"I found out there was a job offer in India, exactly what I was interested in: instrumentation, circuit control... I went to my boss to see what he had to say. My boss - I loved him, he was a high-level expert and a really kind man, Professor Balda - he smiled and said, 'Go if you dare.' I wrote to Ferox and said yes, but all sorts of problems started to arise. The first was, I realised I didn't speak a word of English. I'd never even met English in my life, so that was a bummer. I started learning from a self-taught textbook at home. I had a month to do it, so I basically learned nothing. They said, 'Never mind, you'll learn it there. Then it was practically arranged - and it turned out that there was another problem: I needed a special travel clearance to leave to work for a year. Only the trusted communist cadres were issued with those that year; it wasn't normal for them to just let you go. It was a big problem for the factory because their employee was sick and didn't want to get back on the job, and the project was halted. That costs money, right? So they were very keen for me to go there. Eventually they found out that the Faculty could let me go for three months; it had the authority to do that. The boss gave it green light, so I got a three-month exit clearance, with the factory promising to arrange things retroactively. I left and got to work... I learned English over time. We were doing pretty good with the project; I even got some reward for the special services I provided to the Indians, so that was very nice. The problem came when my family was coming to see me, because after six months I was entitled to have them come and stay there. But my kids were in school, so they couldn't stay there anyway. It looked like two months of holidays would be nice. But it was discovered that my wife had the wrong passport; she needed a business passport. Then there was something else; then suddenly they discovered she didn't have written permission from me to bring the children to see me. This had to be arranged in Delhi, which was 2,000 km from where I was working. The biggest problem was we kept writing letters to each other because telephone was virtually out of question at the time. We wrote letters, and since it takes two weeks for a letter to reach India and another two weeks to come back from India, we were a month out of sync. We wrote one another about something completely different from the reality, as it had always evolved in the meantime. Finally my wife ended up at the Ministry of Education and was told, 'But comrade, we can't let you go because your husband has emigrated.' So, I was an émigré in India for nine months."
"When I was in eighth grade, my class teacher Mrs. Kolingerová, a nice lady, told my dad he should figure something out. The principal had ruled that one other friend and me would be deployed in the mines and would have no career options at the end of the ninth grade. She said, 'Do something about it, it would be a shame.' We kept thinking at home about what to do but were unable to find a way out of it. I went to ninth grade after the holidays. See, I played sports, went swimming and training at AXA and I liked to ride my bike, that was my forte, and what happened was that I got a cold in the autumn with wet hair. I got frontal sinusitis, which lingered on for two months and didn't improve until after I had taken like forty punctures. Then again, it was actually fate intervening in that it gave my father an opportunity to realise that I could leave Prague for health reasons and escape the communist pressure. It was due to some personal grudge anyway, but to this day I can't imagine why. My friend Jirka Válek had to go to work in the mine; he didn't escape that. He got caved in and was disabled for the rest of his life due to knee injuries. Unfortunately, he died much earlier."
"I remember it was Saturday [it was actually Ash Wednesday]; my mom was cleaning the whole apartment, everything. Then the sirens went off before noon. We didn't do anything because that was normal for us. Suddenly there was some rumbling and explosions. Mum became alert and immediately ordered our maid Zdeňka - she was a nice girl, we liked her very much - to take us to the basement shelter, and mum was going to open the kitchen window so that the bomb shockwaves wouldn't shatter it. When Zdeňka was pushing us into the corridor, she found that the door was jammed due to the previous vibrations. She started screaming because she got scared, and that saved my mom who rushed into the hallway fearing for us. It was around the corner from the window. That's when the first bombs hit the Charles Square hospital. They blew out all our windows, and my mum probably wouldn't have survived because she would have got hit all over her body. We had a petite grand piano in our living room - and it looked like a glass hedgehog. It had pieces of glass stuck into it in an incredible way. Then we darted out - the next blast rattled the house so hard that the door opened by itself, and we ran down three flights of stairs to the basement where we were stuck for quite a long time because nobody knew what was going to happen next, even though it had gone quiet by then. It was before lunch and we were hungry, especially us kids; my brother and sister were there with me. So my mom sent Zdenka to get lunch, which was cooked on the stove in the kitchen. Zdeňka brought - I remember to this day - potatoes and pork with carrots, which I loved; my mother made it delicious. We wanted to eat but we found out we couldn't - because the lids opened during the explosions and all the glass from the windows got into the pots with food. We had to throw it all away. It was unbelievable - how can so much glass get into a pot under the lid?"
Pavel Beneš was born in Prague on 11 August 1937 into a Czech-German family of the famous Prague florist František Beneš and his wife Elisabeth. He grew up in Salmovská Street near Charles Square where the family miraculously survived the Allied bombing on 14 February 1945. Due to a poor ‚cadre profile‘, he had to take high school away from his family in Soběslav, but he met his future wife Věra there, with whom he had two children. After returning to Prague, he graduated from the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering of the Czech Technical University and then taught subjects in the field of control automation, informatics and cybernetics for decades. He completed his military service in 1961 at the Air Force Headquarters. He spent one year in India on business in the 1970s. He was active in the faculty strike committee in 1968 and regularly participated in anti-regime protests until the Velvet Revolution. After that, he completed his associate professorship, co-founded the Civic Forum at the faculty and became a councillor in Prague‘s Suchdol district, a position he held until 2014. In 2023 he was living in Prague, still actively lecturing and writing his memoirs for posterity.
Hrdinové 20. století odcházejí. Nesmíme zapomenout. Dokumentujeme a vyprávíme jejich příběhy. Záleží vám na odkazu minulých generací, na občanských postojích, demokracii a vzdělávání? Pomozte nám!
