Jiří Oplatek

* 1944

  • “I managed to get a paper from his saying I’m not the bearer of military secrets, I didn’t how it was with the borders. I requested a passport while still doing military service, and I received it the next day after coming back from the army. It was in early September 1969, the borders closed down in October. I managed to get out to Basel about a month before that, on 4 September 1969. There was no problem getting a place here in the late sixties, there was a huge boom here. Employment was practically unknown, at least in Switzerland. My wife got a job as a graphic designer at one advertising agency. [...] I set off into the streets, [when] I saw an architect’s doorplate, [I said] I was an architect from Brno, that I was looking for a job. I had about three offers in the course of the first afternoon, I chose one studio, I don’t remember why any more. I said I didn’t have my diploma, it wasn’t possible to take it across the borders. They said: ‘Never mind the diploma, sit down here, draw things here for a week, and then we’ll tell you if you’re an architect and if we want you. It worked out fine after that one week.”

  • “Back then I managed to secure asylum in Switzerland. For those of us who came here in the late sixties, early seventies, there was no problem in getting political asylum 99 percent of the time. Ten years later it already started to be a problem, and many people weren’t approved, not even when they were from Communist countries. I managed to arrange for him to get asylum at the office in Bern, even though he wasn’t in Switzerland. [...] Reuniting family, that still means something in Switzerland, it’s a big bonus. They had the great idea of sending it to the embassy in Prague, which wrote to him and sent him a letter by Czech post to his letterbox in Brno to inform him he had been given asylum in Switzerland. These are two worlds, each in their own sphere, it’s not easy to understand. If they don’t try, they don’t understand. So he couldn’t go to get his visa from the Swiss embassy when he went to Yugoslavia. The way we did it, they sent it to the consulate in Zagreb.”

  • “To round it off in some way with the year 1989, when I returned after twenty years, it was an enormous shock. You get used to the look of the streets, houses, parks, and cars here really quickly, and then you come back after twenty years. That was such a strong experience that I had to really hold back so as not to talk about it with my colleagues in Brno, that certainly wouldn’t have been the right thing, to confront them with that. On the other hand I was able to rediscover the threads of relationships with my classmates and begin to make a connection with them again. We weren’t in touch much. I corresponded with a few people, then the letters became fewer and far between. Maybe some of them were afraid, or they didn’t have time to write. Besides my parents, I didn’t have much contact with anyone in the end.”

  • “We came to the border guard barracks every morning. They assigned us two border guards, and we drove with them to a huge gate with barbed wire. They worked on the road there for eight hours, the border guards sat bored on tree stumps because there was nothing to do. That was something of a crucible for me, I was so close to crossing that line illegally. There were just those two sub-machine guns in the way. I didn’t do it in the end.”

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    Basilej, CH, 03.08.2014

    (audio)
    duration: 01:13:33
    media recorded in project Stories of 20th Century
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The Swiss were very open to immigrants in 1969

In 1975
In 1975
photo: archiv pamětníka

The Czech-Swiss architect Jiří (Jura) Oplatek was born in 1944 in Brno, his father was also an architect. He graduated from the Faculty of Architecture of Brno University of Technology (FA BUT) in 1968. After undergoing a year of compulsory military service he emigrated to Switzerland in September 1969. He settled down in Basel, was successful in his profession, and started working for the architecture studio of Vischer & Weber. He was employed by the firm for more than ten years, and while there he produced his best-known design, the St Chrischona television tower near Basel. In 1981 he founded a new studio with his colleague, and together they completed many building projects in and around Basel (Vischer & Oplatek Architekten SIA). In 1993 he established his own firm (Jura Oplatek Architekt SIA), the studio is slowly being passed on to his daughter Blanka Oplatek, who is also an architect. From 1990 he also lectured at FA BUT, in 1995 he was habilitated with the title of docent.