František, the youngest son of Josef and Barbora, was born on January 21, 1882 in Německý Brod, where he also attended the highschool from 1892 to 1900 before going on to the Faculty of Medicine in Prague. After his Charles University graduation, he took up work at Leopold's Gynaecology Clinic in Dresden. He also worked at the Brno maternity hospital, where he became interested in the difficult job of the midwives, for whom he later published a textbook at the request of the healthcare minister entitled "Textbook for Childbirth Assistants" and founded a school for their education.
He came to Ostrava in 1911 as a professional gynaecologist. Three years later, he became the head consultant of the Slezská Ostrava hospital. World War I broke out shortly thereafter, and since many of the area's doctors were drafted into military service, he became the only doctor for miles around who could use a scalpel!
He married Božena, born Sovadinová, on February 3, 1912, thanks to whom he survived the second war, as she wasn't of Jewish descent. Božena was born on April 2, 1886. She came from Brno-Jundrov. She was a teacher briefly, when single, but then became a homemaker. They had two children - Petr and Eva.
After the formation of Czechoslovakia, the Slezská Ostrava hospital changed into the Gynaecology and Childbirth division. In the new conditions, his work was very successful. He developed new cures and treatments, he trained many doctors at the division, some of whom eventually became well known head consultants on their own. He is also partly responsible for the establishment of the Home for Abandoned Women and Children in 1923, which later became The First Nursery of Masaryk. Around this time, he also wrote a book about the issue of female infertility. Record of some of František's activities can even be found in the 1937 addendum to "Ottův slovník naučný".
In 1932, František and Božena bought a villa in Ostrava, on Blahoslavova street, and lived there till 1938. Immediately after the german occupation, František was deprived of head consultancy as non-Aryan, lost his property and moved, along with his family, from Ostrava to Valašské Meziříčí, where he lived for a time, in something like a toolshed. Apparently, this saved his life at first, because barely any of the Jews deported in October 1939 from Ostrava eastwards, to Nisko nad Sanem, survived till the end of the war. After that, they built a house in Zlín on Božena's name and spent the war there. He met old friends there as well as many new people who visited him and helped him.
On October 12, 1944, however, he too was called upon to go to the Hagibor concentration camp in Prague, which was a transfer station on the way to Terezín. He was very lucky though, he had diabetes and contracted influenza in the camp, his state of health was very bad. He wrote to his friend, Josef Jahoda, in a letter on September 12, 1945:
"In October, I could no longer defend myself and had to go to the Hagibor concentration camp (for Jews of mixed marriages). They released me after 12 days for my poor health. It is unbelievable, but the local SS shook his head above my case and let me go. They wanted me to go back there in December, but I refused and I think that was a good decision. They dragged them all off to Terezín and I doubt I would ever come back."
He was more or less in hiding till the end of the war and every doorbell ringing must have been terrible for him. He was the only one of the Pachner siblings who remained. He lost a great majority of his relatives during the war and probably never knew exactly where they died. In the letter cited above, he also writes:
"Of my brothers and their wives as well as most of my relatives I have but bad or the worst tidings. My brothers and their wives have apparently all perished. They disappeared in Poland and we know nothing of any of them but Artur, of whose death we are certain. Of other relatives, the cousins, I do not even write, as I doubt you know them. Nearly all of them perished. I haven't yet made the full count, but I already know that there are about 27 dead in my closest family."
After the war, he refused the position of head consultant of the gynaecological and childbirth clinic as a professor offered by the dean of Masaryk's University in Brno. He said he felt too old for this demanding task. He taught at the Faculty of Medicine in Brno and had nurseries established in Luhačovice and near Valašské Meziříčí. He wrote articles for newspapers and medical magazines, he wrote a textbook for midwives and a book on female functional sterility. He published several books, including "Kdo je I. F. Semelweis" ("Who is I. F. Semelweis") and "Za životy matek" ("For the Lives of Mothers"). He looked after the grandchildren, worked on the garden and he often met with his cousin, František Langer, who remembers him in "Byli a bylo". His wife unexpectedly fell ill in 1964 and died shortly thereafter. This hit František so hard that he followed her less than a month later, on July 27.
Their son Petr was born on April 12, 1913. He studied medicine and completed his education just before the war. He then took up work in the Zlín hospital as the junior physician at the hygienic station, as the the Nuremberg laws didn't permit the leadership to allow him contact with patients. He married Marie Waldek on July 19, 1941, in Zlín.
In 1944, he was deported to the Postoloprty labor camp, being of mixed blood, where he worked for a year. He escaped the camp on April 4, 1945 and remained in hiding in Zlín till the end of the war. He never spoke much of this unpleasant period in his life.
After the war, he worked in Ostrava as the head of the labor hygiene and work-related diseases division at the County Hygienic Station till 1963. From 1963 he worked in Prague and after the regime loosened in 1968, he got a job at the "World Labor Office" and worked in Barma for a year and a half. The significance of his work can be seen in the fact that Czech occupational medicine conventions are made in his name (Pachner's days of occupational medicine), the most recent of which took place in May 2007, in Mladá Boleslav.
Petr Pachner (his full title being Doc. MUDr. Petr Pachner Csc.) was active till his death on October 26, 1978, at the County Hygienic Station of the Central-Bohemia county in Prague.
Eva, the daughter, was born in Ostrava on November 18, 1917. She studied at Charles University in Prague till November 17, 1939, when the universities of the Bohemia-Moravia protectorate were closed. In order not to be sent to work in the Reich, she took up a midwife course at a school in Pardubice. After she completed her education there, she worked as a midwife in Hradec Králové. As her father was a Jew though, she was no longer allowed to work there, so she moved to Prague to work in a private sanatorium run by Dr. Záhorovský, who showed the courage of employing her despite her descent.
She was spared the concentration camps by diphtheria, which she contracted in 1944. Doctors she knew maintained her as a bearer of the disease in hospitals, first in Prague (at the Bulovka hospital) and later back home in Zlín.
After the war, she completed her medical education and became a doctor specialised in childbirth and gynaecology. She married Otta Soyka, MD., a haematologist, in 1946 and had two sons with him. She was active in Jaroměř for a while, then at the side of Karl Klaus, MD., at the gynaecology and childbirth clinic of the Charles University First Medical Faculty in Prague, and finally moved to the Zlín hospital along with her husband. From 1964 to 1968, she lived and worked in Kladno. She lives in Switzerland with all her family since 1968.