My friend Karel Kryl
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Zdeněk Kryštof was born on September 18, 1944 in Střílky in the Kroměříž region. His grandfather, Alois Váňa, spent several years in Siberia in the first war in Russian captivity. His mother, Drahomíra Kryštofová, was raped by Soviet soldiers at the time of liberation in 1945 - when they failed, they threw a grenade into the family home. In 1949, in an artificially created political trial, his father Vojtěch Kryštof was sentenced to many years in prison, seven of which he served in the mines of Jáchymov, which later had a fatal impact on his health and life. Zdeněk Kryštof grew up in Kroměříž, where his neighbour and friend was the same-aged Karel Kryl, later known as a poet with a guitar and author of protestsongs. The witness taught Karel Kryl to play the guitar. The boys were not allowed to study at the school of their choice - the only school they could both attend was the secondary ceramics school with branches in Bechyně and Karlovy Vary. Their paths diverged for a while and they met again only after graduation, when they met together in Prague. The invasion of 1968 separated them definitively. Karel Kryl lived through normalisation in exile in Munich, while Zdeněk Kryštof lived in Czechoslovakia, where he returned from West Germany in 1969 for his bride Jarmila. He and Karel Kryl exchanged only two letters and the same number of personal meetings after the revolution. During the Velvet Revolution, Zdeněk Kryštof co-founded the Civic Forum in Kroměříž and participated in demonstrations in nearby Zlín. In the 1990s he founded a company and travelled extensively around the world.
