We cheated on each other and everyone kept their mouths shut
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Jindřich Vaňák was born on 11 December 1937 in Pilsen. His father Jindřich Vaňák was a miller and the family often moved to the mills where he worked. His mother was a housewife. He lived through the war and remembers, for example, the attacks of the figter pilots. In 1950 the family moved to Soběslav and in 1953 they settled permanently in Jindřichův Hradec, where father found work in another mill. The witness was trained as an electrical engineer and went on to study at secondary technical school. At the same time, he had to work to afford his studies. He also worked in the Šumava border region, where people were only allowed to enter with a pass. From 1956 to 1958 he was in the army, half a year of which was spent at the school of operators in Poprad, Slovakia. After his military service, in 1958, he started working in heavy operation at Electric Assembly Plants in the Klement Gottwald New Steelworks in Vítkovice, then he was transferred to Poldi Kladno, and then from 1960 to 1983 he spent his working years in Kovosvit in Sezimovo Ústí. He worked on prototypes, he and his team filed several patents, at the beginning they managed to keep up with the world, but gradually they started to fall behind. Jindřich Vaňák signed the 2000 Words declaration, he was fired from the party, his family was in trouble. In 1983 he started working at the Plant for the Production of Air Handling Equipment) in Milevsko. Here he started to go on foreign business trips, because his professional erudition was irreplaceable, besides Germany he was also in Novosibirsk, for example. In 1987 he moved to Waterworks, where he also experienced the revolution in 1989. From 1993 he taught at the Kovosvit apprenticeship, retiring in 1997. He has a wife and two daughters. In 2024 he was living in Sezimovo Ústí.
