Kamila BENDOVÁ (1946)

We were a revolving-door home 

In the normalisation period the public and family lives of Czechoslovak dissidents were closely tied: married couples planned joint strategies, repression hit entire families, with home searches and harassment impacting men, women and their children. In this regard women carried an even heavier burden as even though they weren’t jailed as often the task of running a household and all that went with that remained with them. One such woman was the mathematician Kamila Bendová, who alongside her intellectually demanding profession raised six children and stood alongside the Charter 77 signatory and Catholic intellectual Václav Benda. 

Kamila Bendová was born on 12 October 1946 into the family of university professor of constitutional law Zdeněk Neubauer and lawyer Štěpánka Neubaurerová. “I have to say I was never into politics. I grew up in a university milieu. Nobody listened to the news or read the paper at our place. I read my brother the entire Aeneid, the Odyssey, all of Plato’s dialogues. We read Descartes together in French. It took a long time for me to become interested in public affairs,” she told interviewers from Memory of Nations.

She developed an interest in public life alongside Václav Benda, whom she met in her final year at grammar school. They shared an interest in the Catholic faith and understanding the world more deeply. They married in 1967 and their oldest son Marek was born the following year. After the August 1968 occupation of Czechoslovakia they planned to emigrate, though in the end they decided to remain in Prague. It was just in the days following the invasion of Warsaw Pact troops that the Bendas’ apartment in central Prague became a focal point of the dissent: “My mother had a wartime complex, so when somebody called at 3 am to say they were occupying us she went and stood in a meat queue,” says Kamila Bendová. “The following day she went to stay with my brother, then studying in Naples. Lots of meat was left at home so I made schnitzels and fed the friends and acquaintances who visited us. There were quickly more and more of these people, so we were kind of a revolving door home...”

The Bendas’ apartment remained a meeting point for intellectual discussions for many decades. In the early 1970s, when the couple had three children in quick succession (Martin, Marta and Patrik), they frequently hosted Ivan Havel, whom Kamila Bendová knew from a mathematics seminar, the philosopher Jiří Němec and underground figures. A group of people who were distant intellectually and in values terms, and who would never meet in a free society, began to coalesce under the pressure of normalisation.

The Benda family’s situation began to collapse after Václav Benda signed the Charter 77 Declaration. At that time Kamila did not sign it, as signatories faced a greater threat of repression, including having their children taken away. “I couldn’t imagine everything that would come. But I decided that I would never complain. You felt like somebody had to do something. This necessarily gave rise to the question – why not us?” says Kamila Bendová. 

Two years later her husband was sentenced to four years in prison in a trial of activists from the Committee for the Unjustly Prosecuted (VONS). Every week Kamila Bendová sent him two letters, which served as mental support as well as spiritual distraction and intellectual stimulation. During visits she secretly gave him the host, so that he could experience the sacrament of Holy Communion even in prison. She also had to lead her life on the outside. She believed that the regime wouldn’t jail a mother of four (Dana Němcová had received a suspended sentence in the VONS trial) but did fully expect to lose her job. Fortunately that did not happen.  The Institute of Mathematics at the Academy of Sciences, where she worked, not only didn’t fire her but allowed her to work from home, so as to better combine work and child care. She could rely on the help of many friends and acquaintances, for instance in the form of garden produce, home baking or words of support. 

On the other hand she naturally had to go through State Security interrogations. “On principle I didn’t answer whatsoever. I was silent. I had learned what to do. ‘You’re investigating a crime? What crime? On that basis I can draw on paragraph 100 – that I do not have to testify about myself and my family.’ It always revolved around that. They always pulled out subversive printed materials on us, to which I always said that it was no crime. Then there would be a bit of bargaining, until I said: ‘No, I’m afraid that I can’t tell you anything, because I don’t know what crime you are investigating.’”

The StB monitored the Bendas’ flat from the attic window of an opposite building. The family’s phone was disconnected for several years and many searches of the flat itself were conducted. The police would arrive at 5 am and often hammered a nail into the bell; it would ring constantly, intensifying the psychological pressure on all present. Kamila Bendová later said that for several years after the revolution she had a recurring “dissident dream”, in which she was woken by a bell. 

Nevertheless she wished to avoid being forced into a dissident ghetto and did her best to function in the “normal” world, going to parent-teacher and building meetings, meeting ordinary people, though some only dared express sympathy free of witnesses. 

In 1989 Václav Benda entered active politics and Kamila Bendová joined the Department of Logic at Charles University’s Faculty of Arts. In 2003 the Czech Senate made her an inspector of the Office for Personal Data Protection.

The Bendas’ home on Karlovo náměstí, which she created with her husband, has remained a place of inspiring intellectual and creative encounters for three generations now.