"Then, when the uprising happened, I can remember, how my mother once took me into her arms, took my sister by the hand, and dragged us to some air raid shelter. We sat there on these long benches, which were apparently borrowed from the grammar school's gym, and on them people were sitting. In those cellars we had about the same illumination, as cows have in barns. That kind of wired-over shades and how it blinked and swung in the gloom, and how everyone was scared, if we were going to be bombarded, or not. And in the end it all turned out well. When the liberation happened on the 9th of May, then right in front of our house, when we were still living under rent of the Kolečkář family, a Russian car stopped. The Red Army men, the Soviets, came, and visited people, checked apartments, if we weren't hiding any Germans, collaborationists, and so on. My mother got a piece of bacon from one Russian and another Russian took me in his lap in the car and I turned the turning wheel with him like this. My sister got a big doll, but a really beautiful one, in this kind of folk dress. She had natural hair and blinking eyes. We later talked with my dad about how they had likely gotten the doll from Germany, because she had natural hair."
"That was in the year of 68. Not many of them drove through Blansko, but some drove through there. One night me and my friend took a bucket with lime and started writing all sorts of slogans and things on the streets at night: 'Odin, two, three, four, five, the Siberian people in Czechia and Slovakia came out to pay.' Then on one street corner we signed the petition Two Thousand Words. And I payed for that. In air quotes I should not have done that, because my comrades would in later years dig it up from somewhere, because they were going after me. And then lots of these kinds of different unpleasantries began to pop up in my life, relating to the fact that I couldn't find any employment."
"I forgot to say, that my father's brother Jindřich fell during the Prague uprising in Prague during the defense of Prague Castle. Dad went there with them and after a week, it was maybe the 10th or 11th of May, he returned crying. Both dad and mom told me, about how they were walking around Prague around various police commissariats, where there hung photographs of the dead found without documents. They were looking for a photo of his brother on there, until they found it. I have the photo as well. They found him tortured, beaten to death, in Jelení příkop. And dad told me: 'Every step I take here reminds me of Jindřich, and when I don't have him here, then life in Prague loses its meaning for me.' And so we moved to Vysoké Mýto."
Oldřich Páleníček was born on the 9th of October 1941 in Zlín, but lived with his family in Prague until the year 1945. There he also experienced the Prague uprising, at which his uncle Jindřich Páleníček died defending Prague Castle. After the war his family moved to Vysoké Mýto, where Oldřich studied the Higher Industrial Construction School (Vyšší průmyslová škola stavební), specifically the field of economic water structures. In the fifties his grandparents in Senec lost their vast estates during collectivization and his father was stripped by the communists of his post as headmaster of the grammar school in Vysoké Mýto. Even Oldřich Páleníček had problems with his reports, when during his mandatory basic military service they transferred him to the railway troops instead of promoting him. After his service he worked at the District Water Economic Administration in Gottwaldov, but inside him the conviction that his life should be dedicated to art grew ever stronger and stronger. And so he studied stone sculpting and restoration at the Art and Industrial Middle School (Střední uměleckoprůmyslová škola) in Uherské Hradiště. And it was exactly there that he joined the communist party in the year 1966. In August of 1968 he joined those protesting against the occupation and signed the document Two Thousand Words (Dva tisíce slov). While he had problems as a signatory, he remained in the party during Normalization. In the years from 1974 to 1978 he studied the teaching of art at the Pedagogic Faculty of Jan Evangelista Purkyně in Brno. In the year 1978 he managed to get the position of the newly founded People’s Art School in Bojkovice, where he stayed until the fall of the communist regime. As he himself says, he could only see clearly when he travelled throughout Europe after the Velvet Revolution and realized all the lies the communist regime told people. He then taught art at various schools and with his friends founded the Association of Visual Artists of the Moravian-Silesian Borderland (Sdružení výtvarných umělců moravsko-slovenského pomezí) and later its branch, the graphical group G 90. In the year 2017 Oldřich Páleníček founded a studio and graphical workshop at his place of residence in Šumice. He practices the techniques of linocut, drypoint, and etching, manual typography, printing with forgotten old wooden hitches and book printing. He took part in many exhibitions with his artworks, both at home and internationally, and he also organized a few of them himself.
