Jozef Abrahám

About a hun­dred and twen­ty or a hun­dred and thir­ty Roma lived in the vil­lage of Budča. Abra­ham’s broth­er-in-law[1] was a Sude­ten Ger­man who had enlist­ed in Slo­va­kia. After meet­ing Abra­ham’s sis­ter,[2] he did not return to Bohemia.

[1] Name not given.

[2] Name not given.

Abra­ham was serv­ing in the army at the time Ger­many invad­ed Poland and the war began [1 Sep­tem­ber 1939], and was in Poland with the entire 25^th Reg­i­ment. Accord­ing to Abra­ham, some­thing must have hap­pened then between the Slo­vak pres­i­dent and the Ger­mans, because the Slo­vak Army with­drew and began to allow reservists and those who had already served their time in the army to go home. He returned home in Novem­ber [1939] and mar­ried Vil­ma, who had wait­ed for him while he was in the army. They came to get him in 1941.[1] He was issued with a uni­form in the bar­racks in Trenčin and they were going, he says, to Rus­sia. But they nev­er got that that far, stop­ping in Lublin.

Jozef Abra­ham then took part in the [Slo­vak Nation­al] Upris­ing – he was the only Roma from the vil­lage of Budča, but many oth­er Roma men were tak­en by the Ger­mans to work in the camps. He says that the Rus­sians first invad­ed Bystri­ca and on 28 August [1944] Zvolen, where he reg­is­tered as a insur­gent sol­dier[2] at the cas­tle. They advanced to the vil­lage of Tomášovce and into Lučenec, before being pushed back by the Ger­mans, and then towards Koka­va and Prašivá [a peak on the crest of the Low Tatras], where the Ger­mans sur­round­ed them, as they did the whole repub­lic.[3] Abra­ham fought under the com­mand of the Russ­ian cap­tain Krkhanov and his aides Pavel Beliek and [prob­a­bly Pavel] Bar­bo­ri­ak. He was on guard duty, going out at night to recon­noitre. The par­ti­san cam­paign against the Ger­mans last­ed about three months. Then each man returned home on his own. The Rus­sians took off in aeroplanes.

Then[4] the Ger­mans came again, and took peo­ple to work in Ger­many. Abra­ham was cap­tured right at the begin­ning, but took the oppor­tu­ni­ty to report to the coal mine in Handlová. When he arrived, there had just been a gas explo­sion and twen­ty peo­ple had been killed, so he want­ed to get out of there. He hid with his old­er broth­er[5] on a train going to Štubňa and threw his back­pack out of the win­dow. Appar­ent­ly the Ger­mans were stop­ping peo­ple who were car­ry­ing a load, a ruck­sack or a sack, and shoot­ing them regard­less, but allow­ing those who were not car­ry­ing any­thing to go. How­ev­er, a parish priest who was trav­el­ling on the train with them spot­ted them and denounced them to the Ger­mans at the sta­tion in Štubňa; accord­ing to Abra­ham, even parish priests were col­lab­o­rat­ing with the Ger­mans at that time. Abra­ham and his broth­er were cap­tured, tak­en to head­quar­ters and had to work for the Ger­mans – dig­ging graves for the dead killed by the Ger­mans. He was in the camp in Nováky near Koš,[6] where there were about three and a half thou­sand peo­ple. The camp was like a prison; they slept on straw on the ground, were cov­ered with lice, and in the morn­ing were giv­en one cup of unsweet­ened cof­fee and a piece of bread. But some­times they got no food for three whole days. The Ger­mans always took ten or twen­ty peo­ple to work, and none of them knew whether they would come back or not. Every evening the Ger­mans came, took one of the pris­on­ers away, shot him, and in the morn­ing the oth­er pris­on­ers found only his shoes and clothes. Abra­ham was also in Nemecké Pravno,[7] where the Rus­sians bombed a meat can­ning fac­to­ry. After that, there was noth­ing for the pris­on­ers there to do, so the Ger­mans took them back to Nováky. When the Ger­mans began to with­draw, they ordered the pris­on­ers to take bread from the ware­hous­es and brought them to Čad­ca, as they planned to repair some destroyed tun­nels. The Red Cross from Čad­ca gave the pris­on­ers a quar­ter loaf of bread and tea, and for the next two days they slept sit­ting by the wag­ons. Final­ly, the Bish­op of Čad­ca took them from the sta­tion to a cas­tle where they could sleep overnight, and he gave each of them papers to return home. Even so, the jour­ney back was full of fear; the Ger­mans were still hid­ing in the woods. Abra­ham was the last of all the Roma and Slo­vaks in the vil­lage to return, just before East­er. He was tak­en by car, by Rus­sians whom he had bribed with liquor bought with hid­den mon­ey. At that time, he and his wife already had three children.

Abra­ham also talks about Anton Facu­na – Abra­ham’s sis­ter-in-law was a ​“sort of” cousin to Facu­na. Accord­ing to Abra­ham, Facu­na posed as a Major Novák dur­ing the war because when he was in the [Slo­vak Nation­al] Upris­ing, a Slo­vak army pilot, Major Novák, was killed. Facu­na took his clothes and doc­u­ments, and because he spoke Ger­man well, he moved among the Ger­mans and could, for exam­ple, warn civil­ians if they were in dan­ger. He became acquaint­ed with Abra­ham’s broth­er-in-law, a Sude­ten Ger­man, who worked in the Ger­mans’ kitchen and took food from there to give to the par­ti­sans. The food was tak­en some­where towards Ban­ská Bystri­ca, Facu­na shot the Ger­mans on the way, took the load of food to the par­ti­sans and returned with an emp­ty car. He also arranged per­mis­sion for the Roma to move around the region, as who­ev­er had a per­mit was not shot by the Ger­mans. So Abra­ham dug pits for the Ger­mans [near the Tri Duby air­port] in Sli­ač, in which they hid when a plane land­ed, so as not be seen.

[1] Ger­many invad­ed the Sovi­et Union on 22 June and by 24 June the Slo­vak Army had already joined the Ger­man sol­diers at the front.

[2] Prob­a­bly a partisan.

[3] The Slo­vak Nation­al Coun­cil, with its seat in Ban­ská Bystri­ca, pro­claimed the restora­tion of the com­mon state of Czechs and Slo­vaks on 1 Sep­tem­ber 1944. (ed.)

[4] It is not stat­ed when.

[5] Name not given.

[6] There was a camp in the vil­lage of Koš where Jews were interned after the first depor­ta­tions stopped in Octo­ber 1942.

[7] Since 1946 Nitri­anske Pravno.

Jozef Abra­ham and his wife had five sons and four daugh­ters, but none of the chil­dren stayed with them. All the sons mar­ried non-Romani women. Accord­ing to them, Budča was becom­ing depop­u­lat­ed, and many Roma now lived in the town, as did their children.