Stepfather faked his Jewish boy’s death in order to save his life
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Ivo Beneš was born Ivo Bondy on 11 September 1934 in Prague into an interfaith family, his mother Emilie was of Jewish-Catholic origin and his father Jiří was of Jewish origin. But his parents divorced and Ivo Beneš moved with his mother to Rosice nad Labem. He spent a significant part of his childhood in Pardubice area and in 1942 he was summoned to be transported to Terezín. However, his mother’s second husband, Josef Preclík, claimed that Ivo had drowned in Podbaba, Prague. And so he did not join the transport and spent the war years hiding in a granary in the village of Řimice near Loštice na Hané. He stayed there until April 1945. However, his father went through Terezín and the concentration camps Auschwitz and Buchenwald (or more precisely the Taucha concentration camp near Leipzig), and he lost his second wife and son in the concentration camps. After the war, his father re-united with Ivo and took him to Březno near Chomutov, where Ivo attended the municipal school and later the grammar school in Chomutov. He completed his grammar school studies in Prague, but due to his transgression against the communist regime, he was unable to continue his studies and joined the Swiss company Wagons-Lits/Cook. However, the company was later nationalized, and Ivo Beneš signed up for the ‘77,000 into production’ action and joined Avie Letňany company. Later, he worked at the Road and Railway Construction Company (Stavby silnic a železnic) and Konstruktiva and then he went to the army where he worked in technical units. After the war, he went to work at the North Bohemian Coal District (Severočeský uhelný revír), then again at the Road and Railway Construction Company and then he moved to a position at the Construction Company (Stavební podnik). Finally, he joined the Engineering and Industrial Construction Company (Inženýrské a průmyslové stavby). Ivo Beneš was sentenced to five and a half years for unauthorised use of socialist funds (see the story of the witness) and he was released on parole in 1973. After returning to the Engineering and Industrial Construction Company, he was sent to build a gas and oil pipeline in Syria. After a successful work mission, he was also promised a contract to build a highway running from Amman (Jordan) to Baghdad (Iraq), but the Velvet Revolution (1989) and the subsequent change in the geopolitical situation interrupted Ivo Beneš’s foreign working career. After 1989, he turned to business, but the floods interrupted this activity. Ivo Beneš retired in 1994 and lives in Prague at the time of filming (2021).
