We are fatefully responsible for the first republic and also for Bolshevism. And we will also be responsible for that, which will come after
Jan Opletal was born on the 18th of March 1947 in Olomouc as the younget of the three sons of Adolf and Hermína Opletal. His father was a pilot, as part of the first republic Czechoslovak army, during the Second World Wr he entered the anti-Nazi oriented resistance organization called Obrana národa (The Defense of the Nation). In the year 1948 he became one of the first instructors for the pilots of the Israeli army, the training of which happened in the Czechoslovak Republic as part of the secret operation ‚Důvěrné Izrael‘ (‚Faithfully Israel). After that his military career started to really take off. He became a member of the General Staff of the Czechoslovak People‘s Army and the commander of the 3rd fighter air division, but in the year 1961 he was thrown out of the army for unclear reasons. At the start of the 50s he was also shortly imprisoned and interrogated in the infamous Domeček na Hradčanech. Jan Opletal grew up in the Hanspaulka in Prague, where his family had to moved to after his father‘s reassignment to Prague. He first apprenticed to become a locksmith , later he studied at an industrial middle school and finally at the Faculty of Law at Charles University. In August of 1968 he experienced the occupation of Czechoslovakia by the armies of the Warsaw Pact, but most importantly a year later he directly took part in the mass demonstrations against the occupation and also their harsh suppression. After his university graduation he worked at the Local Economic Administration until the year 1992, following that he worked as an entrepreneur in the area of used art and in the end he returned to his original field and after his advocate exams founded his own advocacy company.