I‘ve had my whole life in the papers: anti-state activities
Stáhnout obrázek
Karel Jedlinský was born as the fourth child of Josef Jedlinský and Vojtěška Jedlinská, née Šenberger, on 21 September 1940 in Pardubice. His father worked as a technician in the company Prokop and sons. In 1944, at the age of four, he experienced the bombing of Pardubice. At the end of the war he witnessed the Germans leaving the city and the arrival of the Red Army. He and his brothers followed the Soviet soldiers on horseback. At the age of eight, he moved with his parents to Prague, where his father got a job as a technician in a company later called Strojexport. At the age of 14 he decided to build dams and went to study at the Secondary Industrial School of Construction in České Budějovice. In high school, he and his classmates formed a club against the unpopular teacher Josef Kos out of recession. Karel Jedlinský was the only one of the group who was denounced and taken directly from the classroom for questioning by State Security (StB). During the interrogation, State Security officers beat him up and wrote in his cadre papers that he had organized anti-state activities. From this time until 1989 he always had problems at work and was listed as politically unreliable. It was not until the late 1980s that he was able to take up a management position at the Stavební izolace company. Nobody was very interested in this job, so they recruited workers with a lower cadre profile. In August 1968 he participated in anti-corruption activities in České Budějovice. He and several others blocked the road on which the tanks of the occupation troops were coming from Prague. During political vetting he disagreed with the arrival of Warsaw Pact troops. He never joined the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (KSČ). In 1991 he and several colleagues successfully privatised a building insulation company. In 2023, Karel Jedlinský was living in České Budějovice.
