"Black Partisan": Czech director and playwright says he "completely fell for the story" of Romani resistance fighter Josef Serinek

Truthfully, without embellishment, yet with a considerable dose of poetry bordering on magical realism, the production brings the audience closer to the Holocaust of the Roma and their incredibly difficult living conditions in the 20th century. “It’s unbelievable to see the reactions of the schoolchildren who come to the morning performances,” says Richard Samko, the well-known face from public broadcaster Czech Television’s news reporting who plays Serinek onstage.

“The children and even their teachers freeze up and are completely amazed when they see the scenes from the events of the Holocaust of the Roma,” Samko says. He recounts how after one performance he had to quickly leave the theater through the back entrance to make it to his shift at Czech Television. 

Reportedly the children ran after him shouting lines from the play: “Te merav!” (“I swear!” in Romani), and “Zdar a silu!” (“Good luck and stay strong!” in Czech), the greeting of the partisans. “I asked the 10-year-olds whether the performance was too difficult for them to understand. They said no, but that it was sad, especially the part about the Holocaust of the Roma. Then their teacher came over to me and confided that she had no idea how harsh it was. They had just recently been discussing the Holocaust and she brought it closer to the children through the story of a Jewish girl. She was sorry she’d not seen the performance earlier, she would have included the Holocaust of the Roma in the material being discussed if she had,” Samko said.

Vysočina (The Highlands)

The play was both directed and written by the current director of the Minor Theater, Janek Jirků, who has been “carrying it in his mind” for almost 10 years. He first heard Serinek’s story from his friends from the Vysočina (Highlands) Region.

Jirků grew up in the Vysočina Region and attended college preparatory school there. “I completely fell for this story. I could not comprehend why we never learned of this in school,” he said. 

He was also inspired by the book Česká cikánská rapsodie [Bohemian Gypsy Rhapsody], which was written based on Serinek’s own telling as recorded in the 1960s by historian Jan Tesař and published by Triáda in 2016, as well as on Serinek’s handwritten notes about his childhood which were provided to the Minor by the Museum of Romani Culture in Brno. “I feel a personal connection to that place. My wife is also from the Highlands and [the character of] Rufa actually fell in battle in her great-uncle’s house,” Jirků explained as to why the story was so interesting to him.

Rufa, a 19-year-old partisan from Russia in the former USSR, was a member of the partisan group led by Serinek. Although the Minor’s productions are primarily intended for child audiences of all ages, parents who accompany their offspring to the performances are no less strongly affected by them.

“For instance, today a lady was here with three older children and told me that her children grew up here, they’ve attended the performances since the ages of three, of five,” Samko said. In addition to the visual aspects of their productions, music plays an important role in them as well.

Some members of the theater’s musical ensemble have worked there for more than a quarter-century. Each production is gradually shaped through the creative collaboration of the actors, the art director, and the musicians.

“The creative process develops from the story to be told, and in the case of ‘Black Partisan’, from historical research. A meeting with the art director is usually the next step. He reads it and tells me what grabs him. He’s like a seismograph of the various situations. Then we go to the pub and talk about what we’d like to do and how. For ‘Black Partisan’, art director Jakub Kopecký and I decided the story would develop from a statue that rebels,” described Jirků.

“The script starts filling up with notes. In the next phase of the process the actors appear. I bring them an image, for instance, ‘a little dog who looks like an apple’, and it’s broken down visually and also in song,” Jirků explained.

Samko was tasked with suggesting Romani music for the production. “I really like the Romani musician Jan Áčo Slepčík, and in addition to his song ‘Na vašodá ke tu avlóm‘, we included the song ‘Andro da taboris‘ [In the Camp] in the production – the singer Věra Gondolánová recorded it beautifully. That song is touching and urgent in the Romani version, but here in the production they took it on in a completely different rhythm. There was huge respect for Romani culture and history here. Jiří Hradil, the head of the musical ensemble, rejected the idea of their playing the Romani version, saying that they themselves were not Romani and they couldn’t dare try to play it ‘in the Romani way’. I really appreciated that,” recalled Samko, adding: “When we first rehearsed the song, we all spontaneously burst into tears, tears were flowing from all of us. It was incredibly powerful.”

“The entire team co-authors the production, and an emotional line leads us through the creative process together,” Jirků explained. According to him, a story must fulfill certain criteria to captivate the viewer.

“I do it as if I’m telling an anecdote in the pub. To succeed in telling it well, the story has to have humor, somebody’s life has to be at risk, or there has to be a moving scene of some sort. Stuff that’s complicated to explain falls by the wayside. What’s left is maybe 5 % of everything we covered,” the director said.

Josef Serinek’s ups and downs

The adventure story of Serinek’s life could be the subject of a feature film. His childhood was just the start of a lifetime of difficulties.

Serinek was soon orphaned and, as a Romani boy, was forced to wander from village to village following a “gypsy” cart. In 1914, as a 14-year-old, he had to enlist in the army.

After the First World War, Serinek settled in Slovakia in the newly independent Czechoslovakia and started a family. He would probably have happily continued his ordinary way of life if the Second World War had not come and along with it, the forced imprisonment of the Roma living in Bohemia at that time into the concentration camp in Lety.

Serinek was taken away with his entire family of five children and his wife. The scenes set in the concentration camp in Lety are among the most impressive in the production.

The drama and seriousness of the situation is underscored when the prisoners are forced to identify themselves by saying their prisoner numbers instead of their names. The climax is a scene where the Nazis hang a young Romani girl who wandered into the forest while picking blueberries because, like everyone else, she suffered unbearable hunger in the camp.

The hanged girl’s shadow looms ominously over the stage while the actress who plays her hastily apologizes for being hungry in a disturbingly urgent, fearful voice. “Once again, I couldn’t hold back during that scene and burst into tears,” admitted Samko.

The play then further develops Serinek’s story – after a month and a half, he manages to escape from the concentration camp. He hopes to return with reinforcements to free his family.

However, he has to go into hiding as an outlaw, suffering from hunger, and it is a miracle he is not discovered and killed. The forest becomes his home, his protector, his refuge.

“I grew into the forest. I became the forest. I was the forest and the forest was me…” says the protagonist.

There is a parallel here to Serinek’s actual birthplace. In his birth certificate, it is listed as “the forest”.

Serinek makes it to the Highlands, where he meets people for the first time who give him aid even though it is dangerous for them to do so. Local Catholics feed and house him.

In the Highlands, Serinek also meets the important resistance organization called the Council of Three and becomes a partisan. Later, he himself builds up a partisan detachment composed mainly of Soviet soldiers who escaped Nazi German captivity.

Many of the escaped POWs are only a little older than Serinek himself was at the time of the First World War, and he becomes a surrogate father to them. He names his partisan unit “Black” (Černý).

Only after the liberation does Serinek learn that no one from his family has survived the war. His exploits in the resistance are not publicly recognized after the war because society is unwilling to admit that a Romani man can be a true war hero.

Serinek never spoke of his adventures during the war, not even to his children from his second marriage, and did not dictate his story to Tesař until the 1960s.

Richard Samko, actor

Josef Serinek’s grandson Zdeněk also came to the Minor Theatre for the premiere of the play and wept throughout the first half of the performance. Samko, for whom “Black Partisan” is his acting debut, was initially afraid he would not be able to combine the unexpected challenge of daily live performance with his job in television.

The director was suggested to contact Samko by Radoslav Banga of the band Gypsy.cz. “When I came to Richard’s office, I saw that he knew the story of Serinek, he had his story posted on the bulletin board in his office. That decided it!” Jirků said.

However, Samko said he’s constantly worried that it’s too obvious he’s not a real actor. “That news reporter diction keeps returning. It’s like I always emphasize the period at the end of a sentence more than is necessary. Then all I have to do is add: ‘Richard Samko, Czech Television,'” he explained, laughing with a nice dose of self-irony.

“You simply can’t erase those 25 years on television,” added Samko. “Now Richard’s had the bad luck that we’ve made him an actor,” Jirků joked.

Jirků has often focused on historical subjects at the Minor Theater. His plays include “Lipany”, “Zá-to-pek!”, “Bratři naděje”, and “Hon na jednorožce”.

About his latest play “Black Partisan”, subtitled “a Western from the Highlands”, Jirků wrote in the theatre program: “I like westerns, and Josef Serinek’s story reminds me of a western in many ways. It is full of shootouts, heroism, love stories, and the people whom I know from the Highlands, specifically – kind, courageous, honoring truth, and at the same time taciturn and mysterious. Serinek comes among these people during the war as an outlaw and they accept him, they don’t treat him as a fugitive Romani man, but as their fellow human being who needs their aid. He starts assisting them himself in return.”

The story in the theater ends with the same scene where it began, a statue of Josef Serinek who rebels because he doesn’t want a monument. The main message of the play resonates for a long time in the audience, namely, that real memorials are never built from marble, but are built from the heart.

First published in Czech in Romano voďi magazine.