I dreamed of a future, and in a moment, it was all gone
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Pavel Dostál was born on June 10, 1949 into an agricultural family as the sixth child of Maria and Stanislav Dostál. After the confiscation of the agricultural machines and the violent collectivization of their property, his father Stanislav was sentenced in 1959 to two and a half years in prison for sedition. After returning thanks to the amnesty, he died tragically on the last day of 1961. Pavel Dostál trained as an agricultural machinery repairman and worked all his life at the Křelov-Břuchotín collective farm in the Olomouc region. After completing his basic military service, he married Věra Vaňková in 1972 and they had two children, a daughter Pavlína (1974) and a son Tomáš (1977). In April 1981, his life changed fundamentally. On his return from the field, his wife Věra interrupted an escaped Soviet soldier in their house, who stole from them and brutally murdered both young children and Vera. The murderer Yuri Nikolayevich Kononov was later convicted and probably executed in the Soviet Union. The case was taken over by the Soviet army from the very beginning and, in cooperation with Czechoslovak STB, they tried to keep it secret. Pavel Dostál overcame the most difficult moments of his life thanks to his family, friends and work. In 1986 he married a second time to Věra Kolínská, together they raised her son Ivo (1981) and two other sons were born to them: Jan (1988) and Petr (1990). He only watched the Velvet Revolution on television because he was recovering from an operation of hernia. Later, together with the siblings, he arranged his father’s rehabilitation. He likes to travel around the world, take care of the house and farm. In 2021 he lived with his wife in a family house in Křelov-Břuchotín.
