For valour
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Mr Kvetoslav Schonwalder is a Czechoslovakian coach driver, not much over 5 ft tall and weighing in at about 10 stones. But with enough courage to fill a frame twice his size.
Back in February 1969, Kveto was taking passengers from a farm cooperative to the theatre to Brno. Along the way he noticed two children skating on a frozen river, when suddenly they disappeared beneath the ice. He stopped his coach, grabbed a rope from its tool kit, tied it round his waist, and with another driver holding the rope on the river bank, in he went with the ice breaking beneath his feat as he ran. He dived under the surface at the spot where the boys had disappeared, found them, brought them out and returned them to their mother on the river bank. With the icicles still forming on his clothes, Kveto continued on his journey to Brno.
The events only came to light last year, when one of the coach passengers related the stotly; and Kveto was subsequently awarded the honorary title of Gentleman of the Roads, an honour bestowed by the Czechoslovakian Road Safety Committee. Last month an embarrassed Kveto appeared before 400 IRU members and representatives of the world's press at the IRU Congress in Innsbruck where he received that organization's "Grand Prix D'Honneur". This is awarded every two years in recognition of an exceptional act of courage on the part of a long-distance lorry or coach driver, and consists of a diploma, a gold insignia, and a cash award.
Come to think of it, Kveto must be a hardy• customer, because nearly everyone in the Congress hall took the opportunity to shake him by the hand, and that was a lot of handshaking.