Anna Urban

* 1943

  • "It [deportation] hit me hard because I was already seven or eight years old when they picked us up. And I remembered everything like that, and you can see that it remained in my memory as if I were experiencing it now. It got stuck in my memory that I remember everything perfectly... What I remember, I remember it as if I were living it now. I think it has made my life very bitter... It mostly affected my health, because I am disabled and I suffer a lot from it and I will probably suffer until I die. We got get sick many times in Baragan, because we were small, young children and we were sleeping in the open before they gave us those mats. And it was what it was. I think it all stems from there, our disease, rheumatism."

  • "At that time, they loaded us into some kind of wagons used to transport coal in Újbánya. There they drove us down to Hlubotina, from there by trucks to Oršava to the railway station. They put us on the train, in the wagons that carry animals. I remember like today, Alois Nedvěd was small, about three months old, and at that time we were driven here and there for about three days. They said that Ana Pauker wanted to take us to Siberia in Russia, but Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej said that he also had Siberia, and that was Baragan, which was empty and uninhabited. And then we had to build the settlements there. I remember how Alois Nedvěd had a falling sickness and he was getting foam at the mouth and then he was unconscious."

  • "That was on Sunday afternoon, a gentleman brought us new furniture that he was finishing up for us. We went to bed late and at three in the morning we heard banging on the door. The army came and said that we should pack up, that they would take us somewhere. You know mom started crying and dad started packing. We didn't even take anything, just something to eat. At that time, flour, oil and other cartels were handed out. I remember how we had small bags of flour, they were used up in two weeks after we came to Baragan and there was nothing left. There was a carrot field, so dad went to pick carrots. I remember we ate carrot cuspajs for two weeks. For a long time after that, I didn't like the carrot cuspajs or carrots at all. After that, there was nothing left, even the carrots ran out. Dad sold his miner´s shoes to someone there, so he gave someone his miner´s shoes and they gave us that... we built buildings there, we made bricks. My parents made bricks and we went to collect horse manure along the way, which was mixed into the bricks. So, they built a building, and dad gave away one pair of his miner´s shoes to get reeds for the roof for us. So, someone gave us a lot of reeds in return for the shoes to cover the building."

  • Celé nahrávky
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    Ústí nad Labem, 02.03.2023

    (audio)
    délka: 01:45:05
Celé nahrávky jsou k dispozici pouze pro přihlášené uživatele.

Deportation to Baragan ruined my life

Newlyweds Štefan and Anna Urban, the witness was 16 years old at that time
Newlyweds Štefan and Anna Urban, the witness was 16 years old at that time
zdroj: archive of the witness

Anna Urban, née Fiklová, was born on May 28, 1943 in the settlement Nové Doly (Baia Nouă), which falls under the Czech village of Eibentál in Romanian Banat. She grew up in a family of descendants of Czech colonists, and they lived together in a rented building in a workers‘ colony, intended for miners‘ families. Her father František served in the ranks of the Romanian army during the Second World War, which fought alongside Nazi Germany until August 1944. In June 1951, the Fikls family of four including their relatives was deported to the Baragan region, where the Communist Party of Romania displaced politically unreliable persons. The deportees had to leave their homes within hours and were only allowed to take a few personal belongings with them. The authorities dropped them off in an uninhabited area without any means and they were not allowed to leave the area. They first built simple buildings here, and later the place began to change into the village of Rubla. At the end of 1951, the Romanian authorities allowed Czech families to go to work in the miner´s city Comanesti in Romania, where they remained under state supervision. They were able to return home only at the beginning of 1956. However, her grandfather Josef Fikl died before the return, he died in Comanesti. They found their original apartment in an empty state, as most of the things had been confiscated by the national committee or dismantled by the locals. The witness attended a Romanian school in Comanesti and finished her last year in Oršava. She got married at the age of sixteen, worked in the household, and at the age of 40 she joined Eibentál as a post office worker. After 1989, the state awarded her a financial compensation for deportation to Baragan, and she also became a member of the Asociația Foștilor Deportați în Bărăgan association, which scientifically processes the statements of eyewitnesses. At the time of filming, she lived in the Czech Republic in Ústí nad Labem (March 2023).