“During the war he joined that partisan movement, and he notified the farmers. It was all strict-like, secret, when they had an unannounced slaughter, so he had to notify them. It gave him a blot, right, but there was no other way. Then they caught them, the gendarmes, that they’d been cooperating with this movement here. It came out in 19... how many years is it now? In 44, it was, they arrested them on 19 December, the whole gendarme station here. And there were three thousand Germans here, came into the area. They surrounded the whole of Mšeno, seized them, and took them to Mladá Boleslav, and from there they had to go to Terezín; they were marked for elimination.”
“Oh, it was completely different in the past. Those were, I would say, costly funerals, especially the farmers, they had everything all in big style. And people liked the kind of funeral that costs thirty thousand now, with all the pomp, those kind of funerals. They’d last three quarters of a day, they would, to the church, and then to the graveyard. There was the procedure with the burial. Nowadays it’s woosh woosh, done in twenty minutes, and ideally without a service for most people. They don’t have money, most people don’t have money. And the cost has risen a lot, so they think twice about holding funerals. A funeral like that with a service costs thirty thousand nowadays.”
Libuše Němcová, née Schönbachová, was born on 15 March 1925 in Mladá Boleslav. Her father was a gendarme, so they often moved to where he was stationed. She grew up in the border region, in Osečná, from where she was deported to Mšeno in 1938. Her father joined the resistance; during one big raid on the gendarme station he was arrested and taken to Terezín. Libuše Němcová married in Mšeno and continued to run a funeral business there.
