A False Dawn: My Life as a Gypsy Woman in Slovakia

Citation

Guy, W. (2000), "A False Dawn: My Life as a Gypsy Woman in Slovakia", European Business Review, Vol. 12 No. 6, pp. 355-360. https://doi.org/10.1108/ebr.2000.12.6.355.1

Ever since the summer and autumn of 1997, when substantial waves of dark‐skinned asylum seekers from Central Europe arrived first in Canada and shortly after in the UK, the Roma, mainly from the Czech Republic and Slovakia, have attempted to gain permission to remain in a succession of European Union states on the grounds that their lives are in danger in their own countries. Until now only Canada has viewed their plight with compassion. Other governments promptly label them as economic migrants lured by generous welfare benefits, in spite of well‐documented evidence of the widespread racial attacks they have suffered in their homelands, and return them as swiftly as possible.

It is part of the strange fate of the Roma, more generally known by the name others gave to them – gypsies – that almost everyone has heard of them and has ideas about what they are, yet very few have any real understanding of this resourceful and persecuted people. Consequently, it is difficult to match the modern asylum seekers that stare at us from the front pages of our daily press with traditional stereotypes of nomads with horses and of dusky, long‐skirted maidens, dancing round a camp fire. There is a huge gulf in our knowledge that needs to be filled to enable us to respond appropriately and humanely to the current predicament of Roma and it is only books like Ilona Lacková’s autobiography that can make good the deficit.

One of the most important aspects of this powerful book is that although it is the story of a unique and talented individual, who overcame many difficulties to become one of the leading Roma authors of plays, short stories and Romani fairytales, it is also firmly rooted in the collective experience of her people. Throughout, her account is imbued with the core Romani concepts of romanipen (Romani values) and especially coacoipen. This can be translated literally as “truth” but has a far broader meaning including a deeply felt moral sense of “justice”. Perhaps the nearest English equivalent is the blues singer’s conviction in “telling it like it is”. In recounting her own life history, Ilona Lacková also gives us a vivid picture of the unfolding of a new historical trajectory for the Roma of the former Czechoslovakia. Here, as elsewhere in Central and Eastern Europe where by far the largest numbers of Roma live, the overwhelming majority have been long‐settled rather than nomadic, in contrast to the stereotype.

Written in a moving and direct style this is her own personal story as told to her friend Milena Hübschmannová, a lecturer in Romani studies at Prague’s Charles University, who has championed the cause of the Roma for all her adult life. It is all the more effective thanks to a sensitive and sympathetic English translation by Carleton Bulkin. The original Czech text was completed in 1986 but not published till a decade later. Although this account does not deal with the present traumatic post‐communist period, nevertheless it gives more than enough evidence of earlier discrimination suffered by Roma to explain the more overt attacks that were to follow with the removal of repressive communist control.

Ilona Lacková was born in 1921, the year in which the construction of the newly independent Czechoslovak Republic recognised Roma as national minority for the first time. Not that this helped much, for in times of economic depression and hardship Roma suffered far worse than most. Hunger forced them to steal from the fields and infuriated peasants occasionally reacted with physical attacks and even pogroms. Yet Ilona Lacková’s family was more fortunate than most for her father was a relatively high‐status musician and her childhood memories are often of joyous community occasions like fairs. By the time of the outbreak of the Second World War she was newly married, with a baby, and these brighter moments were soon replaced by some of the darkest days Roma have ever endured.

Although Roma first arrived in European countries as long ago as the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries they have nowhere been accepted as indigenous peoples and are still regarded as outsiders and universally their status has been that of pariahs. At various times this has led to their forcible expulsion, physical mutilation and even extermination. This persecution reached its peak during the Second World War when up to half a million European Roma, including those of the Czech lands, were annihilated together with the Jews in the death camps of the holocaust. Roma in Slovakia were more fortunate, for in this puppet state they were often sent to labour camps from which most eventually returned. Meanwhile, those outside these camps sometimes sheltered partisans and also fought alongside them – often suffering brutal retaliation. So it was hardly surprising that Roma welcomed the multiracial Red Army and then lent their support to the Communists who, for the first time in the tortured history of the Roma, offered them hope of toleration and even of equality.

After the Second World War the reconstructed Republic expelled the three million‐strong German minority, creating a massive labour shortage in the industrialised Czech borderlands (Sudetenland) and towns where they had formerly lived. Roma – and landless Slovaks too – were recruited to replace them, especially from the most impoverished region of East Slovakia. Ilona Lacková and her husband joined this human tide of migrant workers and her writing exuberantly conveys the joy of Roma in the apparently limitless possibilities of this new world compared with stagnation in the old world as a neglected rural underclass. Bohemia and Moravia became “the promised land” for Roma where they found not only employment and accommodation, but also respect:

… as [the Romani proverb] … say[s] na ca maro the pat’iv manuseske kampel – man does not live by bread alone, he also needs honour, and so our people were also drawn to the Czech lands by enthusiastic reports of how the Czechs didn’t call gypsies “gypsies” but Mr Horváth and Mrs Kalej.

Angered by renewed and familiar discrimination after her return to Slovakia, Ilona Lacková then did something quite exceptional. She decided to write a play about Roma experience during the war to “show the gadze [non‐Roma] who we were, what we had been through and what we were going to through, the feelings we had, and how we wanted to live”. Husband and mother thought her mad, but when she read her play to them, they immediately recognised her achievement and with the help of family and friends she formed an amateur cast that eventually toured throughout the country. Eager Roma usually arrived well in advance for these performances, only to vacate their seats deferentially to peasant farmers. But Roma and non‐Roma alike were held spellbound and moved to tears by the drama of the killing of the Romani leader at the hands of the gendarmes and stirred by the subsequent rebellion of Roma with Slovak support. Ilona Lacková was satisfied since “for the first time in my life I felt that the gadze were looking at us like people”.

The success of the play led to Party interest in this young activist and subsequently, after political and technical training, to a series of posts in health and culture at local and regional level. The account, of her packed life during this period, gives a vivid and comprehensive picture of Roma health, living and social conditions in the frequently segregated rural settlements of Slovakia and urban ghettos where most Roma lived. Although an optimist by nature, Ilona Lacková also voices growing disillusionment with the wide disparity between the promise and reality of Communist rule. She tells of returning migrant workers with hard‐earned savings, prevented by prejudice from building among non‐Roma, constructing their fine new houses in the settlements – only to have them bulldozed for breaching planning regulations since the master plan was for all settlements to be abolished. She fought to obtain permits for new houses – even in “white” villages – and recounts the tragic tale of one “upstart” whose new house was simply demolished by his would‐be white neighbours. Most bitterly of all she courageously spoke out at meetings about Third World conditions in overcrowded settlements ‐ without safe water or sanitation and plagued by endemic disease. Officials praised her, clucked sympathetically, but little seemed to change.

Having been born in one year of symbolic importance for Roma, Ilona Lacková retired in another, for in 1971 the first World Romani Congress took place in London with the participation of a delegation of Roma from the Czech lands. But her activism took a different form and she turned to her beloved writing, which she still practices to this day. But just as her working life was made all the more arduous by family problems, of which she speaks with unashamed frankness, her retirement was no sedate period of leisure. Roma – and Slovak neighbours too – continued to seek her valued advice and, in order to support her extended family, she took up a new occupation, tramping the roads from village to village to take orders for colourised photographs.

The testament of Ilona Lacková’s life finishes too early to record how the Roma, whose labour had helped rebuild the postwar Czechoslovak economy, were marginalised by government and populace alike when no longer seen as useful. At the time of the peaceful break‐up of Czechoslovakia in 1993, in place of former embryonic signs of respect, many Roma were even denied Czech citizenship in what for many was the land of their birth. But her autobiography, while honestly documenting the failure of Communist rule to counter ever‐prevalent discrimination, does provide glimpses of hope in recounting instances of small kindness and friendships between Roma and non‐Roma. In May this year the Slovak Embassy in London hosted the launch of Ilona Lacková’s autobiography, not as a public relations exercise, but in tribute to her achievement. Hopefully, this small step was also taken in recognition that such a frank account can only help increase public awareness of the still unresolved struggle of the Roma people to achieve integration in what, for them, just as much as for non‐Roma fellow citizens, are their homelands.

Will Guy is editor of the forthcoming book, Between Past and Future: The Roma (Gypsies) of Eastern Europe, University of Hertfordshire Press.