Happily lost records
M.Sc. Zdeněk Mareš was born on July 27, 1948 in Benešov near Prague. He spent his childhood with his family in Votice. In the 1950s, all the family‘s business was confiscated. The witness‘s grandfather suffered a stroke as a result of the shock of the confiscation and spent the rest of his life paralyzed in a wheelchair. This experience shaped the witness‘s negative relationship to communism. In the second half of the 1960s, he studied at the Faculty of Mathematics, Physics and Natural Sciences of the Charles University. In August 1969, he took part in one of the demonstrations on the occasion of the first anniversary of the Soviet occupation. He was detained by the police and interrogated for three days, where he experienced physical violence. Zdeněk Mareš was subsequently expelled from his studies. Thanks to the helpful intervention of an employee of the study department, his record with the reasons for exclusion was lost and he was able to complete his studies at the faculty in České Budějovice. After graduation, he completed a year of military service. He worked in education, since the 1980s he was devoted to programming.