“On 9th October 1948 somebody rang the bell in the evening. Mom was just having a bath. My brother and I looked through the peep hole in the door. We didn’t know the man who was behind the door, and so we called mom. She put on her bathrobe and went to the door. She opened it only partly, secured with a chain. The men showed her police ID cards and she thus opened the door. At that moment they stormed inside, shoved mom to the ground and placed a gun to her head. She had to put her clothes on, they took her away and we remained in the apartment alone. I was ten and my brother was eleven.”
“Thanks to the contacts my parents had, they knew Mrs. Hermína Bílá, the wife of general Bílý who was executed during the war. This way they got to the underground movement and she and dad were working there. In 1943, when I was four, the Gestapo came. Mom saw them from the window and she managed to hand over my brother and me to our neighbours. The Gestapo arrested my parents and the neighbours took care of us and then sent us to other people. Mom survived several concentration camps – Auschwitz Birkenau, Neustadt-Gleve, Terezín, and she came back. Dad died in Flossenbürg on February 15, 1945, on the day of my name-day. I had been meanwhile in the Institute for the Deaf-Mute in Prague-Smíchov, in the orphanage in Hradčany, and then one policeman was hiding me in the forests near Říčany, and I spent the end of the war in the ´Olivovna´ sanatorium in Říčany. Mom came back and she began looking for us through the Red Cross.”
“I had basically no family. The Germans have taken my family from me during the war, and the communists after the war. These regimes are one like the other. Both of them are dictatorships, both are disgusting. My mom has survived two death marches, she has survived concentration camps. She has survived all of it, and then when she was arrested by the communists, they were burning the soles of her feet with a hot iron during the interrogations.”
“My mom found me at the end of the war in the Olivovna sanatorium in Říčany. I still remember it as if it happened yesterday. We were returning from a walk outside, and some woman was sitting by the gate, and the institution’s director was with her. I thought: ´Oh, some visitors again.´ Nobody was ever coming to visit me. The director called me and I was staring at this stranger for a while and she at me. And this emaciated and grey-haired woman tells me: ´Jiřinka, I am your mom.´ I told her that this could not be true. That I had had a pretty mommy and she was old and ugly. Even now, I still remember how my mom must have felt. But I was still a child. She brought some bonbons for me, and she basically gained my favour by it.”
Mrs. Jiřina Urbanová was born in August 1938 in Prague. Her mother Emilie Faitová, who married as Kolářová, was of Jewish origin while Jiřina‘s fahter Josef Saibert was a Christian. Her parents joined the anti-fascist resistance in 1939. Her mother cooperated with the Defence of the Nation. Both of them were arrested by the Gestapo in 1943. The mother managed to hide the children and save them from being arrested. Jiřina‘s brother was hiding on a countryside farm, and Jiřina spent the war years in children‘s homes and sanatoriums. Her father was executed in the Flossenbürg concentration camp, and her mother was interned in the Small Fortress in Terezín, in Auschwitz, in the women‘s camp in Ravensbrück and in Neustadt-Gleve, where she witnessed the camp‘s liberation by the Red Army. Jiřina‘s mother worked at the Ministry of National Defence and later at the Ministry of the Interior after the war. She was arrested for her views in autumn 1948, tortured during the interrogations and eventually sentenced to eleven months of imprisonment. Jiřina, who was ten years old at that time, and her brother were meanwhile placed in various children‘s homes all over Czechoslovakia. The family lost their apartment, but after the mother‘s return from prison they were able to live together. Jiřina was not allowed to study and she thus trained as a lathe operator and then worked in this profession until her retirement. Mrs. Jiřina Urbanová passed avay on April 2014 in Kadaň.
