You shouldn’t think that their father was a natural hero, cautions Martin Benda. One evening, when Kamila was late coming home, Václav kept a nervous vigil by the window, staring at the street below, afraid that his wife had been arrested by the secret police.
“That was the moment when I started to admire my father even more,” says Martin. “That’s when I saw that he was human. He was scared, but he did not want his fear to master him.”
FILL THEIR MORAL IMAGINATIONS WITH THE GOOD
Screening High Noon and movies like it for their children wasn’t the only way Václav and Kamila Benda prepared them for Christian resistance. Despite the demands of her job teaching at the university, Kamila made time to read aloud to her children for two to three hours daily.
“Every day?” I ask, stunned.
“Every day,” she affirms.
She read them fairy tales, myths, adventure stories, and even some horror classics. More than any other novel, though, J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings was a cornerstone of her family’s collective imagination.
Why Tolkien? I ask.
“Because we knew Mordor was real. We felt that their story”—that of the hobbits and others resisting the evil Sauron—“was our story too. Tolkien’s dragons are more realistic than a lot of things we have in this world.”
“Mom read The Lord of the Rings to us maybe six times,” recalls Philip Benda. “It’s about the East versus the West. The elves on one side and the goblins on the other. And when you know the book, you see that you first need to fight the evil empire, but that’s not the end of the war. Afterward, you have to solve the problems at home, within the Shire.”
This is how Tolkien prepared the Benda children to resist communism, and also to resist the idea that the fall of communism was the end of their quest for the Good and the True. After communism’s collapse, they found ways to contribute to the moral reconstruction of their nation.
Patrik says the key is to expose children to stories that help them know the difference between truth and falsehood, and teach them how to discern this in real life.
“What my mom always encouraged in us and supported was our imagination, through the reading of books or playing with figures,” he says. “She also taught us that the imagination was something that was wholly ours, that could not be stolen from us. Which was also something that differentiated us from others.”
DON’T BE AFRAID TO BE WEIRD IN SOCIETY’S EYES
“In our classes at school, where we were different, we were different through our faith but also through our clothes,” says Patrik. “We had more variety of our clothing, because something came from our aunt or someone who gave us our clothing. We were not hurt by being different because we considered this exceptionality was a value and not something bad.”
In this way, the Benda children say their parents vaccinated them against the disease of communist ideology, which was everywhere. They brought them up to understand that they, as Christians, were not to go along to get along in their totalitarian society. Václav and Kamila knew that if they did not strongly impart that sense of difference to their children, they risked losing them to propaganda and to widespread conformity to the totalitarian system.
“Sometimes it was really hard,” muses Patrik. “We were poor, and we felt the difference. It was totally impossible to buy anything fashionable, or to take part in any fad that was popular. Collectible toys that every child had, we didn’t. Sometimes it was hard, but it made us stronger.”
PREPARE TO MAKE GREAT SACRIFICES FOR THE GREATER GOOD
Kamila once received a letter from her husband in prison, in which he said that the government was talking about the possibility of setting him free early if he agreed to emigrate with his family to the West.
“I wrote back to tell him no, that he would be better off staying in prison to fight for what we believe is true,” she tells me.
Think of it: This woman was raising six children alone, in a communist totalitarian state. But she affirmed by her own willingness to sacrifice—and to sacrifice a materially more comfortable and politically free life for her children—for the greater good.
If you fail to do this, thinking that you are making things easier for your kids, it might backfire in a big way.
“We knew people who gave in for the sake of their children,” says Patrik. “They wanted their children to have a better education, so they compromised their values and entered the Communist Party. But in the end, they alienated themselves from their own children. I saw this when I was in college in 1989, during the Velvet Revolution. Some students positively hated their parents who made those compromises for them.”
Today, the children and grandchildren of Dr. Benda have the letters he sent to their mother and grandmother, respectively, from prison. They are a written testimony of how the political prisoner’s rock-solid faith helped him endure captivity. These letters are a catechism for his descendants, made vivid because they came from the pen not of a plaster saint, but a flesh-and-blood hero.
“In one of his letters, he tells us about how being in prison gave him new insights into the Gospels,” says Patrik. “He talks about how Jesus said in his Passion, ‘Not my will, but Thy will be done, Father.’ My dad’s letter shows how he believed that he was giving testimony by suffering persecution. This helped us all to understand the example of the Lord.”
“Dad believed that even though things were bad, and he was suffering, and that he didn’t see positive consequences from his actions, that there is
