Antonie Angrová

Antonie Angrová grew up in the village of Kněždub in the Hodonín region. She had three siblings, Jan, Kateřina and Marie. Her family was well integrated in the village. Antonie’s father worked as a blacksmith, her mother washed and ironed for local farmers. The whole family also performed seasonal work on a local estate. They were not paid in cash, because the people themselves had no money, but in kind.

Antonie recalls that they did not experience poverty, and that she grew up like a peasant girl. In 1932 she married František Kýr and moved with him to nearby Strážnice. Here, too, they paid and earned their living in kind.

In the autumn of 1942, rumors began to circulate that Romani people would be taken away to work. Antonie’s family was summoned to the police station, where they were fingerprinted and photographed. Six months later, in the spring of 1943, the gendarmes came for them, told them to pack their bags, and took them to the train station. Only the Romani women, whose husbands from peasant families had arranged an exemption, were spared. At the train station, Antonie was approached by a gendarme who had previously served in Kněždub and had even attended her wedding in 1932; he later told her mother that if she had asked, he could have arranged her release. However, Antonie left with the others for Olomouc, where they were housed in an inn for several days.[1] The Germans then allowed one representative from each village to call home for them to take them back to the village. However, only those from Vrbka [presumably from Mala or Hrubá Vrbka] and Velká [presumably Velká nad Veličkou] came.
Antonie commented in in this connection that the local people, not just the Germans, also played a role in the transports of Romani people. She recalled specifically Šmejkal,[2] the mayor of Strážnice, who, like his deputies, enriched himself from property left by the Roma. Councillors Sochor and Pištělka,[3] on the other hand, tried to exempt at least five Strážnice families from, including Antonie’s, from the transport, but they were too late. The conductor had already handed over the list of those being transported and could no longer release anyone. So she left with the transport,[4] and more and more families were picked up along the way. From Ostrava the train went non-stop to Auschwitz.

Upon arrival at the [concentration] camp, they quickly ​“realized what sort of horror we were going into.” Soldiers with dogs took them to the so-called G*psy camp, where they tattooed them with [prison] numbers. Antonie’s number had to be corrected.[5] At first they were allowed to wear their own civilian clothes, and then they were given the clothes of Jews. They were housed in a block[6] where there were already other Czech Roma. There were beds on either side, in three tiers, on which they had two blankets — one under them and one to cover them. A chimney flue can the length of the block heated from both ends. It did not heat the block but it could be sat on. A barrel by the rear exit served as a toilet, which stank strongly. The block leaders and their assistants [Stubendienst] were not only Germans but also prisoners, who had been selected and were often even worse. They woke the prisoners in the morning by banging on the bunks with their truncheons, and those fit for work had to line up outside the block to form a so-called Arbeitskommando or work party. They would carry bricks back to the camp from ruined Polish houses, as well as rocks or sods of grass.

There was so little food that the prisoners even stole from each other. For breakfast they were given black tea, which was scarcely drinkable, but at least it was boiled. Lunch was brought to the workplace: soup, sometimes made of beetroot, sometimes of potatoes, cabbage or nettles, and for dinner a piece of bread with salami or margarine. If someone hid bread under their head for the morning, they usually lost it, so they preferred to eat it all at once. Those who drank water fell ill with typhoid fever. This also happened to Antonie’s husband, who died of typhoid fever in the camp.

Antonie contracted tyfus, for which she was treated for six weeks in the sick bay, and she remembered a kind Polish doctor and his wife, a midwife.[7] If a Roma person died, the body was sent to the crematorium to be burned. Once she saw Jewish women with prams going towards the woods in the direction of the crematoria and only the empty prams were brought back on a truck. Antonie’s mother and aunt arrived at Auschwitz in a later transport; they both asked to join their children. Antonie’s brother Jan had previously been working on an estate at Kněždub, where the administrator Parsch[8] had him sent to concentration camp with his two sons when he refused to ​“join the German side”. At Auschwitz she was also reunited with her sister Kateřina and her husband, after an informer had revealed they were at home at Hodonín.

Antonie was in Auschwitz for eighteen months, after which she was taken to the Ravensbrück women’s camp and then, after some time, to Kraslice, where there was a factory for the production of aircraft parts.[9]

When the factory started to be bombed, prisoners were evacuated on so-called ​“death marches”. Antonie escaped from the march with her cousin Růžena Kýrová and others and they reached the border [of the Protectorate] via Karlovy Vary. A customs officer let them cross the border and they were given food and somewhere to sleep in the inn at Maletín, the first village they reached. Antonie became ill from the food and had to receive treatment. They eventually reached [Uherské] Hradiště via Prague, Brno and Zlín, but a battle was still in progress and they had to take refuge in a shelter. Four days later Hradiště was captured [from the German forces] and Antonie and her cousin arrived home in Strážnice on the first of May [1945].

[1] The inn ​“U Ostrčilů” at Olomouc-Chválkovice, Dělnická 12. (ed.)

[2] Alois Šmejkal, mayor and owner of a steam sawmill in Strážnice. He died on 4 April and his funeral was on 6 April 1943. (ed.)

[3] Jan Sochor, a peasant, and Emanuel Pištělka, originally a teacher by profession. (ed.)

[4] She was deported 19 March 1943. (ed.)

[5] Antonie is listed in the register of women — at that time under the married name of Kýrová. Her original tattooed number had been given a day earlier to Sintica Stefanie Reinhardt, born at Katzendorf in 1909. (ed.)

[6] The Czech Roma were mostly housed in Blocks 9, 13, 15, 16, 18, 19, 21, 23, 25 and 27. (ed.)

[7] Dr. Tadeusz Szymanski, the head prison doctor at Block 26, where the infectious diseases ward for women and children was located. His wife, Dr. Danuta Szymanska, was also a prison doctor at the camp infirmary. (ed.)

[8] Hermann Parsch, administrator of the Stražnice estate of Count Anton Franz von Magnis.

[9] There was a branch of the Flossenbürg concentration camp in Kraslice and female prisoners performed forced labour at the Luftfahrtgerätewerke A. G. (ed.)

After the war Antonie Angrová received a letter from a man from Tišnov, who had been a block elder’s assistant at Auschwitz along with his brothers. He asked her to write him a reference that he could attach to his application [for a certificate of participation in the national liberation struggle under Law 255/46 Coll. (ed.)]. But Antonie did not write back to him, as she did not want to harm him by her statement: she herself had been treated decently, but others had not.