Elena Lacková

Ele­na Lack­ová (1921, Veľký Šar­iš, Prešov dis­trict – 2003, Košice) was a Romani writer, poet and play­wright, and one of the lead­ing fig­ures of the Romani eth­no-eman­ci­pa­tion move­ment in Slo­va­kia. She began to write poet­ry even before the war, as a school­girl. Ele­na Lacková’s promis­ing work was inter­rupt­ed by the war: the cre­ation of the Slo­vak state was declared a week before her eigh­teenth birth­day and the fam­i­ly began to face repres­sion. In 1940 she mar­ried Jozef Lacek from Kapušany, who then spent the fol­low­ing year in the camp for forced labour at Petič. In Novem­ber 1943 Ele­na Lack­ová and her fam­i­ly expe­ri­enced the destruc­tion of their settlement.

After the war Lack­ová and her hus­band joined the Com­mu­nist Par­ty out of con­vic­tion and began to devote them­selves to edu­ca­tion­al activ­i­ties. She wrote her first play in 1948, Hořící cikán­ský tábor (The gyp­sy camp is on fire) about the per­se­cu­tion of the Roma dur­ing World War II, rehearsed it with her own com­pa­ny and then toured the whole of Czecho­slo­va­kia. She brought up five chil­dren, and then at the age of forty-two reg­is­tered for dis­tance learn­ing at the Fac­ul­ty of Jour­nal­ism and Edu­ca­tion at the Charles Uni­ver­si­ty in Prague, where in 1970 she was the first Roma woman from Slo­va­kia to grad­u­ate. She was forty-nine years old and by that time had nine grandchildren. 

Lack­ová wrote many arti­cles and plays for radio and the the­atre. Her best known work is her auto­bi­og­ra­phy Nar­o­di­la jsem se pod šťast­nou hvěz­dou (I was born under a hap­py star) which was pub­lished in coop­er­a­tion with the spe­cial­ist in Indi­an and Roma stud­ies Mile­na Hüb­schman­nová. She trav­elled with Lack­ová from 1976 to 1984 and record­ed her nar­ra­tion in the Roma lan­guage. It was 1997 before the tran­scribed, trans­lat­ed and edit­ed mem­oirs were pub­lished by the Triá­da pub­lish­ing house.

Ele­na Lack­ová was the first Roma per­son­al­i­ty to be award­ed a high state award – The Order of Ľudovít Štúr Third Class, which was award­ed to her by the Slo­vak Pres­i­dent Rudolf Schus­ter in 2001. The Slo­vak Pres­i­dent like­wise award­ed her his Com­mem­o­ra­tive Medal for her life­long efforts to bring the val­ues of the Roma nation to the non-Roma soci­ety and for her artis­tic depic­tion of the holo­caust of the Roma.

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Testimony origin

The inter­views were con­duct­ed over the course of eight years and became the orig­i­nal basis for the writer’s auto­bi­og­ra­phy, Born Under a Lucky Star, which includes a chap­ter on the wartime fate of Ele­na Lack­ová, her fam­i­ly, her native com­mu­ni­ty of Roma from Šar­iš, and the Roma com­mu­ni­ty of Kapušany, where she was married.

How­ev­er, for the book After the Jews come Gyp­sies, the edi­tor chose only mem­o­ries of the forced evic­tion of Romani peo­ple from the vil­lage. She did not use the edit­ed and pub­lished Czech ver­sion, but returned to the Romani orig­i­nals, which in the mid-1980s were to become part of an unpub­lished pub­li­ca­tion about the wartime fate of the Roma in Slo­va­kia. Ele­na Lack­ová’s nar­ra­tive was there­fore pub­lished in a new trans­la­tion and in a dif­fer­ent way from the auto­bi­og­ra­phy as a book.

The facts described prob­a­bly do not always cor­re­spond to the time frame pro­vid­ed by his­to­ri­ans. For exam­ple, the pro­ceed­ings over the announce­ment of the ban on Romani peo­ple enter­ing Prešov and their depor­ta­tion to a forced labour camp as pun­ish­ment for non-com­pli­ance could not have tak­en place imme­di­ate­ly after the dec­la­ra­tion of the Slo­vak state. The forced con­scrip­tion of Roma into the labour camp in Hanušovce nad Topľou did not begin in the Prešov region until the sum­mer of 1942.

Where to find this testimony

Mile­na Hüb­schman­nová (ed.): ​„Po židoch cigáni.“ I: Svědectví Romů ze Sloven­s­ka 1939 – 1945 (“After the Jews, the gyp­sies.” Tes­ti­monies of Roma from Slo­va­kia 1939 – 1945)

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