"When we had to study for the aspirant exams, one of the exams was on Marxism-Leninism. In order to be forged in the subject, they invited a lecturer from the academy of Marxism-Leninism and in addition to that, five of us aspirants took a course created for us. In 1968 all five aspirants and the lecturer emigrated."
"Professor Wichterle somehow was not a good research director. To explain - he was great, he had a lot of wonderful ideas. And when he came to someone who was working on something, he would recommend that they start working on one of those great ideas instead. And that threw the person who was supposed to be working on something else off the rails. His closest subordinates realized this, and Wichterle eventually realized it too. The solution was to forbid him from assigning research tasks to Institute staff. Instead, they gave him one or two people who were assigned to work on his wild ideas."
"We had a bust of them (Gottwald and Stalin) at the school, and that was where the service was kept - in the Unionist shirts, of course. Swaziland shirts, blue, with a badge. It was insisted that on all ceremonial occasions we had to wear the Swaziland shirts. In the first year, in 1951, it was required even for exams. But those professors, that was old school. For example, Professor Andrew, mineralogy, was an old gentleman, and he always asked students to wear a black suit for exams. So it ended up that we went there in a black suit with a blue shirt."
Petr Munk was born on 31 October 1932 in Prague into the second marriage of Julius Munk, a lawyer of Jewish origin. His mother, Marie Benešová, like his father’s family, came from eastern Bohemia. He grew up in Vinohrady with his parents and his half-brother Alexander. During the Nazi occupation, both father and brother passed through Terezín; while his father returned, his brother, along with many other family members, perished in the concentration camps. Petr Munk was expelled from the bourgeois school during the war, after which he graduated from the gymnasium and studied chemistry at the University of Science and Technology. From 1956 he worked in the laboratory of Otto Wichterle, later the Institute of Macromolecular Chemistry. In 1968, together with his wife and two daughters, he went to the USA for an internship, where they stayed after the August events, first illegally, then as naturalized citizens. He returned to Prague for the first time in 1985 and visited it regularly from then on, before settling there permanently after the coronavirus pandemic. He managed to recover the family factory in Sopotnice, where his son-in-law now runs a small hydroelectric power plant. In 2022, he lived with his wife in his family apartment in Vinohrady.
