Vladislav Bumba

Vladislav Bumba was born on 13th June 1926 in the town of Děčín in a family of railwaymen. He lived out his early life living on the German speaking borderlands where his family moved to as employees of the Czechoslovak State Railway. His father was originally a cobbler but then the large shoe-making manufactory in the town of Třebíč Borovina producing footwear, built by the entrepreneur Antonín Baťa, closed down and for him his livlihood as a shoemaker ended. The idyllic environment of Děčín in the second half of the 1930s was disturbed by the squabbling of the Nation. This mainly began to intensify from the year 1936, when on the borderlands voices of the agitators on the side of the Sudenten towns were gradually getting stronger. In the year of 1938 the situation came to a head and the Bumba family decided to leave the borderland counties in September of that year and remove inland to his relatives to the town of Skuteč. From here the family lived out the war. After the liberation the Bumba family moved once again back to Děčín where, at a local school in 1945, Vladislav Bumba began to teach subjects in Humanities. Soon after his entry into his pedagogical calling (in the year 1947) Bumba contracted a disease of the lung - tuberculosis, which required long-term medical treatment in various sanatoriums. This insidious disease sent him, at first partially then completely into a full retirement for the disabled. In the year 1949 Bumba got married and roughly one year later the family greeted the first of their offspring. Then in 1953 another, and in 1954 the youngest of the family arrived, a girl. His wife found employment at a school as a cleaner. Due to an operation in 1952 Vladislav began to gather strength and upon an examination it was found that he could be made fit once more for work. However, the first attempt was nullified by the commission; they did not want him to enter the education service, to be amongst children spreading his tuberculosis. Therefore, as a starting point he was offered an available position at a district school union where in the Děčin region he knew that the wages were low. Then, in 1949 a friend of his came to him with an offer to join them in their own union organization, which had been founded by several well-known people. The union group was made up of seven members. Four of them worked at Mostecko, Bilinsko and Hora Sv. Kateřiny, and three at Děčín. Their civil duties were wide-ranging. The members of the organization at Děčín existed until the year 1955 when the State Police had uncovered their activities. Vladislav Bumba was arrested and interned at a State Penitentiary in the town of Litoměřice. After spending three months in this Penitentiary his dossier was sent to the district court at the town of Ústí nad Labem, where the whole group’s documents were processed, but it was in Litoměřice that they were sentenced for treason. For Vladislav Bumba he was sentenced to a maximum of nine years, but it was not agreed that the whole group should serve such a punishment and so all were called to the High Court in Prague where they were all transferred. The High Court judge, at a neighbouring district “Tabor Mír” (Peace Camp), attempted to lower the weight of Bumba’s punishment, in all probability under International Law, from nine years to six. From Pankrác prison he was transferred to the town of Valdice and put to work at the glass-works. He passed through the prisons of Pankrác, Valdice and Leopoldov. After his release from prison he was not permitted to re-enter the education profession, but worked instead repairing forest path-ways and also at bakeries at Děčin and at local factories Narex and Kablo. Vladislav Bumba died on February 11, 2009.