The only church in the vicinity, the Tomslake Roman Catholic Church, is still used today for weddings and funerals. At the rear of the church is the Tomslake Museum, housed in a school teacherage building from the Tate Creek Elementary School which was moved next to the Church in 1986.
The theme of the museum is the story of the Social Democratic Sudeten German refugees who came to Tupper Lake, now Tomslake, in 1939 to escape the Nazis. They emigrated from the Sudetenland to Britain in 1938, completing their journey to Tomslake in 1939, the group of 518 spread over nine different sailings from Liverpool on several different ships.
In 1939 a group of Social Democratic Sudeten German refugees from the Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia arrived in Canada. Betrayed by the international community, abandoned by the Czechoslovakian government, the refugees were then more or less also abandoned by the Canadian government. Though originally urban dwellers who manned large factories in Czechoslovakia, they were forced to settle on farmland in the Peace Country of northeastern British Columbia. With little assistance from either federal or provincial governments, they managed to survive, then thrive, solely through hard work and perseverance.
Prior to the onset of World War II, Nazi Germany had forced Czechoslovakia to cede the Sudetenland to Germany. There had been ethnic Germans in the Sudetenland since the 12th century, most having retained their language and culture, remaining essentially apart from Czechoslovak culture. With annexation of the Sudetenland imminent, many Sudeten Germans aligned themselves with the Nazis, setting themselves up to extreme reprisals by the Czechs after the war. The Social Democrats, however, were adamantly opposed to the Nazis, many of them seeing their only avenue to survival being emigration to Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Argentina, or Scandinavia. Regrettably, however, the Social Democrats who remained after the war were treated the same as were all Sudeten Germans, regardless of their affiliations or beliefs.
Of some 80,000 social democrats in Czechoslovakia, only about 5,000 would manage to flee the Nazis. The rest were incarcerated, and many of them were executed. Many of those who survived the Nazi persecution were later expelled, together with other Sudeten Germans, on the basis of
Beneš decrees, a series of laws drafted by the Czechoslovak government-in-exile in the absence of the Czechoslovak parliament during the German occupation of Czechoslovakia in World War II.
As a result of the Beneš decrees, almost all ethnic Germans and Hungarians whose ancestors had lived in Czechoslovakia for centuries prior to World War II or those who had settled there during the German occupation of Czechoslovakia lost their Czechoslovakian citizenship and property and were expelled from their homes. [Many] of them died during the expulsion process which took place during the late 1940s.
From Wiki
Following is text transcribed from a bronze plaque mounted on a memorial in the church yard. Further north, at the north end of the churchyard, is the cemetery.
This monument stands in the honour of the Sudeten German Social Democratic refugees who came to Canada in 1939. In their homeland they kept their faith in freedom and democracy against truly overwhelming odds. Abandoned by the signatories of the infamous Munich Agreement September 29, 1938 to a fate of persecution, imprisonment, torture and possible death in the Nazi concentration camps of the Third Reich, they were among the fortunate who escaped and found asylum in Canada. Of the 1024 Sudeten German refugees Canada accepted, 518 were delivered to the small hamlet of Tupper, now Tomslake. Since their arrival they have worked with their fellow Canadians in building a greater and better land. They have earned acceptance and respect.