Airplanes as a lifelong love
Milan Enc was born on July 10, 1936 in Zelenec. His father ran a radio and electricity shop and repair. During the war, he was obliged to remove shortwave coils from all radios so that it was not possible to listen to the forbidden radio on the device. Milan Enc started its primary school in Zelenec; later it continued in neighboring Svémyslice. He recalls the fall of the fighter just below Zelenec in January 1945 and the bombing of Prague in March 1945. He witnessed the arrival of the Red Army in Zelenč and the disarmament of German soldiers in Svémyslice. After the war, he travelled with his father to the border, where in the empty houses after the displaced Germans, they collected radios, repaired them and gave them to people who had none. In September 1948, his grandmother, the head of Sokol in Zelenec, took him to Prague for the funeral of Edvard Beneš. After graduating from elementary school, thanks to his father’s acquaintances, he avoided the profession of miner and metallurgist and trained as a mechanical locksmith. He worked in Mladá Boleslav in car brakes and in Prague’s Motorlet, in 1956 he went to the army to go to Střelské Hoštice near Sušice. The secret police tried unsuccessfully to persuade him to cooperate. Milan’s father worked at the airport in Kbelí as a test pilot, and Milan was hired as a technician by the Kbely air repair shops. He recalls the occupation of the Warsaw Pact troops in August 1968, when he and his colleagues assembled a radio car for Czechoslovak Radio and removed key components from the operational aircraft, without which the aircraft could not take off. In 1989, he took part in several anti-regime demonstrations in Vysočany. Just before retiring in 1996, he spent a year at a flight school in Ghana, teaching students how to repair aircraft. In 2021 he lived in Zelenec.