My dossier said I come from a bourgeois background
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Petr Karlík was born on February 5, 1938 in Teplice. Shortly after his birth, the family left Teplice due to the growing anti-Czech sentiment in the Sudetenland and moved to Kyjov in South Moravia. After the war they returned to Teplice. As a young boy, Petr witnessed the displacement of the German population, which also affected his grandmother Marie Karlíková, who was of German origin and who settled in Stuttgart afterwards. After February 1948, Petr Karlík’s father and both his sons, including Petr Karlík, were, without any reason, given a dossier which said that they came from a bourgeois family. Due to his father’s work as a mining engineer, the whole family moved to Slovakia in 1949, first to Handlová, and four years later to Bratislava. In 1956, Petr Karlík was accepted into the Czech Technical University in Prague. What supposedly helped him was, that applicants from Slovakia were preferred at that time. After graduating he worked as an operating technician at a power plant in Holešovice for seven years and then for twenty-five years at the Energy Research Institute in Běchovice.
