Vladimír Vlček

* 1944

  • At that time, very limited private business was allowed. Employing anyone was not allowed, but performing simple services with the permission of the District National Committee was all right. In my case the sort of simple service was a restaurant business. All this, the restaurant was in the hands of my wife, who cooked, baked and fried. I was the waiter and this is how it went practically for a year, a year and a half before the velvet revolution. I can boldly declare that at that time I was the first private entrepreneur in the Jablonec region. New entrepreneurs came to see me again, I know that some people came from Jičín. I, on the other hand, went to Prague. There I saw an open private confectionery, I think it was at Malostranské náměstí. So, I went there and asked, "Where did you buy those machines?" Because there was nothing here, of course. "Well, friends from Germany brought it to us." And, that's how I started my business.

  • We are with a friend, a colleague, it's such, I think, quite an interesting story, we were driving to work in the morning. And we noticed that in Bohuslavice, which is a village before Poříčí near Trutnov, that soldiers, then Soviet soldiers, were stretching a cable across the road. So we were like, "Damn, we've got to do something about it." So, we came to work and we said to the other guys, the co-workers, "Hey guys, we're going to cut their cable." So the next day we were like, yeah, yeah , yeah, we'll go there. And the next day, I think there were four or five of us, we sat in the car. When we arrived at work, we took the ax and drove back to the pole they were running down; we figured it was a telephone cable. Because they had tents on both sides of the road, beware that was the valley, through which the Úpa river flows and the main road from Úpica to Trutnov flows there. We simply came to that pole, took an axe, cut the telephone cable, we assumed it was a telephone cable, smeared it with dirt so that it wouldn't be visible at first glance, and left again. And when we were coming back after work, this happened around ten o'clock in the morning and our shift ended at two o'clock, we were walking past that road and now we saw the swarm of soldiers who were looking for the problem, because suddenly there was definitely no connection. There were ten, fifteen soldiers running around, desperately trying to locate the issue.

  • My father had a company, it was called, at that time, it was called Vlček a spol. I have a number of artefacts here that relate to that company. After the war, I was born at the end of the war in the year 1944, after the war, practically five years after the war, in 1948, so it's not five years, in 1948 there was a communist coup, which meant that my father's company was nationalized. They took away our orchard; of course they took away the workshop. Which was a factory that had about twenty-two, twenty employees at the time and it was my dad's jewel. Moreover, this fact left its mark on him in such a way that when he was fifty-three years old, he died of a heart attack.

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    Kunice, 25.03.2022

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    duration: 01:17:19
    media recorded in project The Stories of Our Neigbours
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I loved doing everything I did

Vladimír Vlček (en)
Vladimír Vlček (en)
photo: archiv pamětníka

Vladimír Vlček was born on December 2, 1944 in Rtyn in Podkrkonoší. His father ran a mechanical locksmith shop, which was founded as early as 1896, and employed around twenty people. Their company was nationalized after February 1948. Due to an unsatisfactory personnel profile, Vladimír could not study and there was a threat that he would have to go to work in the mines. Thanks to the intercession of a family friend, he was able to work at a power plant and finally finished his high school graduation in formo f an evening study. He experienced the Prague Spring intensely, and the August occupation was a big disappointment for him. Together with colleagues from the power plant, they cut the telephone cable of the Soviet soldiers. After 1970, he ran the Pozemní stavby hostel in Železné Brod, travelled as a tour guide with Čedok tours, and took part in filming as an extra. Even before the Velvet Revolution, he opened a small restaurant, which allowed him a partial license for private business. After 1989, he ran a hotel in Špindlerův Mlýn, worked as a manager, and since 2002, he has run his own business. In restitution, the family business was returned to them, which was taken over by Vladimír’s brother and was run under the name Vlček a syn since then. In 2022 he lived in Jablonec nad Nisou.