Name Vojta Benes Siblings Edvard Benes | Role Political leader | |
Died November 20, 1951, South Bend, Indiana, United States Books The Story of Two Peoples: Or, Czechoslovak and German Morality | ||
Vojta Benes (May 17, 1878 – November 20, 1951) was a Czechoslovak educator and political leader and brother of Edvard Benes.
Vojta Benes was born in Kozlany, Bohemia, then a province of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Benes began his professional life as an educator at various institutions, and from 1913 to 1914 visited the United States to study its school systems. Returning to the United States with his wife, Emilie, and their children in 1915, he criss-crossed North America agitating for Czechoslovak independence from Austria. For this and similar activities in the US during World War II, he became known as "the Czech Paul Revere."
After freedom from Austrian rule and the establishment of the Czechoslovak republic in 1918, Vojta Benes was active as both an educator and public servant. He worked as a provincial school inspector, and, from 1937, as the chief inspector of the national school system. A member of the Czech social democracy, he served as a deputy in the Czechoslovak parliament from 1925 to 1935, and as senator in 1935, resigning the latter post upon his brother's election to the presidency the following year. Benes was additionally an official of the Czechoslovak legionary community and of the union of Czechoslovak teachers.
With the conclusion of the Munich Agreement in 1938 and the subsequent Nazi conquest of Czechoslovakia, Benes narrowly escaped to the U.S., where he began anew his campaigning for Czechoslovak freedom after nearly twenty-five years.
After the liberation of Czechoslovakia by Allied forces in 1945, Vojta Benes returned to public life in his country, serving from 1946 to 1948 in the Constituent National Assembly. Following the Stalinist accession to state power in 1948, Benes, aided by the persuasive efforts of his daughter in Illinois, returned for the third and final time to North America with the help of the U.S. State Department. He died in South Bend, Indiana, in 1951. His remains were eventually returned to his homeland and interred in a cemetery in Prague.
He was the author of a number of works, including the war-time books The Mission of a Small Nation and Ten Million Prisoners, an illustrated volume of poetry for children, Nase Maminka (Our Mother), and others.
His son Vaclav was professor of political science at Indiana University and father of Eva Benes Hanhardt, a city planner in New York City, and Nina Hajda, an author based in Manhattan, Kansas. Emilie Benes Brzezinski, a sculptor, is a distant cousin; her father Bohus was a diplomat.