"When the vetting was going on, the chairman of the local Communist Party organization, a man named Voděra, who was quite hard on me, offered me that if I joined the party I could be general director, which was a big position at the time, for the whole republic. "Did you consider it?" - "To get six thousand instead of three thousand - who wouldn't consider it..." - "And why didn't it work out?" - "Because the central committee didn't approve me for the job. But because of that, I went to the research school.” "So you would have joined the Communist Party?" - "I didn't think much about it. I wasn't enthusiastic about it. But back then it was not possible to reject something, was it?"
"Then a world-famous professor arranged that when I won the Commonwealth Games with a German and a Swede, I should go away for two years to do a land inventory in Tasmania, New Zealand and Australia. But the Ministry wouldn't let me go there. They said I had to do the work I know here first. But then the Commonwealth would have to re-audition me. I was going to Yugoslavia at the time, so we thought about emigrating. We would have had to run away, but my parents convinced me not to."
"One of her colleagues, who was serving somewhere in Africa, wrote to Professor Hildebrandt in Freiburg asking if I could get a job there. He arranged it so that I could get in through the foundation, and so I went there. My wife was very lucky at that time, she was successfully treating one of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, and so I was allowed to go there. It was West Germany and I went there in 1963. If my wife hadn't treated somebody from that Central Committee of the Communist Party, I wouldn't have got there." - "She was there with you?" - "No, I went there alone. She came there in 1968 with a two-year-old daughter Jana. The house was shot up." - "So you were there from 1963 to 1968?" - "No, not that long. It was intermittent." - "What was it like in Germany?" - "The Germans treated me terribly well. They thought it was a curiosity that I was there. I learned computer technology there and that was a big plus when I came back. I set up - and then I went around the world with it - the first forest inventory. They let me go there with that, too. I then went to the research institute in Strnady and the director was quite proud of that. I introduced forest inventories in all socialist countries."
"You were an assistant at the college for how long?" - "Until the Hungarian events." - "Until 1956. Was that a landmark for you?" - "Yes, because there was a personnel profile inspector, a former cleaner, and she saw that when the Hungarian events happened, there was a vote on who was in favor of doing the right thing in Hungary. But I was talking to Eliska Nováková at the time and I didn't raise my hand. So I had to leave the school. Eliška Nováková was also an assistant at the school, but she was doing zoology." - "And was it a coincidence that you weren't paying attention, or was it more an intention?" - "Well, more by intention. I discussed intensely. But that's life."
"I was lucky I didn't get kicked out at the time because I got first state honors and won the University Tech 800 meters. So they waved their hands at me in those screening committees in 1948. That I could study. Otherwise, a lot people were thrown out from the forestry faculties, because there were often, for example, former forest owners and the like."
"How did your parents, or rather you, perceive the rise of the Communists?" "Dad was completely crying because they forced him to sign an application for the Communist Party. He said that he had to sign it so that we children could study and he said that he hoped that one day we would not hold it against him. But then dad left anyway."
"I also remember that when Masaryk died in 1937, my father and I went to Prague and stood by the National Theatre and saw the funeral. All the people there were crying. They already knew what was being prepared in Germany."
Miloň Pohořelý was born on 7 December 1926 in Olomouc into a family of a mechanical engineer and a civil servant. He spent his childhood in Ostrava. During the Protectorate, he studied at a grammar school, but the Nazis closed it down and he had to work as an announcer, calling drivers to duty during night shifts. In the spring of 1945, he was totally deployed to dig trenches, and at the end of the war, as a totally deployed worker in a warehouse with German uniforms, he found himself in prison, from which he escaped thanks to his father‘s intervention. In the summer of 1945, he passed his high school diploma and went to Prague to study at the forestry faculty. In 1948, after the communist coup, he passed the vetting process as a student, mainly because he won the 800 metres in the university race that year, but also because his father joined the Communist Party. His father did this so that his descendants could study. After graduation, he got a job as an assistant at his alma mater, from which he had to leave because of his opinion on the Hungarian anti-communist uprising in 1956. He moved to Lesprojekt in Brandýs nad Labem, to the geodesy department. In the sixties he completed a study stay at the University of Freiburg in Germany. There he gained experience in the application of computer technology in forestry, which he applied in the processing of forest inventories and other work. In 1977 Ing. M. Pohořelý, CSc. became a researcher at the Research Institute of Forestry and Hunting in Jíloviště-Strnady. By 1986 he had published 130 popular, technical and scientific articles, many of them in Lesnická práce. He co-authored five technical manuals, a number of reviews and often acted as a lecturer in professional courses. He has participated in scientific symposia at home and abroad. After the 1989 Revolution, he participated in the process of forest restitution, valued it, founded an association of private forest owners, continued to travel and became vice-president of the Chamber of Agrarians. He worked until he was 85 years old.
Hrdinové 20. století odcházejí. Nesmíme zapomenout. Dokumentujeme a vyprávíme jejich příběhy. Záleží vám na odkazu minulých generací, na občanských postojích, demokracii a vzdělávání? Pomozte nám!
