Father was branded as right-wing opportunist
Stáhnout obrázek
Jana Krutilová (née Kalná) was born on 21 September 1953 in Brno. Her father Bedřich Kalný was a Half-Jew and therefore he was imprisoned in a concentration camp during the Protectorate. He managed to escape from the death march, and he was hiding at the house of his classmate from grammar school until the end of the war. He graduated from the Aviation Academy and became a fighter pilot after the war. On the night of 20 to 21 August 1968, while on duty at Brno airport, he and his entire crew refused to allow Soviet occupation aircraft to land. It consequently cost him his career and membership in the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, and he was allowed to do only blue-collar jobs during normalization. He was rehabilitated after 1990. Father‘s fate also caught up with Jana Krutilová. After passing her secondary school-leaving exam at the grammar school in 1973, despite her excellent grades, she was not admitted to either the Faculty of Arts of her dreams or the Faculty of Law. Eventually, she got into the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering at the BUT, where even applicants with cadre problems were admitted. After graduation in 1978, she worked in Zbrojovka Brno in the Foreign Trade Department. The witness was from 1968 active in renewed Junak and was a troop leader there. She kept doing it under the Pioneer organization even after Junak was cancelled again in 1970. In the 1970s and 1980s, she was also highly active in tramping which was the reason the State Security was interested in her and tried to force her to cooperate with them. During her studies at BUT, she became active in Hnutí Brontosaurus, and she was one of the founders of “Holidays with Brontosaurus.” She and her husband to this day travel around the world, including on a motorbike. In 2023 Jana Krutilová lived in her native Brno.
