“When the then president Václav Havel was here after 1990, the group of Civic Forum members marched from the heating plan towards the agrarian school. It was crammed on both sites. And an employee of the car company Bečvárovský – God created good and bad people and drivers – so Bečvárovský (the witness refers to himself in third person – trans.) because he was the head of the railway, road, and air transport, was standing at the galvanizing plant. You could see that he was a little above the others. And suddenly, the row of thirty-five people who were showing their faces there with Havel was marching. Věra Čáslavská was walking next to Havel. We knew each other via the State Design Institute in Prague where she as a gymnast had to work, so engineer Pavlů officially let her draft technical reports for the projects we designed. When she saw Václav who was standing out (the witness refers to himself in third person – trans.) she ran towards him without ulterior motives because she was (married) Odložilová or maybe not anymore at that time. The row of thirty people then stopped; they did not know what she was doing. She ran towards me, put her arms around me, and said: ‘Is that you Venoušek?‘.”
“In 1958 I qualified for the European Championship in Stockholm as a decathlete. There were twenty-eight decathletes, however, at that time there was a well-known Soviet record holder Vasili Kuznetsov, who scored 7 800 points. I thought I could score about 7 300 – 7 400 points, however, it did not work out because of an unknown environment. Moreover, athletics is expensive, they (other athletes) had their poles made of laminate, the javelin was no longer a fishing rod and I had to borrow it there. And for the first time in a long time, I did not run on clay but on but on a plastic surface, which was a big handicap, so I was about eighth out of twenty-eight. I did not establish the record anymore, but it was still good in 1958. In 1960 I set another record, and I was supposed to go to the Olympics in Rome."
"We were staring at them there and older guys, twenty, twenty-five-year-old ones waved at the retreating Germans, and they tossed something to them, for example, a suitcase with phonograph records. Suddenly, we heard a terrible roar. We found out in terror that a group of twenty, thirty, or more (nobody can count that now) periwinkle green Russian two-engine planes were flying in the area of the old town between the old town and the Belvedere. They were painted in unusual periwinkle green which was like grass; it was not dark green but light periwinkle green (which is used) for painting water goblins and reeds. Suddenly, explosions. So, it was a vanguard, maybe fighters and maybe bombers.
Since I was used to obeying my mom and moreover, I knew that something was going on, I ran through Buchnar's passage, where there were electrical works, to the Former Czech Brethren church. There I ran to the theatre and across the exhibition grounds to Smetanka, where we lived, and I got there. My mother immediately scolded me. My dad, of course, was not there, he had been sent to forced labour and at that time, he was somewhere in Jabkenice hiding with his former students of bricklaying because he had escaped after the bombing of Dresden."
Václav Bečvárovský was born on 6 April 1933, he came from an important family from Mladá Boleslav. His father worked as a construction manager for his brother, architect Antonín Bečvárovský who built modernists buildings in the town and who later died in the Dachau concentration camp. The witness experienced the bombing of Mladá Boleslav by the Red Army Air Force at the end of the Second World War. He went to Sokol since his childhood and he devoted himself to sports, mainly athletics. He gradually worked his way up to become one of the best athletes in then Czechoslovakia. He represented Czechoslovakia also abroad, first in the 110-metre hurdles and he later transferred to the decathlon. In this discipline, he managed to overcome the national record twice. He was preparing for the 1960 Olympics in Rome, but an injury eventually robbed him of his participation. He did sports at the top level until 1967, apart from athletics, he also played ice hockey, basketball, and Czech handball. He made money as a project architect at the State Design Institute in Prague, however, most of the time, he worked for the Škoda Auto company in Mladá Boleslav. In 1961, he got married to his wife Hana, they had a daughter Martina. Apart from sports, he also devoted his life to scouting. He lived in Mladá Boleslav in 2022. Václav Bečvarovský passed away on November, the 8th, 2024.
