Josef Miker

“When it first happened there… this was in 2000. I knew that there had been a concentration camp since the time young Mlynář was the minister, as he said it publicly, including where exactly it was located. So I started to get interested. And then, when I knew my present partner, we spoke with her granddad and they claimed that they were original Czech Romany people. I just asked them where they had come from in Slovakia and he replied: ‘I don’t come from Slovakia. We are the original Czech Romany people.’ So I asked him about the Lety camp at the time of the war. And he said, ‘Yes, son, I remember it. I was there.’ And the he started telling me about it. Then came uncle Ruda who was six years older than her granddad, so he remembered even more. And he told me about the dreadful things that they had gone through there. How their sisters were raped, how their nephew who was like brother to them was killed, they spoke about him like he was their brother but it was their nephew Sidonius.”

“He went to serve in the army but as he was illiterate, never went to school, he was assigned to the infantry regiment. And then – he could not serve as a guard, could not learn the directives since he couldn’t read – he was transferred to the unit of the politically-unreliable persons, PTP, and was sent to mines in Ostrava. And he liked it so much that he stayed well until 1977.”

“We didn’t expect it. This was really a huge difference between the Czechs and the Slovaks, I have to say. In Slovakia, they tended to ridicule us, whenever they saw a Romany person: ‘A gypsy, sold his horse and is tipsy’, things like that. And in Czechia, we were welcomed really nicely. For instance, we waited for our furniture to arrive for about a week and neighbours around, one neighbour asked my mum, ‘You have your flat empty, don’t you?’ And my mum said, ‘Yes, we’re waiting for our furniture to arrive. But we have been waiting for a week already and still nothing.’ And out neighbour went around other neighbours and everybody brought us something. Some brought duvets, others brought a sofa. We didn’t expect it, really. I cannot complain about my neighbours or anybody that they would abuse me, calling me a gypsy or something like that. I cannot really say a wrong word, here in Czechia.”

“Well, there’s a big difference as in the early 1990s – 1992 1993 – there were skinheads who joined up with punks, they they fell apart and went against themselves. And the difference between that and 2009, when there was Litvínov and other places, was that these were no longer skinheads but the so-called ‘decent citizens’ and this was much worse. I’ll never forget it. When the march got to that Romany house and the woman shouted, ‘Burn the gypsy swine to death’ and my daughter was just looking from a window and said, ‘Look, this is our teacher!’ this was something I really could not understand. Well, and then later, I even was several times hit by the police during the demonstrations.”