Ing. Luboš Petřík

* 1945

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  • "There was a special exit clause for each trip or race. It had to be certified by the school, by the military, and it had to be stamped by the new youth union. All right. I wasn't in the new youth union. I always had to go with the paper and I had to make an appointment. He said when he could come and comrade. It was already confirmed from the Military Administration and there was a stamp from the school - they had no objection - and now the Youth Union. I came and there was a nineteen-year-old sitting there, some chairman. I was already twenty-four, I was already in the fifth year and he was in the first year. All right. And you, comrade, are not a member of the Youth Union, so good. I thought I was going to shoot him, that man. 'So what would you tell us about Angela Davies.' I would tell him what I've been hearing. I used to listen to Voice of America a lot. There were some pretty good English lessons there. I always listened to those. There were several times about Angela. Well, there were protests all over the Eastern Bloc. Well, Angela Davies. They had a detailed... what she was guilty of. The weapons she had. She was an assistant at the college, but she was involved in all sorts of terrorist activities. Apparently, the guilt was pretty clear there. Well, of course, I couldn't tell the 19-year-old president that. So I said to him, 'Well, I think, comrade, we think she's going to do well.' 'Well, we think so too, comrade, we think she's going to do well.' In the end they freed her."

  • "When my brother and I started racing, my father became a skiing official. Volunteer work, that was it for him. Organizing races, organizing everything around skiing. Who's with who in the club. He was the chairman of the Hradec Králové county council, those positions he had in skiing. Like the Herlíkovice ski area. When we were young boys, I remember, his friend was Zdeněk Pelc. He was a teacher in Vrchlabí, he was my first coach. Zdenek Pelc, a wonderful man. He was a friend of my dad's and he always came to us and said: 'Jaromir, Jaromir, you have to find someone. We have to build that ski lift to Žalý.' My father always laughed and then said: 'Well, actually, I should try it. So he started to go around to all possible institutions that could give money for it. He did get money, from the physical education. Only the ski club had to build the lift themselves. They paid for the lift, but, 'You have to build it yourself.' So my father organised it, it was one job after another. My father painted the lower station, the upper station, he did it all for free. That was hundreds, thousands of hours. Is that even... We used to work there. They were digging the foundations for the footings of the columns. We're talking about 1961 or 1962."

  • "When we started going to school, when we were growing up here as children, we had no idea there were Germans here. I thought, 'Well, Vrchlabí is a Czech town.' That there were almost no Czechs here five years ago, we didn't understand that at all, we didn't know. It was for us, like Vrchlabí has always been a Czech town. When you go into the history, just at the building office, all the documents about the house that my father bought are all in German. All the drawings are in German. The mayor. All the negotiations and the permits, when Mrs. Voightová applied for a permit to put a loft up there, it was all in German."-"And there was no mention anywhere that the Germans built this place? All those houses we look at, those streets we walk down." - "Exactly. It's true that there was a czech Sokol house a short distance from here. It was built in the 1930s. Or the Tyrš house, for example. We used to call it Tyrš House, but that was the German Turnhale."

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    Vrchlabí, 31.01.2025

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My father believed in building the Krkonoše, regardless of the regime

Luboš Petřík in 1971
Luboš Petřík in 1971
photo: archive of a witness

Luboš Petřík was born on 9th September 1945 in Jilemnice. His parents came from the nearby villages of Horní Branná and Dolní Branná and after his birth they moved to Vrchlabí. The life of his parents, his older brother and Luboš’s was connected with skiing since childhood. His father, Ing. arch. Jaromír Petřík, held numerous positions in the Ski Association of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic and as an enthusiastic lover of the Krkonoše Mountains, he worked selflessly for years in many volunteer positions. His son Luboš was a member of the Czechoslovak national downhill skiing team from the age of 16, and participated in international competitions every year, even while studying civil engineering at the Czech Technical University in Prague. He interrupted his studies for two years and became a member of the Dukla Banská Bystrica club in order to continue competing. In 1966, he met his future wife Zuzana, who came from the family of a prominent economist Josef Macek and emigrated to Canada after February 1948. After graduation, Luboš Petřík was briefly employed in Prague at the State Institute for the Reconstruction of Monumental Towns and Buildings, but by then he was already thinking about and considering various ways to get to Canada. In the end, a coincidence helped him: he figured out how to take advantage of the situation and managed to fly to Canada via Switzerland. As an engineer, he proved himself well in his new location, but his parents at home had a harder time with the situation, and for a long time they could not accept his departure. After his marriage to Zuzana and the birth of their three children, relations improved, especially after the regime repeatedly allowed the parents - by then retired - to visit their son. During the Winter Olympics in Vancouver, Luboš Petřík was appointed attaché of the Czech team. Since the 1990s, he has been happy to return to Vrchlabí with his family.