1. Early Life

2. Life Under the Reich

3. References

Zdeněk Halaš (born on August 21, 1924) spent his childhood in Prague. He attended an elementary school in Vinohrady, then a proper gymnasium (school) also in Vinohrady. After graduation, he tried to avoid working assignment to the German Reich, and so he began to ride in Prague as a horse-bearer. When he was 18, on December 18, 1942, he was ordered to board the Reich Post Office in Frankfurt. After the end of World War II, he was admitted to the Technical University in Prague as a lecturer at the Institute of Chemical Engineering. However, as a result of his exclusion from studying after the so-called study examinations, he began his studies at the Chomutov tube factory, where he worked in various positions (with the exception of the two-year military service in 1949) until his retirement in 1992. Now he lives with his wife in a retirement home in Jirkov^[1].

As an attempt to bring attention to the effects of authoritarian regimes, Post Bellum works with individuals who lived during those regimes on either side of the story. Most of the information listed is based in witness testimony and other information gather by Post Bellum.

Early Life

Zdeněk Halaš was born in Prague, Czechoslovakia to Marie and Josef Halašovým. His father, Josef, was a trained carpenter, who was wounded twice during World War I. After returning from military service he studied at a secondary technical school in a construction field and started in the Prague municipality, where he worked as an officer in the Prague waterworks^[2]. Zdeněk's mother, Marie, had graduated from the Conservatory of Music, and was a "state approved piano teacher"; she was hired by rich Jewish families in Prague to teach their daughters to play the piano^[3].

During his childhood, unemployment was high, but because communist regimes required men and women to work, Zdeněk Halaš was raised mainly by his grandmother. In an interview with students working with Post Bellum, Zdeněk told about the fear and poverty that many people lived in recounting that one of the most precious wedding gifts his mother had received was 5 lbs of sugar. He often spent his holidays in the village of Radkov, in the district of Tábor, with his other grandmother. One of his earliest memories from his childhood is a Zeppelin flight over Prague for a tonsillectomy in Karlově hospital^[4].

He graduated from elementary school in Vinohrady, where boys and girls were taught separately until the fourth grade. In fifth grade, he switched to coed schooling, where he was able to study in the company of boys as well as girls of the same age. After the end of compulsory schooling his mother did not want her only child to leave, so Zdeněk stayed in Prague, where he studied grammar school in Vinohrady^[5] before the signing of the Munich Agreement, sometimes referred to as the Munich Betrayal, in 1938, which sent ripples all across Czechoslovakia as Germany annexed Sudetenland. Zdeněk was 14 when this occurred. Not long after, Hitler occupied the rest of Czechoslovakia^[6].

Life Under the Reich

After graduation he tried to avoid working in Reich, so he began riding a horse as an assistant in Prague. But on December 18, 1942, he was delivered an order by the working office in Prague-Střešovice to start working at the Reich office in Frankfurt. He was accommodated in a former hotel of a Jewish entrepreneur, Kristall Palast. Following a large air-raid of Frankfurt in November 1943 he left to Prague on his own and found a job in Prague-Letov in an airplane production. On February 16, 1944, he was arrested by police and had to return to Frankfurt. On March 24, 1944, the factory of Kristall Palast was burned down again. On April 30, 1944, the witness went to Fulda, a small town near Kassel, where he worked as a postman until February 1945^[7]. On March 31, 1945, he returned back to Prague after a demanding journey, where he started working in a post office in Břevnov. There he experienced the arrival of the Soviet army. After the war, he began studying at the Czech High Technical School in Prague-Dejvice at the High School of Chemistry and Engineering Technology. Since May 1, 1949, due to expelling from studies after so-called study checks he began working in a factory making tubes in Chomutov, where he worked in various positions (except two-year military service since 1949) until retiring in 1992^[8].

On July 26, 1952, Zdeněk Halaš married Jiřina Šaflerová and had two children, Alenka and Pavel^[9]. After the political situation liberated slightly, he got a chance to finish his studies at the High Mining School in Ostrava, where he graduated on June 12, 1965 at the age of 41 years. Apart from lecturing and publication activities, Zdeněk Halaš was also active as a translator and an interpreter in the tube mill. Due to speaking German he worked also in Western Germany and got to know many tube mills in the former Soviet Union, Hungary, Poland, and Sweden. He held a position of a chairman of the skiing club for 19 years^[10].

References

• Pennsylvania Treasurer
• Pennsylvania truss
• Pennsylvania Turnpike Face-Off
• Pennsylvania Unified Court System
• Pennsylvania Unified Judicial System
• Pennsylvania United States House elections, 2008
• Pennsylvania United States Senate election, 2010
• Pennsylvania University (disambiguation)
• Pennsylvania (U.S. state)
• Pennsylvania Veterans Museum
• Pennsylvania v. Finley
• Pennsylvania village
• Pennsylvania v. New York
• Pennsylvania Votes
• Pennsylvania wind energy
• Pennsylvania wind power
• Pennsylvania (wine)
• Pennsylvania wine
• Pennsylvania Wing
• Pennsylvania Wing Civil Air Patrol
• Pennsylvania World War II Army Airfields
• Pennsylvania XOZ
• Pennsylvania–Reading Seashore Lines
• Pennsylvannia counties
• Penn Symons