“We had to take part in that. I was never in the party, but we had to participate and it was marked. Whether we prepared poem at a Communist Party meeting. If we went out to the parade on May Day. If we were at the meeting. How many brigades we did, all that stuff. It was not for this director, it was for several others. There was still a lift about who was where and what was attended.”
“They were still trying to learn something. It was the kind of old teachers who presumed their Latin mattered the most in the whole world. Our language of instruction was German. We were forbidden to teach Czech literature. We had no textbooks, everything was written. We did not have geography, we kept memorizing stuff about the German Empire, and then we also calculated star distances, until now I know nothing about it. That's how it was. The German Nazi inspector also came to visit us and we all had to hail. One of my classmates, František, was left-handed, so he greeted with his left hand and it was a great offense. He was called to the director's office, where he had to apologize and had to explain that he was left-handed, that he was wrong.”
“The commander of the hospital, a Nazi, declared that all the town representatives, important inhabitants of Bystřice, must be taken away. To the middle school class, the hospital. That he gave them a condition: if they heard a single shot, that someone would be shot by partisans, so that the captives would be very strictly treated. Well, out neighbor Stanislav Vrbík, who was in illegal activity, sent out, at least he came to tell us, an advice among all guerrilla groups not to shoot and save the detainees in the school.”
“The Neděles did not return from Mauthausen. I would like to say that it was just after the grain harvest event that my father received a card from Mauthausen to remove the so-called repair keys from the threshing drum, because if he did not remove them, everything would be revealed in the rumble. So the father went, took the guns from the threshing drum and went to dig them into the forest and succeeded. He marked the tree with a notch so he could pick up his weapons after the war, of course he couldn't find the weapons after the war. The forest became a clearing, because people were looking for heating during the war. There was nothing else to burn, so they cut down the trees.”
Jitka Pešová, born Tobyášová, was born on 22 September 1927 in Brno. Mother Marie Matějková had to leave the profession of a teacher after the wedding and devoted herself to her family. Dad Jaroslav Tobyáš graduated from the University of Agriculture in Vienna and became a leading Czechoslovak expert in flax cultivation and processing. He held the office of the top ministerial council for the flax industry. He worked as director of the Flax Research Station in Domanínek, where Jitka and her sister and parents lived in one of the apartments in the mansion. She spent an idyllic childhood here. In 1941 the Tobyáš family moved to Bystřice nad Pernštejnem. The same year, on the basis of a report, a crackdown took place in Domanínek with the aim of arresting a hiding Jewish girl. The Germans took away not only the hiding Alice Fainová and her fiancé, a farm employee Bohumír Běhulu, but the neighbors and family friends of husband Neděles. They died in the Mauthausen concentration camp. The engaged couple was executed in Pankrác prison. The witness experienced dramatic moments of the end of World War II in Bystřice nad Pernštejnem. After graduation, she joined the University of Agriculture in Brno. During political cleansing at school, she was thrown out of studies because of her so-called bourgeois origins. She worked in the food shop until she once went to guard children at the elementary school in Bystřice. She immediately liked working with children and stayed in the job. She devoted herself to self-study and later completed her university education and taught at secondary school. She moved from Bystřice nad Pernštejnem with her husband to a row house in Brno. Jitka Pešová died on February 26, 2023.
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