I was totally deployed in Germany, but my life was in danger at home
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Jaroslav Langer was born on December 8, 1924 in Štěpánov near Olomouc. He grew up as the only son of his mother Anna, née Ramelt, and Josef Langer. Shortly after the wedding, his parents divorced and his mother took care of little Jaroslav herself. The witness spent his childhood mainly in Štěpánov in a small house and mainly on the street, where he belonged to a children’s party, in which Czech children mixed with German ones. He later joined the scout unit. From childhood, he played passionately football, and later hockey, and was versatile. From the summer of 1938 until the occupation of the Sudetenland he lived with his mother in Ráječko near Zábřeh, then they returned to Štěpánov. During World War II, he graduated from the Business Academy in Olomouc. On March 15, 1944, he received a call to work for the Reich. On April 1, he first took a train to Stuttgart, Germany, and later moved about 80 kilometres south to Tailfingen. During the total deployment, he and his friend Kvido Kolomazník took a trip to Constance, where they were detained by a German patrol and spent two days in prison. In August 1944, Jaroslav applied for leave in the protectorate and never returned to work in Germany. He experienced liberation under dramatic circumstances in Štěpánov. After the war, he completed basic military service in Olomouc and Brno and then worked as an accountant on the construction of the Vír dam. In 1951 he was called up from the reserve for an extraordinary exercise and later remained as a professional soldier with the Czechoslovak People’s Army (ČSLA). He worked, for example, as the head of a training group at a military college in Martin. Although he remained a non-member of the party for the rest of his life, he ended up in the army in 1980 with the rank of lieutenant colonel. In the 1980s, he managed to travel abroad several times - for example to Canada at the invitation of an old friend, whom he met during his work in Germany. In the last years of communism, the StB was also interested in his travels, as follows from the preserved archival material OB-1046 OV. The witness spent most of his life with his family in Brno, with his wife Ludmila, née Schäferová, raising two children. In 2021 he lived in Olomouc.
