Karel Polacek (1892–1945)

Karel Poláček was born to a Jewish family in Rychnov nad Kněžnou, Czechoslovakia. His parents were Žofie and Jindřich Poláček, a merchant. He had four brothers: Arnošt, Kamil, Ludvík and Zdeňko, and two half-siblings, Berta and Milan, from his father's second marriage to Emília Posilesová. Karel finished high school in Prague, graduating in 1912. He then attended the Faculty of Law at Charles University, and worked as a legal clerk for a short time. During World War I, he served on the Russian and Italian fronts. After the war, he was employed by the Foreign Trade Office, but lost the job after he ridiculed the office in his short story Kolotoč (The Carousel). In 1920, Poláček began contributing short stories, features, and columns to the satirical magazine Nebojsa, where he met the brothers Josef and Karel Čapek. They introduced him to the editor of Lidové noviny, a popular daily newspaper that in 1922 began to publish his column and a series of humorous stories about the court system. From 1927 to 1930, he edited the humorous magazine Dobrý den. His debut novel Dům na předměstí (A House in the Suburbs) was published in 1928. His bestselling 1931 novel about football fans, Muži v offsidu (Men Offside), was adapted into a comedy film the same year. After Nazi Germany invaded Czechoslovakia in 1939, Poláček could no longer publish, so he went to work for the Jewish religious community. In 1943, he and his partner Dora Vaňáková were deported to the Nazi concentration camp at Terezín (Theresienstadt) and then transferred to the death camp at Auschwitz. Poláček was sent to the Hindenburg sub-camp, where he wrote a short play in which the other prisoners acted. Later, he was sent on a forced march to the Gliwice sub-camp, where he is presumed to have died in 1945. Decades later, several of his works were adapted into Czech films or television shows made between the 1970s and the 1990s.