1947. One year later I had to hand in my business license
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Zdislav Chalupa was born January 24, 1922 in Opava. His father Rudolf Chalupa was an assistant at the local prosecution office. In 1936 the family moved to Brno where Rudolf Chalupa had been transferred to. Zdislav graduated from a Gymnasium. During the Protectorate he worked in the textile industry. After the war, he and his friend took over a destroyed textile factory in Krnov in the re-colonized borderlands as national administrators. They did well and had one hundred people working for them. In 1947 Zdislav got his business license and opened up a knitting workshop in Krnov. He planned to expand and had a good grasp of the area. However, he had to end his business after the 1948 communist coup d’état. He used to get into arguments with the communist officials in Krnov. One of the reasons why was the life story of his brother Vlastimil Chalupa who had collaborated with Petr Zenkl, leader of the National Socialists, emigrated and became an agent of the State Security. Because of various obstructions from the regime, Zdislav had trouble supporting his wife, two kids and other relatives who lived with them, which is why he started working as a miner in Ostrava in 1957. He worked in the mines until his retirement. Subsequently he found a hard manual labor in the Vítkovice Ironworks. In 1986 he got married for the second time with a woman almost forty years his junior. He has another two kids from this marriage.
