My father didn’t give up, he was an entrepreneur in body and soul
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Jana Kautská was born in Prague on 22 July 1938 as the first child of Jana and Jiří Polášek. Her parents owned the Prague pharmacy U Zlatého hada on Národní třída and a pharmaceutical factory in Hořátev near Nymburk. Her grandfather, prof. Antonín Ostrčil, co-founded the Prague Sanatorium, later the Institute for Mother and Child in Prague Podolí. In the 1920s, he bought the Osvěta villa, where he ran a private medical practice. It is said in the family that the late First Lady Hana Benešová used to visit him. In 1940, a younger daughter, Emina, joined the Polášek family. The family lived in a spacious apartment on the Prague waterfront. They spent their summers at Hrubá Skála - the famous Řezníček villa was inherited by Jana Kautská’s grandmother from her uncle, the businessman and traveller Karel Řezníček. The February bombing of Prague in 1945 found her mother and daughters at home, in an apartment on the waterfront. They were very lucky to have survived. After the communists came to power, her parents lost everything. Her father’s factory became Spofa n.p. for the production of medicines, the pharmacy was nationalized, the villa on Hrubá Skála was given to the local national committee, the Osvěta villa was nationalized and the apartments were converted into smaller ones. The family lived in one of them after the death of grandmother Ostrčilová. However, he father of the witness did not become bitter. On the contrary, he started a new business after being reassigned as a warehouse worker at the State Warehouse of Pharmaceuticals. The pharmacist’s indomitable entrepreneurial spirit could not be suppressed. Jana Kautská graduated from the Czech Technical University in Prague (ČVUT) and spent her entire career working in design offices at Armabeton. Together with her partner, she later built a cooperative house in Krč and spent summers at a cottage her father had acquired in the Krkonoše Mountains. In 2024, she lived in Prague.
