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Benno Beneš was born on April 19, 1938 in Osek. He attended the elementary school in Osek. Most of his schoolmates were German nationals and they were included in the deportations after the war. His father worked in the Coal Survey. During ten years he was expelled from his job three times for political reasons both during the war as well as after the war and then for the third time in 1948. Salesians who came to the monastery in Osek after the war, and who were there from 1946 until its takeover in 1950, had a strong influence upon Benno. He maintained contacts with the Salesians even later during his study at the technical secondary school of chemistry in Most. After his military service he worked in a coal laboratory in Osek. In 1965 he changed jobs and he began working in the Research Institute for Fuels in Prague and he was thus able to restore his contacts with the Salesians. He became a Salesian in 1967 (and started using the abbreviation SDB behind his name). He kept his ministry secret until 1989, although the StB already knew that he was a Salesian. After completing the novitiate he still worked a full time job and he was taking care of his parents, and at the same time he was devoting all his free time to his vocation. He was working with children and he was going to summer outings with students, among other also to Bulgaria and Rumania. In spite of the ban, the Salesians were active throughout the entire period of normalization. Benno Beneš was secretly ordained a priest in 1972in Poznań. From 1973 he served as a (still secret) deputy to the Salesian provincial. In 1993 he was appointed the provincial of the Prague province for six years. He greatly contributed to the development of the Salesian work after 1989. He oversaw missionary work in Bulgaria, and he taught at the Salesian school Jabok. Afterwards he was sent by the new provincial to his native region north of Teplice, where he still lives in a Salesian community. Apart from pastoral care he is also actively involved in the process of restoring the relations between Czechs and Germans.