Antonie Kinštová

* 1937

  • "They didn't go straight to the collective farm, but they got an ugly and remote field. They worked on it for a while and then gave it up and went to the co-op. That wasn't possible. When you have to till, go far to a bad field and deliver supplies and then you can't even kill a pig, nothing. The ones that didn't deliver, didn't meet the deliveries, they fattened the pigs but they weren't allowed to kill them. You know, they were killing them under the table so nobody would know. I didn't know what butter was. Well, I knew what butter was, because in Volhynia it was sold, I used to beat it, but it wasn't available there if you didn't have tickets. And they didn't give tickets to the farmers if they didn't meet the deliveries."

  • "Then the Germans came and one of each family had to go with horses and sledges to carry the wounded. So two uncles went, my grandfather went, and my mother wouldn't let my father go, so she went. She thought that if a woman went, they would let her go home. But they didn't, and what the men did, my mother did. She carried the wounded with horses and sledges. Then she told me how many times she stood by the horse's head, just feeee, feeee, as the bullets flew past her head. Then it killed her horse. They wanted to give her another one, but she didn't want to. Then she got sick and she lay about seven kilometers from our village with Ukrainians she knew. They all came back and my mother still didn't go. And grandmother, she was already - you could say on her deathbed, very sick. And they all came back, and my mother didn't. She couldn't, she was so sick. The report couldn't be given because there was shooting. You couldn't go between the bullets. It was only after it died down that they brought mom in. And grandma kept saying, 'If only that Luba would come,' and she did, and Grandma really died by morning."

  • "I think they said we had four hectares. Of what was left, we used to take it to the market in town. We had the advantage of living about three kilometres from the town of Dubno. We went over the hill and we were in Dubno. And there were holes dug on that hill, and during the Germans' time they shot Jews there. I remember they were leading a man, his hands were tied backwards, and the poor man was walking completely bent over, and the Germans were following him with bayonets and so they were leading him. Probably up that hill. That's where they shot them. Lime was thrown in there when we went over that hill. When I was there, I remembered it, what they were lying there, poor things. And after the war, after what happened there, there were these shot horses, bloated... It was a terrible sight when we went to town afterwards. There was shooting across that village."

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    Šumperk, 23.04.2024

    (audio)
    duration: 02:14:26
    media recorded in project Stories of the region - Central Moravia
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We never knew who we were opening the door for.

Antonie Kinštová (Sitařová)
Antonie Kinštová (Sitařová)
photo: archive of the witness

Antonie Kinštová was born on 9 September 1937 in the village of Kliščicha in the territory of Volhynia in the former Poland as an only child to her parents, Karel and Libuše Sitař. The family owned a four-hectare farm and a blacksmith’s shop where her father ran his business. Antonie Kinštová witnessed the murder of Jews in Volhynia, her uncle was hanged by the Banderites, her mother almost lost her life when crossing the front line and she herself narrowly escaped death during the bombing. Her father fought in the ranks of the 1st Czechoslovak Army Corps. As a scout he went through all the battles from the Dukla Pass to Moravia. Her uncle Josef Sitař lost his leg in a grenade explosion, another uncle Václav Jesínek was killed in September 1944 in the fighting for the Dukla Pass and her uncle Antonín Jesínek died after being wounded on January 1, 1945 near Krajná Polana in Slovakia. In 1947 the family emigrated to Czechoslovakia and settled in the village of Tatenice, where they farmed eight hectares of fields. During collectivisation, after several years of pressure, they joined a unified agricultural cooperative (JZD). In 1956 Antonie married Alexander Kinšt, with whom she lived in Dolní Studénky, where their sons Zdeněk, Jiří and daughter Miluše were born between 1956 and 1960. Alexander Kinšt also came from Volhynia. Several of his relatives perished in Český Malín in Volhynia, where the Nazis murdered 374 innocent Czechs on 13 July 1943. In 1963 Antonie Kinštová joined Moravolen Šumperk, where she eventually stayed until her retirement in 1991. In 1976, the family moved to their newly built house in Nový Malín. At the time of filming in 2024, Antonie Kinštová was living in Šumperk.