Ján Benč

* 1932  †︎ 2021

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Many of them, who wrote reviews, were well aware of how they destroyed human lives and dignity

Ján Benč was born on May 1, 1932, he comes from the town, Nová Baňa. Father, Jozef Benč earned living as a casual worker, mother Mária Benčová, as single also Benčová, took care of four children. His childhood was accompanied by poverty and the existential crisis of the family. During World War II, his brother Jozef served on the eastern front as a war correspondent. He also obtained classified information about the massacre in the Katyn Forest. After graduating from a folk and burgher school, he successfully graduated from the pedagogical grammar school in Levice in 1952. As a result of a distorted, malicious personnel report, Ján Benč received a summons in the autumn of 1952 to complete basic military service in the PTP criminal units. Here he spent two years of hard slave labor as a despised second-class citizen. In 1954 he returned to civilian life. In the following years of his life he worked as a teacher in Malá Lehota, later in Tekovská Breznica, where he eventually became the principal of the school. As a result of normalization purges, after the invasion of the Warsaw Pact troops, he was removed from school in 1972. Since 1975 he has been an employee of the department of education for school maintenance in the district and polytechnic education. He retired in 1995. He was a passionate hunter all his life. At present, Ján Benč lives in a retirements home in Tekovská Breznice, where, among other things, he writes memorial literature.