The town was a Communist stronghold and centre of anti-Nazi resistance. Dienstbier grew up under Nazi occupation and knew of its horrors at an early age. In June , the nearby village of Lidice was razed by the Nazis. Its men were all killed and the women and children taken to Kladno, from where they went to concentration camps. Nazi propaganda openly, and proudly, announced the events in Lidice. Slave labourers from the Theresienstadt Jewish ghetto worked in Kladno's mines.
Dienstbier joined the Communist youth movement and studied philosophy at the Charles University of Prague. In , aged 21, he wasadmitted to the Communist Partyand worked as a foreign correspondent, from to , for Czechoslovak radio in the Far East, Soviet Union, Germany, France, and Yugoslavia.
From to he was assigned to the United States. The nightmare of Stalinism was over and in Moscow, a "thaw" was taking place. Even so,Dienstbier broke the rules by conducting interviews which had not beenauthorised by his Communist bosses in Prague.
In , the Czech Communist Party was taken over by reformers led by Alexander Dubcek, who, catching the mood of the majority of this educated country, inaugurated the liberalisations of the "Prague Spring". But in August of that year Leonid Brezhnev, who had replaced the more liberal Khrushchev, urged on by other hardliners, ordered the invasion of Czechoslovakia by Warsaw Pact forces. As a supporter of Dubcek, Dienstbier was expelled from the Communist Party and, in , from the journalists' union, and dismissed from his job in radio.
He could no longer pursue his profession and, like Dubcek himself, was forced to do a series of menial jobsincluding working in the archives of an engineering company and as a nightwatchman.
