Anyone who hasn’t experienced the whizz of a bomb can’t imagine what war is like
Download image
Miroslav Čuban was born on 23 July 1936 in Mladá Boleslav. At the war’s end, he experienced a Soviet air raid in Mladá Boleslav, which cost the lives of 450 people, and the subsequent liberation of the town by the Red Army. After the war, he enthusiastically joined the scout troop and Sokol. He participated in the 1948 All-Sokol Gathering in Prague, and when the Sokol was banned after the February communist coup, he performed exercises at the Spartakiada. He liked poetry and music. He founded a student band and later played in a jazz group and in the Škoda orchestra. He also piloted gliders. In 1950, he became a laboratory technician and in 1956, he graduated from the Higher Industrial School of Chemistry in Kolín. He worked first at Karborund in Benátky nad Jizerou and then–for the next decades–as a wastewater technologist. From 1960 to 1967, he studied remotely at the University of Chemistry and Technology in Prague. In 1967, he graduated at Karolinum in Prague. Miroslav Čuban was a member of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia from 1960 but left the party in 1969 in protest against the occupation. During the totalitarian era, he solved many problems in the water industry. At the time of the Velvet Revolution, he co-founded a strike committee in the company Central Bohemia Waterworks and Sewerage Mladá Boleslav. He wrote a petition supporting students and collected signatures. In 1989, he became the chairman of the Waterworks Union and held the post until 1998. He was also on the regional committee of the Wood, Forest, and Water Trade Union. In 2023, he lived as a pensioner in Mladá Boleslav.
