The Communists destroyed my life

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Miloš Stehlík was born on 14 November 1923 in Brno and is one of the prominent personalities of the Moravian metropolis. He spent his childhood in Židenice and Juliánov in Brno. In 1934 he attended elementary school in Brno-Židenice and then attended a real grammar school in Brno-Husovice from the age of eleven to nineteen. Both his parents died when he was four years old, so he was looked after and raised by his grandmother and aunt. During the closure of universities during World War II, he attended a language school and was to be deployed for forced labour in the empire, but he refused and had to hide the whole war. After the war he studied art history and classical archaeology at the Faculty of Arts of Masaryk University. When he joined the Memorial Institute in Brno, where he still works, the Communists forbade him to repair church monuments and forced him to join the party. He refused it radically. During the communist era he managed to secretly restore the altar in Jedovnice, followed by a definitive prohibition to participate in the preservation of religious monuments. The Communist regime considered him an agent of the Vatican. The witness is still working at the Institute of Monuments and in 2001 he was awarded the Ministry of Culture Prize for heritage care.