“Even ten years after the war when I had a bad dream at night, I dreamt of being there having nothing to eat. I was always frightened and my husband used to tell me: ‘Relax, you’re at home, little one.’”
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Libuše Chourová, nee Šimková, was born in Prague into the family of legionnaire Josef Šimek on June 8th, 1924. The family later lived in Ústí nad Labem . She had two brothers, one of which died as a child. After the Sudetes occupation of the border area in 1938, the whole family decided to relocate to Roudnice nad Labem. Libuše Chourová started her fourth year of school at the local grammar school there. She studied there until her arrest on June 20th, 1942. She and some other students were formally accused by the Gestapo of planning the assassination of a head teacher of the German primary school in Roudnice and the assassination of an active Nazi Alfred Bauer. All of them were imprisoned in Malá pevnost, many of them were later sent to other jails and concentration camps. Many of the students didn’t live to experience the end of the war. After half a year of hardship Libuše Chourová, one of the last girls still imprisoned, was released. From that time she worked as a displaced person in industrial and chemical production in Roudnice nad Labem till the end of the war. Libuše Chourová returned to Ústí nad Labem after the war, there she married Jaroslav Choura in 1946. The couple’s only son Petr was born in 1948. Her husband Jaroslav Choura tragically died in a car accident in 1971. She married for the second time in 1976. She married Vlastimil Mastný who worked as a bookseller. Libuše Chourová had mostly secretarial jobs; she worked predominantly as a clerk. She decided to join the ‘Club for Committed non-Party Men’ (KAN) in 1968.
