You wouldn’t make a good socialist engineer
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Jiří Chlumský was born on 21 September 1932 in Prague into the family of Jan Chlumský, a room painter. His mother Marie, née Dudařová, came from Chyška near Milevsko and was the daughter of a former legionary who was given a small farm after the First World War. Jiří Chlumský grew up in Prague 6 near Vítězné náměstí, which was a bastion of the Gestapo and the Wehrmacht during the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. At the age of ten, he played resistance fighter with boys and broke the windows of a Gestapo officer’s apartment with stones. The family was to be sent to a concentration camp because of this. They were saved by a neighbour, a young German woman who worked for the Gestapo. However, Jiří Chlumský had to leave Prague, so his mother took him to his grandmother in Chyšek near Milevsko, where he went to school for about two years. In 1951, he graduated from grammar school, but he was not accepted to the engineering college because he was the son of a tradesman. He worked for fifteen years in the Projekta company as a draughtsman and graduated from a secondary industrial school (distance education). He then worked at the State Institute for the Reconstruction of Historical Buildings, eventually completing his education and becoming a fire protection specialist. In August 1968, he witnessed the shooting of a young woman by the Soviet occupiers in Prague’s Klárov district. He never joined the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (KSČ). In 2023 he was living in Prague.
