"Ten planes donated by the Soviet Union flew there with the Soviets. There were still partly old Russian inscriptions on them, but partly new, French inscriptions [pause]... and then they came back with us, so the Soviet delegation was probably also expelled. But the Russians, I believe, did not have diplomatic representation in the Belgian Congo, whereas we did. We even had some diplomatic legation there. I mean, about seven people who then flew back with us. Before fleeing the country, it was necessary to destroy their entire office, so we smashed the radio with an axe, burned the cheques and destroyed the documentation in the laundry room where the fire was burning."
"At that time, marriages of Soviet citizens to foreigners were forbidden. We heard many unfortunate stories of how such people who had a child together committed suicide. When I left in 1953, Galina and I wrote an application to get married. Not only did she get a negative answer, but we also went to Moscow together, where we stood in line at the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet. It was in a kind of begging room and they were receiving visitors and complaints there from the morning. Galina knocked on the door and entered. They asked her what was going on, and she answered. They further asked her if she had written to them, and she replied that she had. Whereupon she was told that they had already answered her and invited her to make room for the next person. So we went our separate ways and promised to meet after ten years. For that time I was bound to work at my destination because I was drawing a government scholarship for my studies. Not even a year had passed and the Soviet Union abolished the regulation. So I had to prepare invitation letters with seven stamps of different institutions. Legalization of signature, superlegalization. I also had to sign to feed and clothe her. It took me at least a month to get it all done. Then I sent it in and it took a year to get her arrival processed [pause]... and that's how we started living together."
"Dad came to Prague first and then came home with his brother [pause]... he was a completely different person. Mum said so too. He was forty-five and almost an old man. Mother was four years younger and the broken personality that came back, it must have been quite a disappointment for her [pause]... we loved him immensely, but the war experience left deep marks on him. Later on he got sick. He had Parkinson's. From fifty to seventy, he just lived. He wasn't physically a full man, but his mind was still there. A pre-war father and a post-war father are two different people to me."
“Dad served in this function until 9 May 1941, when he took the bus from Budějovice to Hluboká. The company, for which he built roads, was based in Hluboká. He was on his way there to supervise something. The Gestapo was waiting for him there, they took him to Budějovice. The Gestapo came to inspect our house. I have to explain why that happened. He was a member of the group Loyal We Remain. The group was connected to the [exile] government in London, and Dad also served as a go-between for Budějovice and Prague because he often had dealings in Prague. The resistance group in Prague was headed by Mr Lány, who was Chairman of the Supreme Court, and Mr Bondy. And Dad relayed messages. The group mostly comprised post office and railway employees and former soldiers. That was because when the army was dissolved in 1939, many officers either fled abroad, or were forced to look for some other employment. So there were former officers there.”
“I’d say that these illegal activities were undertaking in pretty primitive conditions, in retrospect. Because they would meet up in a restaurant once a week or fortnight, and they’d chat there. But, as it later turned out, the Gestapo had a waiter there, who served their orders.”
“His investigation went through various phases, he was taken from Budějovice to Pankrác, then to Terezín and, I think, to Dresden. From Dresden they sent him back to Budějovice. He spent eight months in solitary confinement. Before the end of the war he and the whole group were stood before a people’s tribunal in Nuremberg, Volksgericht it was called. And some of them, including my father, were on line for the death sentence. By a stroke of luck, through my father’s sister and some Prague solicitors, they managed to secure one solicitor in Dresden, his name was Crussius. I have some of his correspondence, in which he describes my father’s ongoing situation, and he always ended with: ‘Heil Hitler!’ And that solicitor happened to soak up all the money that we’d received for Dad’s project. So we paid about a hundred thousand crowns at the time for Dad’s solicitor. He got Dad out of it, so that he ended up with only seven years in prison instead of the gallows. And it seems that in his defence he made much use of the Czech-German club. When the Germans took over here, state officials, including my father, were forced to take an oath of loyalty. So they were charged with high treason for breaking their oath of loyalty to the German Reich.”
Professor Mirko Vaněček was born on 7 September 1928. He comes from a family of admirers of first Czechoslovak president Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, and both he and his brother were brought up to have the same approach. His father Bohumil Vaněček was active in the resistance during World War II. He was a member of the group Věrni zůstaneme (Loyal We Remain), he functioned as a go-between for České Budějovice, where the family lived, and Prague. The group would meet up at a restaurant, but later events proved that the Gestapo knew of the fact and was receiving regular information from one of the waiters. Once a fortnight it would raid the members’ houses. As a boy, Mirko Vaněček helped his father hide illegal materials under the coal in the cellar. His father was arrested on his way to work on 9 May 1941. Both his sons had time to remove some of his things from his office at home and hide them at the neighbour’s. The witness’s father was interned in Pankrác, Terezín, Dresden, and in solitary confinement in České Budějovice. Fortunately, the family managed to secure a capable solicitor, and so Bohumil Vaněček avoided the death sentence proposed by the prosecution and received a mere seven years in prison. He survived a death march, and after the war he came home starved, but alive.
Already as a child Mirko Vaněček was interested in geology, especially in fieldwork. For this reason he applied to study at the Faculty of Natural Sciences of Charles University in Prague, and he accepted the subsequent offer to go study geology and mineralogy in the Soviet Union, at the Sverdlovsk Mining Institute (now the Ural State Mining University in Yekaterinburg). He returned to Czechoslovakia every summer, and instead of relaxing he worked at the Institute for the Exploration of Mineral Resources, where he functioned as head geologist despite his young age. He visited various mines and assessed where it would be worth it to continue mining and where to stop. Because of this, rumours started to spread that he was an agent of Rudolf Slánský (a leading Communist figure who fell from grace and was then sentenced to death at a show trial in 1952 - trans.), who was tasked with closing down mines. It seems that Mirko Vaněček only escaped arrest due to the intervention of Professor Jaroslav Koutek, who confirmed that it really was correct to close down the mine in question.
In the last year of his studies he met his future wife, Galina, a student of the teaching school. They wanted to marry, but that was not possible in the Soviet Union, it was forbidden for Soviets to marry foreigners. Fortunately, the said law was abolished a year later, although it was still in effect in Czechoslovakia. However, the Czechoslovak ban was not so strict. In December 1954 the witness finally managed to obtain the necessary stamps together with a passport for Galina, and the girl moved to Czechoslovakia, where they married a year later. After completing his degree Mirko Vaněček worked at the Central Institute of Geology, and he later helped establish United Geology, which transformed into the Czech Geological Office after the Velvet Revolution. He was employed as head geologist at the Ministry of Fuel and Energetics. For some time he also worked in Moscow as a secretary at the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (COMECON). During that period he travelled a lot and got to know the prominent figures of Soviet geology. He later lectured at Charles University as a substitute lecturer and then as a professor. He taught mostly practical subjects at the Department of Economic Geology, and he held the office of vice-dean of the department for some time.
When the Soviet tanks rumbled into Czechoslovakia in 1968, an international geological congress was just starting in Prague. The congress had to be dissolved. Both he and his wife were intensely impacted by the Soviet invasion. In 1969 Professor Vaněček therefore took the opportunity to take his wife and two sons with him to Baghdad, where an eight-member team of Czech scientists were mapping the geology of Iraq. His work took him to all the continents of the world except South America; he was posted in Congo, he worked in Azerbaijan, Kurdistan, Australia, and other countries. He became a pensioner in 1991, but he did not stop working. At the time of this interview he held the position of emeritus member of the Czech Geological Survey and he was preparing for a business trip to Georgia and Bulgaria.
