"My brother was very poor. My brother was in the bordelands. He needed help on the land and he was such a good farmer. To get a part-time job, he had to feed them... those helpers. So it ended up that... he had a religious wife, so he joined her. And the communists blamed him and arrested him. He served five years as a kulak, undeservedly, for killing pigs illegally. He had them killed... because of those pigs they locked him up."
"The runaway separated from the transport and was brought to us by a guy. That he was like a fugitive and what to do with him. So he was with us for a while, but we had nowhere to put him. Because the Germans kept passing. They knew some of the transport had escaped. So they were catching them. So there were always checks. Daddy was a little scared, too. They arranged with this... he was a plumber, this guy. And there at my aunt's next door, there was a big farm. There was a little room hidden in the attic, and they used to climb there through the roof. The plumber took off the tile and that's where [the prisoners] were served food. It was as if isolated. The Germans didn't find out that it was there. That there was a secret room."
"We had a minority German school here [in Klimkovice]. Well, there was a headmaster there and he had a daughter and she actually taught us. And I cheated her. I was older, I was about twelve years old, and a lady from Ostrava came to us and she spoke perfect German. And I knew the words too, but to put together an article... it was hard. And she translated it into German for me and I came to the school, I gave it to [the teacher]. And she says... She named us - like after my daddy: 'Urbánek, Urbánek.' They said it so er differently than we did.
'Who wrote your homework?' She spoke to me in Czech. And I told her, 'I did it on my own. I picked out the words.' I lied to her."
Antonie Šmicerlová was born in Klimkovice into the family of František and Marie Urbánek on 25 May 1925 as their second child. Thanks to her grandmother, she attended the Catholic Orel in her childhood. Like many other children, Antonie did not have much time to study and had to help with the farm. She remembers the fate of the Jewish inhabitants of Klimkovice. At the end of the war, Antonia Šmicerlová’s family hid one of the escaped Soviet prisoners of war named Alexei. He later joined the liberation struggle and lost his life. After the war, the witness began working in the internal trade department at Ostrava City Hall, where she was in charge of distributing food ration cards to the various municipalities. In the post-war period, her brother František Urbánek acquired land in the Jeseník region. Soon, however, the communists convicted him as a kulak and he spent five years in the uranium mines in Rožínka. In 1953, she started working as an accountant at the Machine and Tractor Station in Klimkovice, where she worked until her retirement. She and her husband lived in the former Dominican convent in Příbor for 30 years. In 2025, she was living in Klimkovice.
