After the war he saw the brutal treatment of German civilians in the centre of Pardubice
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Milan Panoch was born on June 21, 1932 in Pardubice, where he spent his entire life. His father was the head of export in the factory for mill machinery, called Prokopce. He was in the first grade when the Nazi occupation began. After the municipal school, he entered the gymnasium. He experienced the bombing of Pardubice at the end of the war. In May 1945 he witnessed the brutal behaviour of the Revolutionary Guards towards the civilian German population. After the February 1948 coup, his father had to do unskilled work. In 1952 he graduated from high school and the following year he joined the Auxiliary Technical Battalions (PTP). He worked in the Metalworks and married in 1965. He spent the years of normalisation in the company of banned artists from the group Starý psi. During the Velvet Revolution he went to demonstrations in Prague and attended all public meetings in Pardubice with his family. After 1989 he was reunited with relatives and friends in the West. As a civic activist, he campaigned for the removal of the statue of the Red Army from the centre of Pardubice. He and his wife Helena raised their son Pavel (in 2025 he was an associate professor at the Institute of Historical Sciences of the Faculty of Arts of the University of Pardubice) and daughter Lucie (at the same time she worked as a special education teacher in Znojmo). In 2025, he lived with his wife in their family home in Pardubice.
