“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.”
“But it affected my husband; my husband had to - he was accepted into the savings company and was there only a year, and then in 1947 they issued a decree and 75 thousand clerks were reassigned to production, so he was made into a blue collar, and he was sent to Semčice, where he was tasked with stacking some sacks of grain. Stacking as in putting in order. And the poor mite had really sickly hands at the time, but he had to suffer through this punishment. The only thing that saved him from this hard work - because he was continuously ill from it - was when they founded the farming co-op in Jabkenice. And because Jabkenice knew us, they wanted my husband to keep their books for them.”
“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.”
Libuše Tůmová, née Pavlištová, was born in 1919 in Kněžice near Městec Králové. Her parents owned a general goods shop in the village. Libuše married the teacher Oskar Tůma during the war. They had a daughter and were thus not required for forced labour in the Reich. The Tůmas did not join the Communist Party after 1948 - this caused Oskar Tůma to be relegated to manual labour, which he had to do even when he had problems with his hands. Libuše started teaching at school after the war. In 1968 Libuše Tůmová founded a primary school for Romani children in Benátky nad Jizerou and directed it for several years.
