His father had been tortured in the Little House at Loreta, he only found out years later from father´s fellow prisoners
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Jan Fechtner was born on 15 February 1946 in Prague. His parents, Milada and Václav Fechtner, lived through the war separately. As a member of the Czechoslovak army who had participated in the construction of Czechoslovak fortifications in the borderlands before the war, Václav Fechtner was imprisoned by the Gestapo and spent the entire war in the Svatobořice internment camp. Due to his father’s position in the army, the family faced problems for the next decade. After the February coup d’état, father was arrested, interrogated in the infamous Little House (Domeček) at Hradčany and then imprisoned in the communist prison in Stráž pod Ralskem. In the meantime, the family, including little Jan Fechtner, had to endure insults and humiliation from people around them. Teachers gave Jan Fechtner to other pupils as an example of a child of a traitor to the nation, and it reflected on his school results. Mother Milada, despite her good education and knowledge of languages, was only able to get menial jobs, for example, as a worker in the Tesla company or as a helper in the Emauzy hospital. After finishing the ship apprenticeship, Jan Fechtner worked in Děčín in the crew of the Elbe-Oder navigation company and regularly navigated across the border to cities in East and West Germany. Later, in the 1970s, he worked for Military Constructions and participated in the construction of the Prague underground. After 1977 he joined the State Navigation Administration, where he passed the captain’s exam. In 2022 he was living with his wife Štěpánka in Prague.
