When my father was being taken to court, he was a wreck. That was my first encounter with the regime
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Doc. ing. Milan Michalko, Ph.D., was born on 31 October 1940 in the village of Batizovce near Poprad as the youngest of three sons to Ján michalko and Mária Michalková. From 1945 he grew up in Nitra. The Michalkos joined the Christian Congregation Church and, together with other Nitra community members, regularly met at religious home meetings. After 1948, the Christian Congregations became an illegal group, and in 1955, State Security officers came for his father - as one of the spiritual leaders. In a politicized trial, he was sentenced to two and a half years, officially for association against the republic. Despite his unsatisfactory cadre profile, Milan Michalko managed to graduate from the Prague University of Transport (1962) and after his studies he settled in Ostrava. He worked at the enterprise Železniční opravny a strojírny (Railway Repair and Engineering Shops), where he rose to a leading position despite never having joined the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (KSČ). From 1973 he worked at INORGA - Institute for Automation of Industrial Control. After the Velvet Revolution, he was an entrepreneur and also embarked on a career as an academic - he taught at the Mining University (from 1996 to 2003) and the University of Business (from 2004 to 2016). In 2026, Milan Michalko was living in Ostrava.
