One memorial plaque is enough
Radoslav Smetana was born on 3 August 1934 in Prague. His father Antonín Smetana was arrested on 14 September 1941 due to his participation in a strike, and brought to the Terezín Small Fort. Unlike fifty-nine of his colleagues who were released two weeks later, Antonín Smetana was instead transported to Mauthausen. In January 1942 the family received a notice of Antonín’s death. In February 1945 Radoslav witnessed the shelling of Jinonice and two months later the air strike on Vysočany. In May 1945 he witnessed the Prague Uprising and the liberation of Prague. At the end of the 40s he became a member of Jaroslav Foglar’s Scout club. Following high school graduation at a grammar school he applied to study geology at the Faculty of Science, Charles University in Prague. Because of him taking part in a prohibited student May celebration he was prevented from concluding his second year of studies. Instead, he went to do his military service. After two years he resumed his geology studies, graduating in 1961. At the beginning of the 1960s he worked as a geologist in the Čertovy schody quarry near Beroun. For the next four years he was employed at the general directorate of Czechoslovak stone industry. He transferred to Geoindustrie in August 1968 where he had worked up until retirement. Radoslav specialized in practical economic geology. In the 1970s he had spent three years working in Libya, Yugoslavia, Germany and Poland. He was a head of a karst club at the Faculty of Science, served as a member of the karst section of the National Museum Association, helped mapping newly-found caves and participated in descents into abysses in Slovak Karst. He retired at sixty years of age but remained active and ten years later began working as an administrator of a sports club in Prague.
