"I just remember, but I already said that, once we had to go to the Great Cinema. There was a trial with the local people, some people named the Jajtners, they had a fabrics shop, they had fabrics hidden somewhere. That was what happened and they were tried and we had to go to the Great Cinema there to watch the trial and among us, as there were different people, they shouted against those people - the whole family was there, the children on the stage. It was so embarrassing. As schoolchildren, we probably shouldn't have been there."
"I have one more very unpleasant experience, we stayed at that school after the air raid was blown off, with a friend because he lost his shoes, so we were looking for them, we were late. However, there was no one alive anywhere, suddenly a plane flew in, took a sort of course towards us and started shooting. Fortunately, we were just on the bridge and there was a man hiding under the bridge and he was calling us: 'Boys, run to me, to me, hide!' So we ran under the bridge, that may have saved our lives. And then we had to go up to Letná and into the forest to get home. So that's quite an unpleasant experience."
"When the bombing came, actually yesterday was the anniversary. So that was a huge raid. Well, we were hidden in a shelter, and those shelters were so poorly made or so shallow, even the one where we were hidden, that if a bomb fell on one of them, those people had no chance. I had such an unpleasant experience as a child, when the ground was completely shaking, it was detonation, I don't like to remember it, but I will always remember that in my life I have never heard people pray in such a choir and so fervently, fear or something in that shelter, it can't be described. We survived.”
I am the last living projectionist of the Great Cinema (Velké kino, Zlín)
Jan Vrátný in 2022
photo: the photo was taken during the filming in 2022
photo: the photo was taken during the filming in 2022
Download image
Jan Vrátný was born on September 29, 1938 in Zlín to the family of Anna and Jan Vrátný. Six years later, he and his friend were nearly killed by a depth pilot fighter that swooped down on the two boys and fired at them. In the same year, Jan witnessed the devastating bombing of Zlín, during which twenty-one civilians lost their lives. In the early 1950s, as a schoolboy, he was required to attend a public trial with a family accused of stealing socialist property. After elementary school, he trained to be a locksmith at Gottwald ZPS, with which he also connected his professional life for a long time. During the background checks that followed the invasion of Czechoslovakia by Warsaw Pact troops in August 1968, the manager under whom Jan Vrátný worked was changed. It was an incompetent person who got to the position only thanks to the fact that he was a member of the Communist Party. Jan Vrátný and several colleagues gave notice with a reason, which the then regime perceived as an attack on itself. Jan Vrátný then worked at the Research Institute in Gottwaldov until the Velvet Revolution. In addition, he also worked for thirty years as a projectionist at the Great Cinema in Zlín. In 1984, he was awarded a sixteen-day study tour to the Soviet Union, where he was surprised to discover how the parts of the country were underdeveloped and completely different from how the ideology of the time portrayed them. In 2022, Jan Vrátný lived in Zlín, where he and his wife Jaroslava raised two sons, Mirek and Petr. He died on September 23rd, 2023.
