‘Prams are made in the Uherský Brod arms factory!’ our teacher told us
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Ivan Pelant was born on December 12, 1944 in the maternity hospital in Uherské Hradiště. His father Josef Pelant served as an officer in the military academy in Hradec Králové. After demobilization they moved to Uherský Brod. Three months after Ivan’s birth, his father was arrested by the Gestapo for collaboration with the Resistance. He was taken to the Kounice dormitories in Brno, then in April 1945 to Mauthausen together with two hundred other prisoners. They were mass murdered in the gas chamber the day after their arrival. Mother Emílie was financially compensated, but in 1953, after the currency reform, she lost all her savings. After graduating from high school, Ivan began studying solid state physics at the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics at Charles University in Prague, which he completed in 1967. Two years later he joined the MFF UK as an assistant and associate professor. In June 1973, he was interrogated by State Security on suspicion of possible flight abroad. In 1980 he married Alena, née Berešová, with whom he raised two daughters, Irena and Dita. After 1989 he worked as head of the Department of Chemical Physics. He was also a member of the faculty’s rehabilitation committee. During a work placement in Strasbourg he participated in important research in the field of observation of exciton molecules. In 1994, he left the MFF UK due to disagreements and joined the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic as a researcher, later as a senior researcher. In 2000, he was awarded a professorship and six years later he wrote a two-volume book with Professor Jan Valenta, Luminescence Spectroscopy, also published by Oxford, which serves as a textbook on the subject worldwide. Ivan Pelant retired in 2021, and at the time of filming (2024) he was living with his wife in an apartment in Vinohrady, Prague.
