During the war he was deployed to the munitions factory in Heydebreck
Jan Kamrád was born on March 8, 1936 in Chuchelné, Hlučín region, the older of two brothers. The family spoke Moravian dialect, but German was also common in the village. His father was a carpenter and commuted to Germany, to the Wilhelmshafen docks. After the occupation of the Sudetenland, he enlisted in the Wehrmacht and was deployed on the Eastern Front. He sneaked out of the encirclement at Rzhev, then was treated for frostbite in Trier and Opava. Jan attended a German municipal school from 1942. From 1943 he worked in an ammunition factory in Heydebreck (now Kędzierzyn). He experienced the end of the war and the arrival of the Red Army with his family in the Hlučín region, as well as the arrival of settlers from the interior. His uncle and his family were deported to East Berlin and later managed to move to Lower Saxony. After the end of the war, Jan Kamrád attended a Czech municipal school, after graduating from the secondary school in Kravaře he became an electro-mechanic and then studied at a higher electrical engineering school in Frenštát pod Radhoštěm. From 1956 he worked at Vítkovice Ironworks, but after 1968 he was dismissed from his position as head of maintenance because he did not agree with the entry of the Warsaw Pact troops. He was not interested in politics and had no other problems at work. In 1976 he and his wife visited their relatives in West Germany. Since the mid-1960s he has lived in Haj in Silesia, where his wife came from.