"It was quite possible to apply for a trip to the United States. The Institute usually got one place from the Bureau there, or two in fertile years, and there were six to nine of us who applied. The ranking was not done by scientific performance, but by something else entirely. Now, I'm going to use a popular term again, and that is: who has a red driver's license. Are you familiar with that term? It was one of those popular terms for the legitimization of the Communist Party. So I was always somewhere towards the end, and therefore I couldn't get into the United States. I only made it, actually, when I got the prestigious award, because there was this thing that they paid for everything: the travel, the stay. Because Professor Moche knew my situation, he got the then president of the American Epilepsy Society, who was Professor Wada, a Canadian citizen, to come to Prague to help me to be allowed to go to America and to help me to overcome all the hardships. Professor Wada was furnished with a number of letters of credentials, including to the Canadian and American embassies, and he began to act in getting me into the United States. He succeeded, and I got approval. And then November 1989 came, and the situation changed, so that there was no need for the complicated godfatherly actions, and I was able to go out normally."
"I naively thought it was possible to do something within the satellite. Then in sixth grade, when one of the members of the Communist Party cell came to me... It was divided there, there were five of them. Four of them were careerists, who used it absolutely without any scruples. And the fifth one was a very respectable man who couldn't start studying normally, so he was older than us. He came to me and agitated me to join the Communist Party, and he also argued that he was having an awfully hard time with the pack there, that he needed someone decent to be there. I made one mistake at the time, and that was that I went to consult with the then Associate Professor Jílek. I told him I didn't want to go there because I was a religious person. He convinced me that it wouldn’t be a problem, that no one would dig into it, and that it was the only way I could actually achieve something. So I listened to him and joined — well, I became a candidate. Even before graduation, I was accepted as a full member, so I went into military service already as a member of the Communist Party. Later, at the hospital in Terezín — this was after the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union — I led training sessions about all the changes that were supposedly coming. None of it turned out to be true, of course, because the leadership of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia was very careful to ensure that absolutely nothing changed. So there I was, preaching like a fool what I genuinely believed — all the stuff from the Soviet Party Congress materials. And what really disillusioned me, and partly cured me, was that the only person there who started pushing for reforms was the stoker — a man everyone knew as the worst kind of opportunistic party hanger-on. That showed me things might not be quite what I thought."
"That was back in 1948. I remember walking home from school and my mother and sister waving at me from the window, telling me to go buy bread, that they weren't allowed out of the apartment. So I came home with the groceries and learned that my father had been taken away. In the afternoon the SS came again. I don't remember that, my mother told me that they discussed among themselves for about half an hour whether they should take me too. In the end, they only took my mother and my sister, who was 15 years old at the time. I stayed at home alone. But we had good friends in the area and my mother had already told me in advance which ones I should go to. So I stayed there until late in the evening when my mother and sister came back. They weren't even questioned at the Bartolomějská street. There was just some pressure in that they let them sit in this waiting room where my father's hat and cane were on a rack. And there they sat for several hours without anyone discussing anything with them. In the end, my father had another attack of angina, so they took him to the hospital, to the General Hospital on Charles Square, and there he was lying in the internal medicine clinic, with an SS man sitting next to the bed. I have to remember what I learned only later, when my father and I were in contact. That Professor Vančura came there for a visit, didn't take his stethoscope, listened to my father with his ear to his chest, and at the same time asked him in a whisper if he wanted to tell anyone anything, regardless of the fact that the 'guardian angel' was sitting next to him."
Pavel Mareš was born in Prague’s Vinohrady district on July 13, 1937. His father Josef Mareš was a director of one of the smaller insurance companies in Prague, his mother Jaroslava was a housewife. He had a sister four years older. He started going to school during the German occupation during the Second World War. He remembers how, during the liberation, the Vlasov members shelled a school near his home, which the German soldiers had turned into an infirmary. When the communists came to power in February 1948, the Mareš family’s life changed. In January 1948, his father refused to join the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (KSČ) and lost his job. Later, the family let one of the people who tried to emigrate stay with them. This led to the arrest of the father, mother and sister of the witness. While the mother and sister returned soon after, the father suffered a heart attack during the interrogations. Eventually his jailers lost interest in him, but another arrest, another interrogation, another heart attack followed. Then they let dad go home to die. Pavel Mareš still studied medicine and became a scientist. He’s one of the pioneers of developmental neuroscience in the world. He was persuaded to join the Communist Party. He thought he could make a difference from within the party. As he was losing these illusions and considering quitting despite the consequences, 1968 and hope came. This was interrupted by the invasion of Warsaw Pact troops in August 1968. Pavel Mareš was then expelled from the Communist Party. This had an impact on his academic progress, even though his work was the basis for world experts, he was not able to habilitate until after 1989. At the end of 1989 he was honored by the American Epileptological Society. In the late 1990s, he served two terms as director of the Institute of Physiology of the Academy of Sciences. He continued his scientific work there at the time of the 2025 shooting.
