“In the evening before the oath I went to my commander and I informed him that I would not be able to swear allegiance to Hitler the next day. He asked me why and I told him that I was a Czech and that my superior was Hácha, the president of Czechoslovakia. There was a scandal because of it, and the very next day they built such a small wooden house for me, and this was my prison.”
“The then minister of information contacted professor Wichterle. He was on first-name terms with everyone. ´Hey, don’t you got anything there which might be interesting for the government? To show what you are actually able to do.´ Professor Wichterle obviously took it up. ´Well, why not, yes, we have something…´ And so the plan Government Experiment came into being. The ministers wanted to see some experiment with their own eyes. Wichterle offered Šebenda’s polymerization of silon to the government. Right on the table in front of the invited ministers he showed the transformation of caprolactam into a silicone block. There were two thermos flasks with two solutions, and when you mixed them, the polymerization process turned them into a solid matter.”
“Our parents knew that a little child needs the company of other children, but there in the north there were not many I could make friends with. Mom thus tried to find a friend for me among those impoverished people. She found one family and they invited their boy to our house for a snack. My was very self-sacrifizing and in order for me to have a friend she was even giving bread with lard and coffee to those poor people.”
“Professor Wichterle hated servility, when some overly diligent student was trying to kiss his ass so to speak. But he did tolerate criticism, which I had the opportunity to see myself. At that time, I was still a brash student, I would not dare to make such a stupid comment now, something like: ´Professor, you are lying.´ But he didn’t tell me off, he wanted me to explain where there was a disagreement between us. Then we discussed it.”
“It was when the Germans occupied the borderlands. There was a pogrom one evening. A group of Germans were streaming through the town and shouting: ´Juden und Tschechen raus´ and they were attacking people and breaking windows and they posted signs on the shop windows: Tschechische Geschäft – hier kauft kein Deutscher. My dad had a sense of humour even in this tense environment, and he wanted to black out the latter ´k´ on the poster and turn it into …hier kauft ein Deutscher, which means …every German shops here.”
“I lived from one symposium to another. I would always prepare a lecture for the upcoming symposium so that they would allow me to go there. I kept producing new topics so that I would always have something to take out to the world.”
Doc. Ing. Jan Šebenda, DrSc. was born June 22, 1927 in Duchcov He comes from a mixed Czech-German family. He was to be drafted to the wehrmacht, but he refused to swear allegiance to Adolf Hitler for which he was imprisoned. After the war he began to study under prof. Otto Wichterle at the Department of Organic Chemistry at the Czech Technical University in Prague. He graduated in 1951 and in the following years he worked as a lecturer at the University of Chemistry and Technology in Prague. In 1959 he started his career as a scientist in the newly founded Institute of Macromolecular Chemistry, whose establishment was closely connected with professor Wichterle. Jan Šebenda worked there until his retirement in 1990. He focused on basic and applied research of the synthesis of polymers, particularly of polyamides. His is the author of fifty patents and 160 scientific publications. His fundamental work is the book Comprehensive Polymer Science, published in 1989.
