He was standing with a rifle on a barricade wishing the Germans would not come
Pavel Staněk was born on 3 June 1927 in a family of a postal clerk in Prague. His father died in a motorbike accident in 1936. Pavel Staněk attended grammar school in Holešovice, Prague during the war. At the end of the occupation, he and his schoolmates cleaned tracks and sorted packages at the post office. He helped rebels at barricades during the Prague uprising in May 1945. He graduated in double bass at Prague Conservatory after the war. He started to work as a bass player for the Czechoslovak Song & Dance Ensemble, but he soon got an offer to take over as a choirmaster. He then acted as a choirmaster and musical director in the Artistic Ensemble of the Ministry of the Interior where he worked instead of his basic military service. At the beginning of the 1960s, he conducted the orchestra in Divadlo na Fidlovaččce (Fidlovačka Theatre) in Nusle, Prague. He moved to Ostrava in 1963 where he got a job as the head of the Ostrava Radio Orchestra. He worked there for twenty-seven years. He conducted music for radio. As a composer and instrumentalist, he was successful both in the Czech Republic and abroad. Later in his retirement, he became blind as a result of glaucoma. He lived in Ostrava in 2023.