Jozef Horváth

The Horváths lived with five oth­er Roma fam­i­lies in a Roma set­tle­ment about half a kilo­me­tre from the vil­lage of Železník. Jozef Horváth, who had three broth­ers and two sis­ters, remem­bers pover­ty and unem­ploy­ment. His father earned his liv­ing as a black­smith, a trade that Jozef Horváth and his broth­ers learned from him. The moth­er and sons went to sell prod­ucts from the forge to the farm­ers; receiv­ing only food in return – as for oth­er casu­al work. They were paid in cash by the farm­ers only when they played for them, for exam­ple, at a wed­ding. The school the Roma chil­dren attend­ed was two kilo­me­tres away and the dif­fi­cul­ty was com­pound­ed in win­ter by the fact they did not have any warm clothes. When Jozef Horváth reached school age, he didn’t attend. He describes the poor rela­tions with the non-Roma Slo­vaks of whom they were afraid, and on the oth­er hand the sol­i­dar­i­ty between the Roma and the Jews, their mutu­al assis­tance and kindness.

At the time Jozef Horváth was tak­en off to a labour camp he was liv­ing with his wife at his father-in-law’s in Kapušany, where many Roma made a liv­ing through the lucra­tive pig trade. A non-Roma acquain­tance from the vil­lage who had joined the Hlin­ka Guard came to arrest him; his father-in-law was spared, appar­ent­ly due to his finan­cial stand­ing. Mean­while, in Horváth’s native Železník, the local Slo­vaks stood up for the Roma with the argu­ment that the Roma worked for them. Horváth relates that apart from the Roma they sent with him to the camp a few poor non-Roma men from Kapušany. He was interned for the first time in 1941 or 1942 in Hanušovce nad Topľou in the Petič camp, where he spent per­haps two or three months. He remem­bers the inad­e­quate food rations, the impos­si­bil­i­ty of mutu­al vis­its and the fre­quent beat­ings. It was fol­lowed by the camp in Dub­nice nad Váhom, which in his words was eas­i­er com­pared to Petič; they col­lect­ed stones by the riv­er. Lat­er, Roma women and chil­dren were interned in Dub­nice, but sep­a­rate­ly from the men. Horváth remem­bers Jan Lacko from Kapušany and his rel­a­tive – the two men repeat­ed­ly tried to escape. Accord­ing to Hor­vath, Jan Lacko killed him­self dur­ing one attempt when he jumped from a lorry.

Jozef Horváth and his wife had four chil­dren dur­ing the war. His wife received no mon­ey dur­ing the rough­ly eigh­teen months Horváth spent interned in the camps. After the arrival of the Rus­sians the pris­on­ers scat­tered and Horváth set out on foot for home, from where he was enlist­ed to serve in Nitra and Nový Zámky. At that time there were still Ger­mans below the Tatra Moun­tains, which was why the army was sta­tioned there.

Horváth was dis­charged from the army in 1946 and left for Bohemia. After the events he had expe­ri­enced he did not want to go home. He was afraid of the wors­en­ing sit­u­a­tion and, more­over, in Bohemia it was pos­si­ble to earn a liv­ing. He also remem­bers the com­man­der from the time of the war who arrest­ed him and sent him to the camp – he then need­ed his sig­na­ture on the essen­tial doc­u­ments to be grant­ed a pen­sion. In con­clu­sion, he says he did not receive any finan­cial com­pen­sa­tion for the time spent in the camps.