VIDEO: Interview with grandson of the Czechoslovak Romani partisan Josef Serinek

A Romani hero of the WWII-era anti-Fascist resistance, the partisan Josef Serinek, was remembered at the end of July by those who attended a tree-planting ceremony in his honor in the Vysočina Region that was held at one of the places where he undertook his resistance work. The event was organized by the Black Partisan (Černý partyzán) initiative led by the former Green Party chair and current director of the Ashoka organization in the Czech Republic, Ondřej Liška, who invited Serinek’s grandson Zdeněk to address the gathering.

“I am terribly glad my grandad was the kind of man he was, that he was not an ordinary person,” Serinek said afterward in an interview for news server Romea.cz. “I’m thinking about whether anybody today could survive what he survived. Would anybody today be capable of surviving under the conditions that he had to survive?”