Antonín Zakopal

* 1931

  • "I've lived to see the freedom. I'm glad I can experience it." - "And you were at some meetings in November?" - "Of course! I took part in them all. It was every night in Zlín on the square. I enjoyed it. I was glad that communism had fallen." - "What filled you there the most? Was it that there used to be people who, until then, were silent? Why did you meet there?" - "The communists weren't there, there were normal people. And those who performed there were the ones who were degraded by the communists. And maybe Hanzelka, right? You know, it was somebody! Hanzelka and Zikmund traveled through Africa. They were big personalities for us back then. And I say, there were people who had reason and were educated, and that impressed me; because those people, I had to work with under the communists were mostly people who didn't even have a high school diploma, how many times they didn't even have an education. They only had those starts on their flaps. "

  • "I lived in Zlín and built a house in Malenovice. Because I was well situated, I built a cottage in Provodov. I was a wealthy man at that time. However, of course, the communists threw me out of the district and I went to the slaughterhouse, where I served until the retirement." - "The notice was due to some of your public statements, or how would you explain it?" - "You speak freely and the communists took advantage of it and just abused it. I just and well, I don't like to remember it. I was experienced at the district, handy at work, I had a reputation, people recognized me, but it all went away. I ended up in a slaughterhouse and I retired there." - "Would you explicitly call it a work degradation?" - "It was a degradation."

  • "Tachov, Jan Žižka, the year 1320, fought there, I will fight too. I spent three years there. I learned practical veterinary medicine there. But in three years I had enough, because life at the border area was not great. On one hand, it was close to the border and there was the danger when I had to go to the case at night, so the border guards, when you didn't stop right away, they shot. It wasn't funny. It was a hard time. The advantage was that there were clean rivers. I have never experienced such a fishing again. In waters that have not been farmed. I like remembering that, but otherwise it was a misery."

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    Holešov, 04.04.2019

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The nonsense introduced by the Communists is all gone

Antonín Zakopal was born on July 27, 1931 in Prostějov. However, he grew up in Holešov, where his father Antonín held the position of a director of a credit union until 1948. Little Antonín became a scout and from 1945 he also led his club. He graduated from the Holešov secondary grammar school in 1950, and in the end he managed to complete veterinary medicine at the University of Veterinary Medicine in Brno, despite the poor staff profile in 1955. He spent three years of practice in the border town Bor near Tachov. In Zlín (back then Gottwaldov), where he then settled, he worked until 1970, first as a regional, later a district veterinarian. He built a house in Malenovice, got married and raised three children. In the period of the beginning of normalization, he was degraded at work due to his views and spent many years in the Zlín slaughterhouse as a veterinary inspector until his retirement. During the Velvet Revolution, he participated in Zlín meetings, but did not actively enter politics. For the last ten years he has lived in Holešov, where he got married for the second time to Dagmar Zakopalová.