Helena Študiová

Hele­na Štu­diová remem­bered that she already had five chil­dren when they took her hus­band off to a labour camp. Accord­ing to her, they took eleven Roma alto­geth­er. Her hus­band was tak­en to Ger­many.[1] She described the time he was away as a time of hard­ship and anx­i­ety about how to feed the chil­dren. Hele­na Študiová’s hus­band returned in bad shape about a year and a half lat­er – he was brought by a non-Roma Slo­vak who cart­ed the mail from Prešov. Štu­diová said that in the camp her hus­band suf­fered from beat­ings, hard work and star­va­tion – hunger even drove the inmates to want to eat their shoes. Peo­ple lat­er hired her hus­band, who was the primáš, as a musi­cian at weddings.

[1] No fur­ther details are given.

After the war Hele­na Štú­diová tried to earn a liv­ing as well as look after the chil­dren. How many chil­dren there were is not quite clear from her rec­ol­lec­tions but prob­a­bly there were even­tu­al­ly ten or eleven alto­geth­er. She would make trips to Bohemia – to Dvůr Králové, and to Prague – to sell bacon and oth­er prod­ucts of which there was a short­age there, [prob­a­bly she was recall­ing the peri­od soon after the war when peo­ple (not only Roma) from Slo­va­kia took bacon and oth­er prod­ucts of which there was a short­age in the Czech part of the coun­try and either sold them or exchanged them for sug­ar, which was scarce in (east­ern) Slo­va­kia; the state author­i­ties con­sid­ered this to be the black mar­ket, and any­one caught would often be arrest­ed (ed.)]. They were a large fam­i­ly and there­fore she want­ed to build a big­ger home for them. She worked for ten years in a glove-mak­ing fac­to­ry, then hoed round saplings in the for­est, and after­wards worked for five years as a brick­lay­er. At the end of the inter­view, to a ques­tion about the pres­ence of par­ti­sans in the vil­lage, she men­tioned one man who was still liv­ing there at the time of the inter­view, with­out giv­ing his name.