They couldn’t cry on the visit to the prison. They were evicted from the farm in the dark
Václav Malát was born on 18 December 1943. He lived with his parents in Křešice, Litoměřice. The family farmed 22 hectares of land in the small village, and after the February communist putsch, his father Bohuslav Malát found himself in the crosshairs of local communist officials. In the early 1950s he was sentenced to a year’s imprisonment and loss of property. He served his sentence in the uranium mines in Jáchymov. The family was then forcibly evicted to the Pilsen region, where they had to start a completely new life. In spite of his poor personnel profile, in 1958 he was admitted to an industrial school, majoring in brewing, in Prague, which he successfully completed in 1962. Soon after, he joined the army, which he spent at Ruzyně in Prague. In 1965 he married Maria Hejhalová, together they raised four children. Václav Malát worked almost all his life as a brewer, changing many workplaces. In October 1989, he started working at the brewery in Trutnov, where he met Václav Havel twice. In the 1990s, he managed to recover part of the family property. In 2023 he was living in his native Křešice.