I didn‘t want to collaborate or take away my children‘s future
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Jiří Petrášek was born on 23 June 1945 in Pilsen. His hometown was still celebrating the end of the war, but at the same time it was badly affected by the Allied air raids in April. His father, František Petrášek, worked in the Škoda factories, and when the factory was hit by Allied bombs before Jiří was born, he and his wife, Barbara, moved to the countryside. When Jiří was studying at primary school, the communists took away the fields and orchard of his grandfather, Václav Fiala, the former mayor of Ledce near Plzeň. He was labelled a kulak and lost his right to a pension. This early experience had already planted the seed of distrust in Jiří Petrášek towards the Communist Party. While studying at secondray technical school in Pilsen, he fell in love with jazz and secretly listened to the Voice of America. After school, when he joined Škoda at his father‘s request, he refused to join the Czechoslovak Youth Union (ČSM) together with another colleague and in 1964 they contributed to the dissolution of this communist youth organisation. After August 1968 he decided to emigrate. He obtained a visa on the basis of a false invitation to Austria and in October travelled alone by train to Vienna. In January 1969, he landed at the airport in New York. At the beginning he worked as a night cleaner in offices. After moving to California, he was drafted into the US Army. To avoid direct deployment in the Vietnam War, he did six months of training with the U.S. Marine Corps, known as the Marines, as part of the U.S. Armed Forces and remained in the reserves for five and a half years. In the 1970s, he changed several jobs and eventually found work in the chemical industry. During that time, he also completed his college education at El Camino College in California. He achieved career success at Metal Surfaces Inc. a surface coating company where he became general manager and vice president. Jiří Petrášek raised two children, Joseph and Kristina. In 2025, he lived with his wife Jane and daughter Kristina in the Atlanta suburb of Tucker, Georgia.
