Roma in the resistance: Heroism, persecution, and massacres of Romani women, children and men in Slovakia in 1944

Different kinds of persecution were applied to Romani people in the Slovak State, including the creation of various registrations, banning their entry into towns and villages, forbidding them to own some kinds of real estate, requiring them to remove their dwellings from the sides of local roads, and forcing Romani men to live and work in forced labor units. They were not killed until after the Slovak National Uprising was put down in 1944.

In August 1944, with support from abroad, the domestic resistance announced an armed uprising against the entry of the German Wehrmacht into Slovak territory and against the authoritarian rule of Jozef Tiso. Banská Bystrica became the center of the uprising.

German troops defeated the rebel militia, which took up the partisan way of fighting in October 1944. The German Army occupied Slovak territory.

Both the civilian population and the partisan movement were subjected to bloody repression in the occupied Slovak State. Boys and young men of Romani origin joined the partisan movement in particular.

Their spontaneous departures into the mountains to join the partisans were the result of the bloodletting of the previous years and the attempts to stand up to evil. The number of partisans who were Romani is unknown, but in central Slovakia, several men from almost every settlement left to join them.

The rest of their relatives faced the death penalty for the boys’ and men’s active participation in the partisan movement. Several Romani communities were murdered over their members’ active participation in the uprising.

Aid to the partisan movement, in the form of providing assistance to the injured, groceries, or supplies, was also grounds for persecution. Frequently just the suspicion of cooperating with the partisans was enough to incur punishment.

These executions were performed without any kind of due process. Sometimes they were performed on the spot, at other times Romani people were taken away to a mass execution ground.

Romani settlements were frequently set on fire so their inhabitants lost all their property. The first such settlement to be set on fire was probably the one in Kunešov on 6 October 1944.

One person died as a result of that war crime. On 14 October 1944, another such tragedy was perpetrated in Žiar nad Hronom.

In the area called Slnečná stráň, two families with the surname Šarközi were set on fire. A German unit returning from the rebel front in Pitelová burned 24 members of those families to death.

Just one young women survived the massacre at Slnečná stráň. Other such murders were perpetrated in October 1944 in Rimavské Zalužany and in Sklený.

Bloody November 1944

In early November 1944, the entire Romani community from the village of Lutila was arrested. There could have been as many as 46 persons, and their fates remained unknown until the end of the war.

The bodies of the Roma from Lutila were later discovered at the mass execution ground in Dolný Turček. To commemorate their lost neighbors, a memorial reading, in Romani, “Ma bisteren!” [Never Forget!] was unveiled in the center of that municipality in 2005.

A memorial with that same message is also located at the site of the mass grave in Valaská Belá. On 6 November 1944, German soldiers murdered 13 Romani people there.

Those victims were taken from their homes in Škrípov for no reason and without due process, driven to a remote site called Nad studienkami, and killed there. Local residents then buried their corpses there.

On 10 November 1944, three Romani women and five Romani men were captured and later executed in the village of Sásová near Banská Bystrica. The suspicion of cooperating with the partisans was also the reason for a similar tragedy befalling the Romani residents from the village of Podkriváň in the settlement of Dolná Bzová.

On 11 November 1944, a unit of German soldiers came to Dolná Bzová and took away all of the Romani men. They took not just the local Romani men, but also Romani men from Detva who were visiting Dolná Bzová at the time, 11 men total.

The Romani women from the Dolná Bzová settlement later found the abducted Romani men in the town of Zvolen, but then lost track of them. It turned out that they had been executed in the Jewish cemetery.

A massive tragedy also transpired in Čierny Balog. German soldiers captured about 65 Vlax Roma, probably from Neresnica near Zvolen, who had been hiding in the surrounding woods.

The captured Vlax Roma were imprisoned in a local school for about two weeks – local Roma brought them food and even tried to free some of them. On Tuesday, 14 November, the captured Vlax Romani men were then transferred to the Vydrovo quarter, where they were shot dead.

On that same day the Germans brought the captured Vlax Romani children and women through the Jergov quarter to the upper part of the Jergov Valley, where they forced them into a wooden cabin, poured gasoline over it and set it on fire. The original memorial marking this tragedy was restored last year by the In Minorita association.

In Krupina, on 17 November 1944, members of the Hlinka Guard captured all of the male Roma between the ages of 14 and 60 and turned them in to the Gestapo. After the liberation their corpses were exhumed from the mass grave in Kremnica.

Romani residents of Tisovec trusted provocateurs who were posing as partisans and paid for it with their lives. The Romani men were shot dead on the spot on 21 November 1944, while the Romani children and women were later murdered in the Kremnička neighborhood of Banská Bystrica.

The total number of Romani victims from Tisovec was 65 persons. On 22 November 1944, the military and security units of one of the Einsatzkommandos arrested 109 Romani people in the village of Ilija (19 men, 69 children, 21 women), brought them to Kremnica and murdered them.

A memorial to all victims of the Second World War was dedicated there in the 1960s, designed by the eminent Slovak sculptor Vojtech Remen. There is no text on the memorial mentioning the Romani victims.

In November 1944, Romani people also met their deaths at the hands of the Nazis and their supporters in the municipal department of Banská Bystrica-Podlavice and in the municipalities of Detva, Horné Hámre, Ihráč, Kosihovce, Kráľovce, Mýtna, Polomka and Vígľaš. In early December 1944, another such tragic event happened in Dúbravy, too.

One local Romani man from the Klincovec family had joined the partisans. Under cover of night, he went to Dúbravy to stock up on supplies and somebody, allegedly a local teacher, reported him to authorities.

The next day German soldiers took 15 male Roma age 14 and up away from Dúbravy. All were later shot dead at the mass execution ground in the Jewish cemetery in Zvolen.

In December 1944, more Roma were murdered by the Nazis and their supporters in Dolný Turček and Pavlovce in the Slovak State.

Dubnica nad Váhom – a symbol of persecution

While eastern Slovakia had already been liberated, in western Slovakia, deportations to some of the Nazi concentration and extermination camps were being prepared. At the site of a forced labor unit in Dubnica nad Váhom a “Detention Camp for gypsies” was set up in November 1944 and Romani families were imprisoned there.

In December 1944 there were more than 700 prisoners there; the bad conditions for maintaining personal hygiene and the cold winter affected the health of the children and the elderly, especially. More than 40 of the detainees, most of them children, died as a result of disease at that time.

The most serious illness there was the epidemic of spotted typhus in January 1945. At that point the Germans took charge of the camp from the local management and in February 1945, they ordered the executions of 26 sick prisoners (including children and women).

The Germans brought the sick prisoners in the back of a truck to the inaccessible woods on the outskirts of town and shot them. Not all of them died as a result of the gunshot wounds and some suffocated to death in the mass grave.

In the spring of 1945, the camp guards fled in advance of the approaching front and the camp was dissolved. Later that year a memorial was erected at the site of the mass grave, and in 2007 it was augmented with a monument reading, in Romani, “Ma bisteren!!!” [Never Forget!!!].

Southern territory

In November 1938, the eastern and the southern territories of Slovakia became part of Horthy’s Hungary after the First Vienna Award. In early 1944, the situation there radicalized and came to a head after the German Army occupied Hungary.

A large number of Romani people there were deported to concentration and forced labor camps. Roma from the occupied territories of eastern and southern Slovakia were concentrated in the detention camp in Komárno.

From Komárno, the Roma were then deported to the concentration camp in Dachau, and from Dachau they were sent to other camps. The killing and repression of Romani communities also escalated in the territory of occupied southern Slovakia.

The brutal murder of almost 60 Romani people, ranging from newborns to the elderly, happened on 23 December 1944 in the village of Slatina. The retreating fascists took their revenge on the residents there, who were unarmed.

The Red Army fought for the village and occupied it toward the end of December, but the Germans then pushed them back. The Roma were charged with stealing supplies and forced into a cabin that was set on fire; those who hoped to escape were shot dead.

At the local cemetery in Slatina there is a sign reading, in Romani, “Ma bisteren!“ [Never Forget!] marking the site of the Romani victims’ mass grave. The last Romani victims of the Second World War in this doubly-occupied part of Czechoslovakia were probably those murdered on 30 March 1945 near the village of Trhová Hradská.

About 70-80 Romani people from Hurbanovo, from its Šárad quarter, were concentrated there and then forced west by members of Hungary’s fascist Arrow Cross Party (the Nyilaskeresztes Párt, colloquially called the Nyilašovci by Slovak speakers) and by Hungarian Police. Some of the Roma detainees managed to escape.

However, about 60 of the Roma from Hurbanovo were driven into the Danube near the village of Trhová Hradská and not allowed to return to shore. Some drowned, others were shot dead.

In all probability those Romani victims were buried on the banks of the Danube near a guardhouse. Their bodies were never exhumed after the war.

Commemorative events

During the postwar period, the persecution of the Roma during the Second World War was almost never discussed and the crimes from that era remained unpunished. During socialism, a strong cult celebrating the Slovak National Uprising was built up through the erection of monuments and the installation of memorial plaques.

The names of Romani victims were listed on these monuments, but there are no inscriptions to the effect that one of the reasons they were killed was that they were Romani. The first memorial with an inscription stating that the victims of this repression were Romani was erected in 1969 in Čierný Balog.

Since 2005, the In Minorita association has been doing its best to enhance these monuments, installing new ones and reconstructing old ones, but most importantly, spreading the information that Roma were persecuted during World War II and gave their lives for freedom. Currently there are “Ma bisteren!” [in Romani, “Never Forget!”] memorials at nine places in Slovakia.

Last year we commemorated the 80th anniversary of several sad events from this history. The In Minorita association managed to organize remembrance events in Čierný Balog, Slatina and Zvolen.

In Dubnica nad Váhom, these tragic wartime events have been regularly commemorated since 2007. It is true that participation by Romani people in these events is weak.

More often we manage to invite individuals or secondary schools to collaborate with us on these events. It is clear that this could create a space for the emancipation of the Roma in Slovakia to understand their own history.

For the time being, this is not the case; it seems that deprivation, existential insecurity, and poverty are preventing part of the Romani population from reflecting on who we Roma are and what we have lived through in Slovakia. It is also true that neither non-Romani children nor Romani children learn anything about the history of the Roma in school, which makes it difficult to find anybody at all interested in understanding the coexistence between non-Roma and Roma here from the time of King Sigismund up to the present.