Communist took the father’s bakery and prevented the son from working at the university
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Jaroslav Jágr was born on 24 July 1932 in Liberec. Both his parents came from Kněžnice near Město Králové. Jaroslav’s father Jaroslav trained as a baker in Chrastava. In 1915 he enlisted in the Austrian army and took part in the fighting on the Eastern Front during the First World War. Due to typhus he later served as a guard in Terezín prison. His brother, on the other hand, fought in the Czechoslovak legions. After the war, Jaroslav Jágr Sr. set up a business in Horní Růžodol and he and his wife ran it until 1938. After the occupation of the Sudetenland by Nazi Germany, the family moved to Český Brod, where they spent the entire Second World War. In 1941, his father was arrested and imprisoned for four months by the Gestapo because he was visiting friends in Liberec who were engaged in resistance activities. However, the memoirist’s father was not involved in it, and so he was released shortly before the Heydrichiad. After the war, the Jágrs returned to Liberec and ran the bakery again. They were deprived of it by the communists in 1949 during the nationalization of their property. Jaroslav Jágr Jr. studied statistics at the University of Economics. In 1956 he married Milena Lacinová. Both of them worked as researchers and teachers at the University of Textile and Mechanical Engineering (VŠST) in Liberec during the 1960s. My wife had problems finding a job for several years. Jaroslav Jágr joined the LIAZ car factory, where he worked until the Velvet Revolution. In 1985, his wife succumbed to cancer. Later he married for the second time. When the communist regime fell in 1989, Jaroslav Jágr returned to the former VŠST, newly renamed the Technical University of Liberec, where he founded and headed the Faculty of Economics for four years as dean. In 2022, the memorialist lived in Liberec.
