Libuše Tůmová

“We weren’t affected by forced labour because when I married, when my husband and I married and we knew we were vassals to Germany, so we reckoned: ‘We won’t want any children and we’ll struggle along without children.’ But then a time came when childless husbands were sometimes required to do labour in the Reich, whereas when they had a family, the husband would stay at home, so we had a daughter. That was a consequence of the forced labour system.”

“If you weren’t a Party member, you were constantly accused of not doing enough. Say, I would get these messages from the district school committee that I was not doing enough extracurricular work. And yet everything you did had to be done for free, and I started taking note of it, and I would have as many as twenty-five different events outside of school in a single month. Attending meetings in Semčice or wherever, Boleslav, managing children’s clubs, doing... extra Russian tuition outside of normal lessons and teaching at people’s courses of Russian, and the like. That was all for free and it all took time, but it didn’t give you anything at all.”