The janitor decided whether I would be allowed to attend university
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Zdeněk Jelínek was born on 8 April 1932 in Prague into the family of Bohuslav Jelínek and his wife Margareta. On his grandmother’s side he has French ancestors. His grandfather, Rudolf Vácha, was a painter from Hluboká nad Vltavou and studied at the art academies in Vienna and Munich. He lived in Paris, where he married a French woman, Anna Pochon. There, in 1901, Margareta, the witness’s mother, was born. They moved to Czechoslovakia around 1924. Zdeněk’s father, Bohuslav Jelínek, had a freight forwarding business but went bankrupt in the late 1930s because his customers were mostly German Jews. Zdeněk Jelínek started attending a French school in Prague, which was closed at the beginning of the war. In 1941, a tragic event befell the family - Bohuslav Jelínek died of cancer and Margareta was left alone with nine-year-old Zdeněk. Zdeněk entered the business academy in 1948. At the school he lived through the first years of the communist regime, which interfered significantly with personnel changes. He graduated in 1952, but for political reasons he was not allowed to attend university. The problem was that his mother worked as a ladies’ dressmaker on a trade certificate. Zdeněk Jelínek had to enlist in the TP (technical battalions) in Zelená Hora, after six months he was released to civilian life thanks to a fictitious psychiatric report from a doctor with whom his mother was acquainted. After that he worked as an ordinary clerk in a national enterprise, the Czechoslovak Automobile Repair Plant. Zdeněk did not manage to get into distance university studies until 12 years after graduation. He was allowed to study law because he could apply it in the company. He graduated from law school in 1969. From 1975 to 1988 he worked at the national enterprise Czechoslovak Circuses, Varieties and Amusement Parks as a company lawyer, then as an investment officer and economic deputy. In 1988, after the change of director, he had to leave this position because he was not a member of the Communist Party. From 1990 to 2002 he worked as a lawyer. He had a lifelong close friend, Konstantin Georgiev Trochev from Bulgaria, who was affected by the Bulgarian regime in the same way as he was: he could not study in Bulgaria, so he studied medicine in Prague. Zdeněk Jelínek was married since 1980 to the puppeteer Jana, née Halířová, who worked at the Alfa Theatre in Plzeň. They raised a daughter together, and in 2004 Zdeněk Jelínek was widowed. He died on March 11, 2024.
