Antónia Pustajová

Antó­nia Pus­ta­jová described how the Roma got along well with the Jews in the vil­lage of Čierny Balog. For exam­ple, when the Roma did not have enough mon­ey to pay for their pur­chas­es, the Jew­ish mer­chant gave them cred­it, while the local Slo­vaks did not. The rich­est Jews in Balog were Artur Gros­mír[1] and his wife, nick­named Gros­mír­ka, who had two girls close to Antónia’s age. She was espe­cial­ly friend­ly with their daugh­ter Tim­ka, with whom she some­times even stayed overnight.

[1] Prob­a­bly Groswirth.

The Gros­mír fam­i­ly were, like the oth­er Jews, tak­en from the vil­lage one night by trucks and the Hlin­ka Guards began loot­ing their home the next morn­ing. Pus­ta­jová believed that if the Gros­mír women had known that their prop­er­ty would end up in the hands of the Guards, they would have pre­ferred to give it to the Roma, with whom the Jews sym­pa­thised. She also says that they cried for them.

After one raid on the par­ti­sans and their sup­port­ers in the adja­cent hills, the Ger­mans locked up the par­ti­sans and entire Roma fam­i­lies in the local large school. Pus­ta­jová described a plane drop­ping food aid in the hills near the hunt­ing lodge where the Ger­mans were con­cealed. Then they caught all those who came for the food.[1]

Peo­ple from the vil­lage brought food to the par­ti­sans and the Roma trapped in the school. Antó­nia Pus­ta­jová’s moth­er also cooked for them, even though they had lit­tle them­selves, and Antó­nia brought food to the impris­oned Roma fam­i­lies. She did­n’t know the Roma, she did­n’t know where they were from. Once they let a boy of about sev­en­teen help her with the soup con­tain­ers. When they arrived back at the school with the food, the pris­on­ers were already lined up out­side, and a Ger­man man got the young man and Pus­ta­jová to line up as well. But the school­mas­ter rec­og­nized her and called for help from the local priest, who man­aged to res­cue Pus­ta­jová. She recalled that the young man could have escaped, and her moth­er encour­aged him to do so, but he said that his par­ents and sis­ters were at the school and he belonged with them. He was sure they would go some­where to work, but instead they were tak­en to a val­ley out­side Čierny Balog, where some of them were shot and oth­ers burned to death in a shep­herd’s hut.[2] Antó­nia Pus­ta­jová’s hus­band had to help dig the mass grave.[3]

[1] While comb­ing the forests in the rebel ter­ri­to­ry around Čierny Balog, tank grenadiers of the 18^th SS Panz­er Grenadier Divi­sion ​“Horst Wes­sel” inter­cept­ed 40 rebel sol­diers and Roma fam­i­lies flee­ing east from the vil­lage of Neres­ni­ca (now part of the town of Zvolen). (eds.)

[2] One group of pris­on­ers was tak­en to the Jer­gov Val­ley, where on 14 Novem­ber 1944 all the men were shot and the women were locked in a hut, which they doused with petrol and set on fire. A sec­ond group met the same fate the fol­low­ing day near the set­tle­ment of Vydro­vo. (eds.)

[3] The 1944 tragedy in Čierny Balog, in which about 60 Roma (most like­ly Olah Roma) who had tem­porar­i­ly camped in the adja­cent woods were mur­dered, is described in detail in Arne B. Mann, Výz­nam spomienkového rozprá­va­nia pre výskum dejín rómske­ho holo­caus­tu (The impor­tance of mem­o­ry nar­ra­tives for research on the his­to­ry of the Roma Holo­caust), Romano džaniben 2/2013, 37 – 52.