We were destroying railroad tracks, bridges and telegraph poles

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Oldřich Vladař was born May 16, 1925 in Boskovice. He came from a working-class family and his father worked as a foreman in a factory. Oldřich studied a trade academy in Brno. Both his parents had died before he graduated. He passed the graduation examination in 1944 and he began working as an accountant in a shop in Boskovice. From 1944 he and his colleagues joined the resistance group VELA which was led by captain Josef Dřímalka. Three young men under the leadership of the former sapper Heřman Hrubý were conducting acts of sabotage in the vicinity of the town and they were using explosives to destroy railroad tracks, bridges and telegraph poles. Oldřich received a decoration for this activity in May 1945. After the war he joined the army and in 1945-1946 he studied at and graduated from the Military Academy in Hranice. He then worked as a teacher in military schools and from the mid-1950s as a lecturer at military departments of various universities, the longest time of which he spent at the military department of the Medical Faculty of the Palacký University in Olomouc. In 1959-1965 he did a distance course at the University of Economics in Prague and he was awarded the master‘s (Ing.) degree.