Josef Miker

“My mum’s mum died when my mum was about two or three so she was raised by a stepmother. My grandad came from a blacksmith’s family but was not a blacksmith himself as only one of the sons could be a blacksmith. This was a kind of Romany tradition when there were over five sons, one had to be a blacksmith. So one of them was a blacksmith, I don’t know whether there were five or six of them, but only one of them was a blacksmith and he lived elsewhere. The dad of my mother used to serve a Jewish family who had a shop, field and a small farm. He went there for service and took my mother along since she was five. And when our parents married, they lived in Velké Zalužice, where my father had a house. And in 1962 or 1963 there were floods in Slovakia, the river Šírava spilled out of its banks and flooded my father’s land with all the community. They decided to make it into a big lake and Romany people of that community were distributed along neighbouring cities and villages. My parents ended up in Sobrance, where I was born in 1965.”

“When it first happened there… this was in 2000. I knew that there had been a concentration camp since the time young Mlynář was the minister, as he said it publicly, including where exactly it was located. So I started to get interested. And then, when I knew my present partner, we spoke with her granddad and they claimed that they were original Czech Romany people. I just asked them where they had come from in Slovakia and he replied: ‘I don’t come from Slovakia. We are the original Czech Romany people.’ So I asked him about the Lety camp at the time of the war. And he said, ‘Yes, son, I remember it. I was there.’ And the he started telling me about it. Then came uncle Ruda who was six years older than her granddad, so he remembered even more. And he told me about the dreadful things that they had gone through there. How their sisters were raped, how their nephew who was like brother to them was killed, they spoke about him like he was their brother but it was their nephew Sidonius.”

“He went to serve in the army but as he was illiterate, never went to school, he was assigned to the infantry regiment. And then – he could not serve as a guard, could not learn the directives since he couldn’t read – he was transferred to the unit of the politically-unreliable persons, PTP, and was sent to mines in Ostrava. And he liked it so much that he stayed well until 1977.”

“We didn’t expect it. This was really a huge difference between the Czechs and the Slovaks, I have to say. In Slovakia, they tended to ridicule us, whenever they saw a Romany person: ‘A gypsy, sold his horse and is tipsy’, things like that. And in Czechia, we were welcomed really nicely. For instance, we waited for our furniture to arrive for about a week and neighbours around, one neighbour asked my mum, ‘You have your flat empty, don’t you?’ And my mum said, ‘Yes, we’re waiting for our furniture to arrive. But we have been waiting for a week already and still nothing.’ And out neighbour went around other neighbours and everybody brought us something. Some brought duvets, others brought a sofa. We didn’t expect it, really. I cannot complain about my neighbours or anybody that they would abuse me, calling me a gypsy or something like that. I cannot really say a wrong word, here in Czechia.”