One could not do anything about it
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Václav Langer was born on October 8, 1929 in Přáslavice near Olomouc as the seventh of nine children to parents Bedřich and Františka Langer. During the occupation of Bohemia and Moravia by the Nazi Germany his father was summoned to the local administration office several times in order to register as a German national, since his parents were a mixed Czech-German couple. He repeatedly refused and he thus saved his sons from being drafted to the war front as soldiers of the wehrmacht. Later he resisted the pressure exerted by the communist regime and he refused to have his family farm incorporated in the Unified Agricultural Cooperative (JZD) during the collectivization process. As a consequence, his youngest son Václav was sent to the Auxiliary Technical Battalions (PTP) where he then served for the next 26 months as cheap labour in coal mines in the village Zbůch near Pilsen. His father died in 1954 and the pressure was becoming more intense and the family was then left with no other option than to join the JZD and to hand over their private fields to the cooperative. Václav Langer subsequently worked in the local Unified Agricultural Cooperative and after completing a distance study at an agricultural school he worked in the position of an agronomist for many years. After the fall of the communist regime he was elected the first post-communist mayor of Přáslavice in 1990. During his five years in the office, he witnessed the withdrawal of the Soviet army, which was garrisoned in the barracks located at the outskirts of the military training area Libavá. In 2018 he and his wife were still living on their family farm in Přáslavice.
