She worked like a dog on the family farm and was happy when the cooperative took over
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Marta Čechová, née Málková, was born on January 31, 1940, in Štrampouch in the vicinity of Čáslav as the fourth of seven children. At the end of World War II, her father decided to take over a large farm in Volfartice in North Bohemia, before the expulsion the possession of Sudeten Germans. The family struggled to manage the extensive farm with plenty of crops and cattle. Most labour was done by the witness and her mother, which is why the father forbade the witness from studying at a secondary medical school. The family gave up the farm and handed it over to the socialist cooperative with considerable relief and the witness got a job as the cooperative’s accountant. She got married in the early 1960s. On finishing his military service, her husband started working as a teacher. Later, the witness found a job as a forewoman at a glassworks in Skalice in Nový Bor area. The couple had two daughters, Ilona and Romana. In 1973, Marta Čechová lost her husband and had to raise the daughters by herself. Despite the tight budget, she decided to support her daughters in getting a university degree. Her older daughter Ilona became first a teacher at, and later the director of, the Nový Bor school of glass. Her younger daughter Romana became a doctor and was running a surgery in Česká Lípa. Marta Čechová left the glassworks and transferred to the uranium mines in Stráž pod Ralskem. It was still during the communist times that the witness visited Vienna, where her younger sister had relocated after her marriage, and other West European countries. After the fall of the Iron Curtain, she continued travelling around the world, visiting faraway countries such as Brazil, the USA or Thailand. She continued working for the uranium mines until 1995, when she retired. In 2022, she was living in Česká Lípa.
