"Then they took my father away, we thought for questioning. They (the secret police) also went around the parish asking people if Dad was persuading them not to join the JZD (unified agricultural cooperative). And one lady was digging something, and they came to her and said, 'Sign here.' She said she didn't have time, but they insisted. She wanted to know what it was. They said, 'You don't even have to care, it's nothing like that. Just sign it.' So she signed it. It was Mrs. Samcova. Then in court, when dad was on trial, they called Mrs. Samcova. She said she hadn't had time, that she'd been taken away from work and that it wasn't true what she'd signed. She said she wasn't persuaded by the parish priest. They even threatened to arrest her for signing an untruth. And one day, when Vicar Kozhdon didn't come to the rectory, dad went to see if he was sick, because he was supposed to come. And there was that Mrs. Samcova. Dad just asked her how she was and left. The priest (vicar) Kozhdon took advantage of this and claimed that he had persuaded Mrs. Samcova just then. Father then wondered whether or not he had sclerosis. But then, when Mrs Samcová said in court that it was all untrue, he said: 'Then I don't have sclerosis, because I know I didn't talk to her.'"
"Once we had permission to visit him (my father) at Mírov. The brother-in-law drove us there, me and my mother. There was a lot of snow at our place and there was nothing there. There was a lady who was also waiting her turn and she only had slippers. Then they called us in so we could talk to father. There was this row of windows in that prison and they were all taken. When we went in, all I could hear was whispers as everyone was talking. We had the last window. Dad was brought in by a very clever guard. Mummy had some long lasting sausage and a walnut cake for dad, because of its long shelf life. She asked if she could give it to dad and he replied that she could. Dad quickly stashed it in his pockets. So we talked for a while. It was determined exactly how many minutes we had. Then we left, and dad went back among the monks. Dad was more interested in what a particular monk was locked up for than in writing anything about himself. In general, he was more concerned with others than with himself."
"I was still in bed and my dad was walking around the bedroom saying, 'This is war. We went to look out the back window of the rectory and a German soldier was coming from Stonávka. Then I got dressed and we went down and we saw another German soldier coming past the window. Dad told him we were satisfied Poles. He said he was Austrian and had come to get hay for the horses, but that he would pay us. He also said, 'You will see it will be like Napoleon's time. First a great victory, then a great crash.' He said it in German. And then, just a few days later, a Gestapo man came, a civilian from our village, a young man, and another one with a rifle. They told us to say goodbye to Papa. And they took father and led him around Stonávka. We thought they were going to shoot him when they ordered us to say goodbye. We had a little dog, and he was barking at the three of them. And suddenly father came back. He said they wanted all of Komorní Lhotka to see how they were leading the parish priest. They locked him in the basement of the former Czech school. And the one with the rifle said to him: 'I don't care. If the tell me to shoot you, I will shoot you." My sister ran to Robert Walach to protect my father. He was our neighbor. Then they took another Walach from the Shore and conferred in the office about what to do with father. And this one said that if they had him shot, the local people wouldn't trust the Germans. They released him and father returned happily."
Janina Unicka was born on 12th March 1931 in Komorní Lhotka in the Těšín Beskydy Mountains. Her father was a pastor at the Lutheran Evangelical parish there. The family claimed Polish nationality. In 1938 they welcomed the annexation of Czechoslovak Těšín to Poland. When the Nazis occupied the whole of Těšín after the outbreak of World War II, her father was expelled from the parish. During the occupation, the family lived in poor conditions. Under the threat of persecution and deportation, the parents declared their Silesian nationality and acquired German citizenship of the third category as part of the Germanization action “List of Germans”. Janina Unicka attended a German school, and after the war she graduated from a Polish grammar school. She worked in an agricultural buying office in Český Těšín and in Baška. She never left Komorní Lhotka, where her father was again the parish priest from 1948 to 1961. Then the communist courts sent him to prison for a year and a half for allegedly inciting against the collectivization of the village. In 1991, he received judicial rehabilitation. Janina Unicka did not marry and in 2023 lived in her parents’ house in Komorní Lhotka. She passed away on January 2, 2024.
