"We were affected by the question of Germanness, of course, and because, from childhood, all the villages... There's Dvůr Králové, that's in the middle, and because it was a district town, so as the Germans started to be supported by Hitler, so was Henlein, and what they did was that every Sunday all these Germans that were around the area, they would gather in the district town, it was in the square, so you would see them there in leather trousers, in dirndls, so they had the upper hand, the Germans..."
"I got a phone call from my friends saying, 'Luděk, do you know that they are dismantling your brickworks?' I withered and said, 'How?' Well, the district committee of the party decided, the Trutnov ones, that the bricks in the brickworks were very nice, so they were dismantled and the communists took the bricks, so to speak, for free.That was, you know, nice stuff."
Luděk Kleandr was born on 10 November 1924 in Dvůr Králové nad Labem. From an early age he attended Sokol and his parents also led him to Sokol philosophy and discipline. They had a farm and at the same time a prosperous brick works, which they took care of together with Luděk’s uncle. After the burgher school, he apprenticed as a carpenter and bricklayer at the Ponikelský company in Králův dvůr. During the war he volunteered for employment at Junkers, thus avoiding forced labour in the Reich. While working, he graduated from a two-year junior mechanical industrial school, and after the war he graduated from the building industry school in České Budějovice. After 1948 the family brick works was nationalized by the communists. Luděk Kleandr got a job in Hydrostav Bratislava, where he worked until 1987. In Slovakia he participated in the construction of several dozen dams and power plants. While working, he studied at the University of Civil Engineering in Bratislava remotely, graduating in 1952. By then he had been married for a year to ball gown designer Olinka, with whom he has two daughters. Thanks to her work, during the years of communist totalitarianism, he saw, for example, Lisbon. He returned to the Czech Republic from Slovakia after his retirement, settling again in Dvůr Králové nad Labem. He died in 2019.
