I was aware of the risk. We all were.
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Jaroslav Janešík was born in České Budějovice on 7 June 1951 as the second eldest of four children to Marie Janešíková and Rudolf Janešík. He spent his childhood in Borovany. Both of his parents worked blue-collar jobs at Calofrig in Borovany all their lives. He fell in love with chemistry in primary school and made it his lifelong profession. He studied at the high school of chemistry in Pardubice. Having graduated in 1970, he entered the University of Chemical Technology in Prague. He interrupted his studies at his own request after the first semester and returned to South Bohemia. He joined MAPE Mydlovary in 1971 as an analytical chemist at the chemical uranium ore treatment plant. This was the only place in the country where all the uranium ore mined across Czechoslovakia was collected and processed. MAPE Mydlovary was thus one of the strategic enterprises of the communist state, shipping virtually all the uranium concentrate it produced to the Soviet Union. Jaroslav Janešík describes the specific operational and safety procedures of the uranium ore processing plant during the normalisation period. The company was subject to strict supervision and employees were regularly screened for eligibility to access with state secrets by the plant’s Special Section (‘ZO’). Those who failed the screening were dismissed. He left MAPE Mydlovary in the autumn of 1989 and took a similar job at the Temelín Nuclear Power Plant (JETE) where he worked until retirement in 2014. At the time of filming (2025), he was living with his wife Bohumila in České Budějovice.
