During the war he escaped twice to Bohemia from total deployment in the Reich
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Antonín Fingerland was born on 13 January 1923 in Prague. During the World War II, after the closure of universities, he was totally deployed on a construction site in the southern Bavarian town of Pensberg. However, he managed to escape back to Bohemia, where he worked in Benešov, before being captured and interned for two months in the Hradišťko disciplinary camp. He was then sent to work again in the Reich. Before Christmas 1944, despite the checks, he made it back to Bohemia, but was again detained and imprisoned in Bartolomějská Street. He then began working as a locksmith and after the end of the war he entered the Faculty of Science. During his studies he taught in the border region, in Žatec and Teplice. State Security officers arrested him in 1950 at a school temporary job. In the Pankrác prison he found out that his whole family had been arrested because his mother had been hiding a priest and helping him prepare his escape. The family was charged with treason for harbouring a Vatican spy. Antonín and his younger sister were sentenced to three years in prison, his older sister to seven and his mother to twelve. The father, who knew nothing about it, was released. Antonín Fingerland began serving his sentence in a labour camp in Kladno, where he mined coal. In 1951 he was transferred to the Jáchymov uranium mines. After his release in 1953, he moved into a flat with his aunt, where his father and younger sister also were living. For half a year he worked as a tunnel maker. On Christmas Eve 1953 he was summoned up for military service, which he performed in the Auxiliary Engineering Corps (TP). After two years he started working in civilian life as a laboratory technician at the Institute of Physical Chemistry of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences, later at the Institute of Solid State Physics. After 1968 he returned to the Institute of Physical Chemistry. In 1983 he retired and began teaching at the Botičská Primary School, then moved to the Josefská Primary School and finally worked at the Archbishop’s Grammar School. After the fall of communism he became an active member of the Confederation of Political Prisoners. Antonín Fingerland died on 1 August 2019.
