You are not in the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, you cannot be principal, comrade
Stáhnout obrázek
Jaromír Vitvar was born on 10 December 1931 in Jičín to a family of a teacher Anna Vitvarová and a clerk Jaromír Vitvar who was an accountant at Weaving Loom Factory in Lomnice nad Popelkou. The witness had a sister who was two years older than him. He was born with hand paralysis and his hand remained almost immobile even though thanks to his father´s care, he successfully managed to overcome his disability. He spent most of his childhood in Lomnice nad Popelkou where he started attending the first grade of school in 1937. He remembers the atmosphere of the Protectorate in Lomnice nad Popelkou, for example, mobilization and Hitlerjugend. His father Jaromír Vitvar Senior was a trainer in Sokol; he did amateur theatre and sang in a choir. He was arrested by Gestapo in 1941 because he cooperated with the resistance organization Obrana národa (Defence of the Nation). Ten-year-old Jaromír knew about the resistance activities of his father and helped him. Jaromír Vitvar senior died in 1944 in Polish prison in Gollnow (now Goleniów). The family found themselves in an existential crisis because the mother was fired from work. They were supported by their relatives and people from resistance, the mother and children made some extra money by sewing things with beads. After the war, they moved to Prague where Jaromír Vitvar graduated from Grammar school in 1950. He refused to join the Czechoslovak Socialist Youth Union (SSM) and later the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (KSČ) which prevented him from university studies and put him at a disadvantage in other ways. After graduation, at his request, he was placed as a teacher in village schools in the Ostrava region, where he taught for several years, then worked in Zvole near Prague. He started a family, he and his wife raised two daughters. He lived in Týnec nad Sázavou in the 1960s and 1970s. Jaromír Vitvar taught Maths and Physics, he studied and graduated in pedagogy as an extra-mural student during normalization. He refused to sign Anticharter. He could not work as a principal which was offered to him in 1982 because he did not want to join the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. He worked as a school inspector from 1990 to 1993. He lived in Zvole near Prague in 2023.
