Dad had good aim
Stáhnout obrázek
Jan Vrba was born in Brno on 30 September 1947, the son of paediatrician MUDr. Adéla Chmelařová and Jaromír Vrba, a former member of the 1st Czechoslovak Partisan Brigade of Jan Žižka who had been in combat action during the Slovak National Uprising in 1944 and acted as a partisan liaison after the formation of the Nazi resistance in the Valašsko region until the liberation in May 1945. Jaromír Vrba became involved in the resistance immediately after the rise of communism in 1948 - as one of the leading members of the Světlana group, he soon became one of the most wanted people in the country. Then, on 2 April 1949, when he fatally shot police officer Bohumil Hýl who was trying to arrest him, the noose began to tighten. The wounded Jaromír hid in Valašsko for two months. When the StB lured him out of hiding, he was arrested, detained and tried, resulting in a death sentence by rope. Jaromír Vrba was executed in Brno on 19 December 1950. His son Jan remembers in detail the last farewell that took place there. As the child of an executed anti-communist resistance fighter, Jan was not allowed to get straight A‘s in primary school. The family was monitored by the State Security until 1960. His mother Adéla Chmelařová was under ‚protective surveillance‘ throughout that time. Jan was not allowed to join a secondary school of electrical engineering, so he apprenticed at ZPS in Gottwaldov as an electrical fitter. In 1966, he passed the matriculation exam at the secondary school for workers. He completed his education in 1972 by obtaining an engineering diploma at the Brno University of Technology (VUT). Before the onset of normalisation, Jan Vrba decided to emigrate but narrowly missed the opportunity. Just one day before he left for the USA, the regime closed the borders. He had one more opportunity to emigrate in 1980 when, as a respected professional, he was offered to stay in Canada. He returned home to his family. The same year, Jan‘s sister Adéla left for California. Because of this, Jan was not allowed to make business trips to the West for some time, and the StB tapped his phone and called him regularly. Jan took liking to rock music in his teens and, despite his timid initial attempts, eventually established himself as the lead guitarist of the group Blue Night in the early 1970s; with minor changes in the line-up, the band was still playing in 2024. After the fall of communism, Jan Vrba and his partner built a successful company for repairing and renovating CNC machines. At the time of the interview in 2024, he was living in Zlín with his wife Milada, with whom he raised two children.
