I knew President Beneš very well, we used to meet and he used to go for a walk every Sunday morning, or after lunch on Sunday, with his wife.
Initially I opened the gate for them; I didn't know who they were. The lady thanked me and asked me if I lived in the village, asked me what my name was, and what I did; I was at school then of course. And she said, oh well this is my husband, Dr. Edvard Beneš, President of Czechoslovakia, and we shook hands.
The president couldn't speak very much English and I couldn't speak any Czech, so his wife acted as an interpreter both ways, she would translate the English into Czech and the Czech into English.
And after that when we used to meet we used to have a chat. And I used to ask the President a lot about his country, and all that sort of thing, so I felt that I learned quite a bit about it. I certainly knew more about Czechoslovakia than Neville Chamberlain did, which wasn't difficult.
But he was a marvellous man, and he was very popular.
taken from: http://www.radio.cz/en/article/66174.
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