Happiness in an unhappy time
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Přemysl Malý was born on March 3, 1945 in Čáslav, as the younger of two siblings. The family lived in Prague at the time, but after the bombing of Prague on February 14, 1945, the father decided that it would be better to move to his wife’s parents in Žleby u Čáslavi for the end of the pregnancy. His grandfather Otakar Malý was a landowner and owned a farm at the foot of the Doupovské mountains in the small village Dvérce. In April 1948, the communists took it from them. In 1950, in a Kangaroo trial, the witness’s father was sentenced to two years in the uranium mines in Jáchymov as an alleged member of an anti-state group. The witness’s uncle, Jiří Klečka, was sentenced to life imprisonment for the alleged murder of communist functionary Alois Blažek in Žleby. He ended up spending twelve years in prison. They condemned the father as an accomplice, and because he came from a landowner’s family, also as an enemy of the state. He returned from Jáchymov in 1952 and could only do inferior jobs for the rest of his life. Because of this, Přemysl Malý was not recommended for secondary school and learned to be a toolmaker. He joined Koh-i-noor in Vršovice and, while working, graduated from the Secondary General Education School for Workers in Přípotoční street. Thanks to a coincidence and the then Minister of Education, Čestmír Císař, he was allowed to study at the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering at CTU, from which he graduated in 1969. In 1969, he also met his future wife, Maria. Two years later they got married. In 1972, their first son, Martin, was born, and their second son Petr in 1975. After graduating from the Czech Technical University, he joined the technological company Inova, where he mainly dealt with hydraulics. He stayed there for almost thirty years. After the Velvet Revolution in 1989, the family managed to get back the Dvérce farm, or rather what was left of it: a ruin and some fields. They sold most of the land and leased the rest to local hunters. Přemysl Malý passed away on August, the 22nd, 2023.
