Solid moral principles are like a life compass

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Tamara Kobosilová, née Svobodová, was born on March 8, 1931 in Turnov. Until she was eight years old, she grew up with her parents and her five years older brother. On September 1, 1939, her father was arrested by the Gestapo and, together with another man from Turnov, interned in the Buchenwald concentration camp until the end of the war. This fact significantly affected the family’s life, even materially. Thanks to regular financial help from Sokol, the family survived. The witness bore her father’s absence very hard. February 1948 brought another hard blow to the family life. The persecution of the father, who was an active member of the Czechoslovak National Socialist Party even after his return from the concentration camp, by the Communist authorities began. First he was briefly imprisoned in the Turnov prison, then he was expelled from Turnov to Litoměřice, then to Žalhostice, where he worked as a teacher; he came home only on weekends. His last place of work was Liberec, but even there he did not escape the surveillance of the State Security (StB). The witness graduated from primary school and grammar school in Turnov. She studied Czech-Russian at the Faculty of Education of Charles University in Prague, which she supplemented with a degree in special pedagogy; she then devoted herself to this profession for some time. For the longest time, however, she worked as an editor at the State Pedagogical Publishing House in Prague. She had two daughters from her first marriage. She met her second husband, a French citizen, through correspondence. The friendship grew into marriage. She often stayed in France, but for family reasons she never moved there permanently. In 2024 she lived in Turnov.