RNDr. Jiří Vrtný

* 1941

  • “The remarkable thing was that I had to prepare all the cultures to cultivate microbes on my own and I managed to do it because I had been the head of the laboratory preparing culture media. I also brought some specific cultures for cultivation with me. And I diagnosed an Afghan patient with tuberculosis. The same in Iraq. I think that I earned respect from the doctors as a bacteriologist. And I was lucky to have a great colleague parasitologist and with his help, we diagnosed several cases of malaria using a microscope which also was not common. Both in Afghanistan and Iraq, the German and British teams had their doctors but when they wanted to examine infectious material, they sent it to Germany by plane and then waited for the results. We examined it immediately.”

  • “When I copied (literature) at work because I needed a typewriter with a wide platen and there were some of them in the lab, I sometimes left it there to go to work in the lab. I once covered the typewriter with a coat. When I came back in about two hours, I saw that the pages had been moved and someone had looked also under the typewriter. My boss was Ukrainian and only after some time I got to know that he was not fond of the Soviet regime. That is why he did not report anything back then. Only after 1989, he told me: ‘Jura, I knew it.‘”

  • “All the newspapers here wrote in the same way in those years, be it Lidová demokracie (“People´s Democracy”) or Katolický týdeník (“Catholic Weekly”). They all tried to make communists satisfied. For example, there was a Congress of writers in 1967 and many people were expelled because of anti-party attacks but they did not let the public see who said what, they did not do that. And so when my colleague gave it to me to copy it, I thought that more people should read it. So I copied it immediately and it circulated among many people back then. When I could get my hands on some literature, I immediately copied it. I reproduced for example “The Black Book” which a friend had brought me. It was published by The Academy of Sciences. It had five hundred pages.”

  • Celé nahrávky
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    Ostrava, 28.06.2018

    (audio)
    délka: 03:37:56
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Stories of the region - Central Moravia
Celé nahrávky jsou k dispozici pouze pro přihlášené uživatele.

The first problem was when I ate three pages of a Russian-English dictionary

Graduation photo, 1958
Graduation photo, 1958
zdroj: Jiří Vrtný´s archive

Jiří Vrtný was born on 7 April 1941 in a working-class family in Ostrava-Vítkovice. His father was a communist until the 1950s. He stopped paying membership fees in connection with political trials and he was expelled. Jiří wanted to study medicine but was not admitted because of cadre reasons. He worked a year in Klement Gottwald´s steelworks and he became an applicant for membership in the Czechoslovak Communist Party. He was not admitted to the Faculty of Medicine anyway but was admitted to the Faculty of Science in Olomouc and there he graduated in Chemistry and Biology. After his military service, he started to teach at a military grammar school in Opava. He was expelled from the Party during the normalisation purges because of his allegedly bad influence on students and he had to leave the education system. After working one year in mines, he got a job as a microbiologist. He worked in various departments of the district and regional public health authorities in Havířov, Karviná, and Ostrava. He copied and spread samizdat literature and reproduced forbidden books. He was a councillor in Ostrava for Civic Forum and for ODS (Civic Democratic Party) after the fall of communist totalitarianism. He participated in humanitarian missions in Afghanistan and Iraq in 2002 and 2003. He served as a bacteriologist in field hospitals and attained the rank of major. He got retired in 2005. He is active in the Union of War Veterans of the Czech Republic.