Petr Ščuka: I was told there was "a soldier" in our family - I found out he was a partisan

Q: We’re going to start this interview a bit untraditionally: I’d like to start by asking about your great-grandfather, Ondrej Ščuka, who was a partisan during the Second World War. You even wrote your bachelor’s thesis on him when you were in the Romani Studies program at Charles University’s Faculty of Arts. What did you learn about him during your research? Was he a hero to you during your own childhood and adolescence?

A: I come from Písek in South Bohemia, where our family settled. My parents and relatives worked in factories and led docile, socialist lives before 1989, they didn’t teach their children to speak Romani so that we wouldn’t seem to be Romani and so the majority society would accept us. Naturally, that was nonsense… At the same time, we forgot about our forebears. In our family we knew one ancestor had been “some kind of soldier”, we had photos of him in uniform, but nobody paid much attention to it. Then, in 2018, I started the Romani Studies program, where Romani heroes and the Second World War are discussed a great deal. I recalled that we also had somebody like that in our family and I started looking into it. I learned interesting things none of us knew about back home.

Q: Where did you look for the information and what did you learn about your great-grandfather?

A: I travelled to Slovakia, which is where my great-grandfather came from, specifically to Poprad. I looked him up in the local archive. The documents from Spiššké Bystré, where Ondrej Ščuka lived, were full of his name. I learned that he set up a group of partisans, both non-Roma and Roma. He was also the unwritten head of the extensive family of Ščukas living in that municipality. He took care of his family members, arranging ration tickets for them, getting them work, negotiating on their behalf with bureaucrats. That was during the Second World War, when Roma had no rights whatsoever.

With the aid of my relatives who still live in Slovakia, I miraculously found one eyewitness to those times. She was already more than 90 years old, so it was pure luck that I was still able to speak with her. What’s more, she was still mentally well, her memory was still intact. She remembered my great-grandfather. Her family owned a sheep farm where they also had a family restaurant. Germans ate there during the war. One of them bothered this lady’s sister during one of their visits to the restaurant and tried to rape her. She ran outdoors, shouting, and my great-grandfather and other partisans ran over to help her. There was a brawl and my great-grandfather shot the German. However, he was so well-liked among the locals that when he was tried, everybody stood up for him and he was acquitted.

Q: Mr. Emil Ščuka ,the lawyer and politician, is also from Poprad, today he is the director of the International Conservatory Prague. Are you related to him, too?

A: Yes. My great-grandfather and Emil Ščuka’s grandfather had the same father, Josef Ščuka. He was a blacksmith who lived in Spišské Bystré. The municipality needed him back then because they had no other blacksmith and in Spišský Štvrtok, where Josef Ščuka lived before moving to Spišské Bystré, there was more than one.

Q: You come from an eminent Romani family. You are fighting for the rights of Romani people, you’ve established Identity Prague, a nonprofit organization, and this year you became a civil society member of the Czech Government Council for Roma Minority Affairs. Where did you find the desire to advocate for a better life for Romani people and for their rights?

A: At the Romani Secondary School for Social Work in Kolín. That school literally turned my life inside-out, I felt a desire to do what I can for us Roma to live better lives. In primary school I had to struggle with discrimination and racism, mainly from my fellow pupils. Primary schools in the Czech Republic are still quite a sad story. My daughter Lily completed ninth grade this year and experienced the same things the whole time that I experienced as a child. Absolutely nothing has changed.

Q: Did you try to address the situation with your daughter at the school?

A: We addressed it the whole nine years. The teachers knew we were educated Romani people who know how to defend ourselves. We had law offices send them letters of reprimand, we threatened to publish what was happening in the media. They started to be quite careful, but the problem is in society itself. Children behave according to what they see at home and it’s hard to influence that.

Q: Do you have an idea of what should be done, what steps to take, to change the majority society’s frequently negative perception of Romani people in our country?

A: It’s necessary to clearly define in the law what is and is not permitted. Through the Czech Government Council on Roma Minority Affairs we’ve managed to get a definition of antigypsyism adopted – after 30 years. That is not a legally binding definition, but at the very least it’s a step in the right direction. It’s important to hire Roma and to advocate for their education. That’s a vicious circle. If parents don’t have work and live in residential hotels, if they don’t have money for clothes and food, then they don’t have enough energy to pay attention to their children and motivate them to get good grades in school.

It seems to me that many Roma who live in poverty have given up on life, in short. They see no point to it if the center of every day is trying to get money for food or rent. Then they say to themselves: “Lord God, if that child of mine had to study until the age of 26 I wouldn’t be able to cope.” However, if you were to give these people work, they’d be able to afford better housing and then they’d start wanting to live in another way. Once Romani people will be working for public authorities, in banks, once they’ll be doctors, nurses, then people will start getting used to that and their attitude toward Roma will change. It’s not that such people don’t already exist, but there are still too few of them for now.

Q: Does it really seem to you that nothing has changed in this regard in the 30 years since the Velvet Revolution in our society?

A: From my perspective, from the standpoint of a Romani man, not much has actually changed. Maybe just that certain movements, like the racist skinheads used to be, have stopped promoting themselves. However, to this day it is still the case that when a Romani man walks into a shop, the security guard runs over and follows us the whole time we’re shopping. We have problems succeeding with job interviews. If we want to rent an apartment, it’s similar. By coincidence, our nonprofit has been looking for an office, a non-residential space, since November. On the telephone everybody really likes what we do, that we have a project for children’s education. When we go to the place, the real estate broker we’ve been speaking with immediately stops in his tracks: “Aha, it’s you…” Roughly an hour after we leave, he sends me a message that the owner doesn’t want a bigger number of people in the office. In short, he finds an excuse not to rent to us. Four times in the last month we went to sign a contract and it fell apart every time.

Q: If you experience this over and over, don’t you sometimes want to leave the Czech Republic?

A: I tell myself that every day, that I’ll pack up and move, but then I always tell myself not to back down. I will not allow a “Czechia just for whites” to be created here. I’m a Czech like everybody else, I love Czech history, the Czech language. Those are basically just desperate ideas that I always recover from somehow. However, I would like it if the law could be enforced against the attitudes of those real estate brokers.

Q: Tell me something more about Identity Prague, the organization you and your wife have established. How did it come about?

A: We established Identity Prague in 2016, because many Roma asked us to aid them with negotiating with the public authorities, completing forms and whatnot. After that we began working through a food bank to provide nutritional assistance to those in need. We did all that without needing to pay any wages, we had our own jobs in addition to that. Through the food help we did our best to lighten people’s costs. Most of the clients were single mothers, senior citizens, or people with physical handicaps. Then when the full-fledged war started in Ukraine, we began aiding Romani Ukranians and our team grew. In 2022, as a nonprofit, we had 35 employees.

Q: The Jagori dance ensemble for children also runs through Identity Prague and your daughter Lily was dancing there. This year she’s studying at the International Conservatory in Prague and winning one dance competition after another.

A: The dance ensemble came together in a totally “classic” way, as a recreational activity. All Romani children probably enjoy dance or music. We were lucky to have Kristýna Gorolová, a professional dancer from a Romani ensemble, to start teaching dance for us. I have to thank a former client of ours, a refugee from Kharkiv, Ukraine, named Oksana Trofymenko, for Lily’s success. She’s a professional dancer and the founder of a Ukrainian dance association. She and Lily got along both in terms of their movement style and as people, and Oksana started giving her private lessons.

Q: You also established the Ščuka Shop where you sell Romani flags, ties and other accessories with Romani motifs. What inspired you to do that?

A: I like how the Americans, for example, are proud of their nation, they fly their flag everywhere. I’d like Roma to be proud of being Roma, too. When I wear this tie, for example, it shows I’m a proud Romani man. I saw an opportunity in the market, nobody here was making such things. My wife and I said to each other: If not us, then who? There is quite decent interest in our products, but mostly from abroad, from America, England, and various corners of Europe.

Q: They say you’re also planning to sew Romani national costumes?

A: Yes, we’d like to, but for the time being that intention isn’t succeeding because they cost too much. The sewing alone costs approximately CZK 5,000 [EUR 200], because 25 meters of fabric is needed for each one.

Q: Christmas is coming. How do you and your family spend it, what do the Christmas holidays mean to you?

A: We experience Christmas quite intensively. The Infant Jesus still brings presents to our house even though our daughter is 16. For Christmas Eve we serve the classic Czech dish, carp cutlets and potato salad, but we also bake Romani bread, it’s like pita bread and comes from our ancient homeland, India. We do our best to uphold the Romani customs. We set a place for one more person, the family member who is no longer among us. According to our traditions, we put his food either on the window sill or in a dark corner. Naturally we go to mass. We thank the Lord God that we survived the year in good health, and we ask him to keep taking care of us in the New Year.

The Czech original of this interview was first published in Romano voďi magazine.