His grandfather was killed as a collaborator, then remembered as a hero
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Jan Vyhnálek was born on 26 July 1946 in Prague. His father Heribert was a room painter and his mother Daruše was a housewife with four children. An important person for Jan was his maternal grandfather Otakar T. Kunstovný, who created an artificial language Serve. He sent and received letters from Germany because he was interested in the Kunstovný family tree. The postmistress denounced him as a collaborator and he was arrested on 9 May 1945. According to records, he was beaten by people in the street, but according to Jan’s mother, he was shot. After elementary school, Jan trained as a carpenter and in 1963 began working as a parquet maker. In the 1960s he often went to the Semafor theatre, where his father was employed. He married in 1966 and had two daughters. On the morning of 21 August 1968, he saw tanks in front of his house as he was passing between them on his motorcycle on his way to work. In 1968 or 1969 he visited a relative in Austria and wanted to stay there. He became involved in the Velvet Revolution, and from 18 November 1989 he took part in demonstrations every day after work. He tried to found the Civic Forum at the Prague Poultry Factory, where he worked as a driver, but did not succeed. In 1992 he founded the SOS civic association. He was motivated by a family situation, when the authorities took his daughter’s child away from her and entrusted her to relatives to raise. In 2002, he even unsuccessfully applied for asylum in Belgium and Sweden because of this situation. In 2021, he was living in Jívka in the Trutnov district.
