As a boy, he used to tell his grandfather he was a capitalist
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Vladimír Hrdina was born on 12 May 1943 in Brno into a wealthy family. His grandfather founded a company that bought land and built houses in Brno, the most famous of which was the functionalist Alfa Palace. After 1948, however, the family property was nationalised, his grandfather and grandmother were evicted from Brno and his father, an architect, had to work as a labourer. After graduating from primary school, Vladimír Hrdina was prevented from studying in Brno for cadre reasons, so he graduated from the Secondary Medical School in Frenštát pod Radhoštěm. After graduation, he worked from 1960 to 1962 as a labourer at Construction Insulation (Stavební izolace) in Brno because he did not receive a reference for university. He eventually managed to graduate from the University of Agriculture with a degree in fishing and after a short period working as an assistant he worked at the Dairy Research Institute. He lived through the occupation of 1968 in the GDR, where he toured fish farms with the fishing university department. After returning to Czechoslovakia, he initially wanted to actively protest against the occupation, but at his father’s insistence he did not join the protests. His opposition to the occupation, however, deprived him of the possibility of obtaining the degree of Candidate of Science. He married in 1971 and he and his wife had three daughters. His wife’s parents were sympathetic to the communist regime, and so the children were spared the kind of bullying that Vladimír Hrdina himself had experienced. The marriage eventually broke up, and Vladimír Hrdina remarried in 1984 and lived in Znojmo until 1990. The year 1989 brought a fundamental change. The Hrdina family had a substantial part of their grandfather’s property restituted, which brought him many sleepless nights - it was necessary to borrow money, reconstruct and invest. The biggest problem and challenge was the heritage-protected Alfa Palace. In 2023 Vladimír Hrdina was living in his native Brno.
