I wish we could all respect the freedom of others
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Jiří Trnka was born on May 9, 1971 in Prague. His father Jiří Trnka was an artist and belonged to the grey zone of artists who were not part of any official art associations. At the Trnka home they would always talk openly about the communist regime, and Jiří absorbed this atmosphere. At the first stage of primary school, he spoke vulgarly about the then head of state, Gustáv Husák, and later, in the framework of compulsory correspondence with pupils from the Soviet Union, he preferred to correspond with a friend whose family had emigrated to Austria. During his apprenticeship years at the Prague engineering company Českomoravská Kolben-Daněk (ČKD), he experienced the atmosphere of the second culture and adopted it as his own. He attended concerts by bands such as Garáž, Půlnoc (‘Midnight’) or Psí vojáci (‘Dog Soldiers’), whose events were often forcibly ended by the regime’s riot police. In January 1989, he took part in Palach Week, a five-day massive protest dispersed by water cannons and tear gas. In the spring of the same year he signed Charta 77’s petition Několik vět (‘A Few Senteces’). During the summer of 1989, Jiří Trnka bought wine and carried it secretly to the fence of the West German embassy in Prague, where a mass emigration of people from East Germany was taking place. When the Velvet Revolution broke out in Czechoslovakia in November 1989, Jiří Trnka stood in the seventh row of protesters on Národní třída, from where he managed to escape and hide with dozens of other people in one of the houses in Mikulandská Street. In the following days, he collected signatures for the general strike and carried them to The Drama Club, where he also held a speech representing the Prague foundry ČKD, where he worked at the time. In 1993, he married Jana, with whom he raised two children, Barbora and Jakub. In 2018, Jiří Trnka took an active part in organising chain demonstrations under the organisation Million moments for Democracy in Zábřeh, where he lived with Jana in 2021.
