The Milín chronicles have accompanied me for almost fifty years
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Jiří Vostarek was born on February 14, 1937 in the Kojetín district of Milín. The father worked as a road worker and after the war as a mine worker; the mother was a housewife. One of his strongest childhood memories is from the end of the war, when the Allies bombed Milín on April 29, 1945. A few days later, he experienced the last battles of the Second World War, which took place in nearby Slivica. Jiří Vostarek attended elementary school in Milín, then graduated from a four-year mining school in Příbram. He served two years of military service in the years 1957-1959 with the Border Guard. After returning, he worked as a mining technician first on iron veins in Mníšek pod Brdy, later in uranium mines in Příbram. In 1968, he was working as an overhead ventilation technician at shaft 6, when the Warsaw Pact troops invaded Czechoslovakia. Because of his opposition to the occupation, he was reassigned to shaft 19 in the late sixties, to the position of an ordinary miner, where he worked until his retirement. In 1974, he took over the care of the chronicles of the village of Milín and wrote down his memoirs until 2022. At the time of the interview (2022), he lived in Kojetín in his native house, which narrowly escaped demolition in the early 1990s in connection with the construction of the R4 expressway.
