In 1951 he founded an illegal group with his friends from Slavonice
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Milan Juránek was born on 6 January 1936 in the village of Vnorovice, Dačice district. His father was a joiner and owned a small farm. His mother took care of a household of seven children. When the Germans occupied the village in 1938, the family moved to Dolní Němčice. After the war and the removal of the German population, they settled in Slavonice, where Milan Juránek finished primary school. He then went to a mining apprenticeship in Ostrava. Two years later he started working at the Jáchymov mines and came into contact with political prisoners. In 1951, in protest against the abolition of Junák, he and his friends from Slavonice founded an illegal group that wanted to continue scouting activities and at the same time carry out anti-communist activities. They used a typewriter to reproduce leaflets which they glued on the doors of the National Committee and local shops. The seven-member group, of which Milan’s brother Ludvík was also a member, operated mainly between 1953 and 1955 before State Security arrested all of them. They came for Juránek on 19 August 1955 at the shaft in Horní Slavkov, from where he was taken to the detention centre in Jihlava. The interrogations lasted five months, and he spent part of the investigation in solitary confinement, but he did not experience physical violence from the interrogators or guards. A public trial was held in Jihlava and Milan Juránek was sentenced to three years’ imprisonment for association against the republic in the Rtyně camp near Krkonoše, where he worked in a coal mine for seven months. He was then released on parole. He returned to the Jáchymov region and then to the Příbram region, where he again worked as a miner. In the 1960s he moved to Dačice, where he worked as a milling machine operator at the SVH Dačice company. In 1968, he participated in the rebuilding of the local Junák in Dačice and the organisation of two summer Scout camps. When the Junák was banned again by the communist authorities, Juránek moved to Studená in the early 1970s, where he married and worked in a sewage treatment plant until his retirement. After the fall of communism, he was honored as a participant in the anti-communist resistance.
