I played a prank when I was 14, then they turned me into a working-class expert
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Václav Beránek was born on 13 July 1943 in Příbram, but grew up in Hostomice in the Central Bohemian Region. His father, František Beránek, worked as a road builder and his mother, Marta, née Šnoblová from Ruda near Rakovník, was a nurse who spent the first 16 years of her life with her parents in France. Václav grew up with his younger sister Anna. He was strongly influenced by his grandfather Václav Beránek from Hostomice, a veteran of the First World War. His father was totally deployed to work in the Reich during the Second World War. In 1957, at the age of 14, Václav was involved in an incident in Hostomice, when he and his friends took posters of Stalin and Tito from the collection materials and put them up around the village. Under pressure from his comrades, he then became a working-class expert. In 1958-1961 he trained as a bricklayer in Příbram. In 1962 he enlisted in the internal guard. The second year he served in Domažlice, where he built guard houses. He married in 1965 and started a family. Since the mid-1960s he and his family lived in Beroun. In the 1960s he resigned from the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (KSČ), but returned in the 1970s because otherwise his daughter would not have been able to go to school. In 1983-1989 he worked as a bricklayer at Prague Castle on the reconstruction of the interior. In 1990-1992 he worked in Germany. After a few years, he and his wife returned to Hostomice to their parents’ house, where they were living at the time of the filming in 2023. They raised two daughters. He died in November 2023.
