Jiří Dvořák

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Jiří Dvořák was born on March 14, 1931 in Stálkov near Slavonice, his brother Dimitrij Dvořák on October 4, 1929 in Brno. Their father Václav bought a farm in Stálkov on a mortgage. His mother worked as a teacher in a Czech one-class school - Stálkov was then a German village from four-fifth, with about 40 Czechs living there. In 1938, Czechoslovak soldiers who were finishing the border fortifications lived on the Dvořák farm. After the signing of the Munich Agreement, the day before the occupation of the Sudetenland, the mother, sons and grandmother fled to Netín near Velké Meziříčí; the father had already been mobilized. Later they all moved to Velké Meziříčí, where Václav Dvořák joined the anti-Nazi resistance. He hid refugees in the surrounding forests and co-organized arms drops. Both Dimitrij and Jiří, who went to the Meziříčí burgher school, helped him with the resistance - stealing equipment from the local Wehrmacht warehouse, such as backpacks, canteens and clothes, or poaching so that those in hiding would have something to eat. During the war, the family also hid a Jewish cousin, Šíbrlová. After the war, the family returned to Stálkov, but their farm was in a deplorable state. The father took a job as the manager of the state farm in Český Rudolc and soon joined the Communist Party. In summer and autumn, Dimitrij and Jiří helped to harvest crops in the depopulating Sudetenland. Near Český Rudolc there was also a large German prisoner-of-war camp, from where they took in laborers to help them. Later, the brothers entered a grammar school in Telč and after graduating in the early 1950s they enrolled at the Mining University in Ostrava, where they studied mining geology. Václav Dvořák was well acquainted with Josef Smrkovský, a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, and so during the purges in connection with the Slánský trial he granted his request and helped the family of Ing. Kot’átek from the Ministry of Agriculture, who, as a Jew, was in danger. When he later received a thank-you postcard from Canada, State Security targeted him and in 1951 he was dismissed from the state farm in Rudolc. Dimitri and Jiří joined the mines in Osek near Duchcov after graduating from college. Jiří later worked in the Pilsen region and Dimitrij in Kladno. All their lives they were engaged in mining, especially geological and mining exploration, and later they also taught. From 1968 Jiří mined coal in Afghanistán for three years. Dimitrij worked at the Paskov mine and later at the Academy of Sciences. Towards the end of their lives, they both settled in Przno in the Ostrava region.