Elena Lacková

Elena Lacková (1921, Veľký Šariš, Prešov district – 2003, Košice) was a Romani writer, poet and playwright, and one of the leading figures of the Romani ethno-emancipation movement in Slovakia. She began to write poetry even before the war, as a schoolgirl. Elena Lacková’s promising work was interrupted by the war: the creation of the Slovak state was declared a week before her eighteenth birthday and the family began to face repression. In 1940 she married Jozef Lacek from Kapušany, who then spent the following year in the camp for forced labour at Petič. In November 1943 Elena Lacková and her family experienced the destruction of their settlement.

After the war Lacková and her husband joined the Communist Party out of conviction and began to devote themselves to educational activities. She wrote her first play in 1948, Hořící cikánský tábor (The gypsy camp is on fire) about the persecution of the Roma during World War II, rehearsed it with her own company and then toured the whole of Czechoslovakia. She brought up five children, and then at the age of forty-two registered for distance learning at the Faculty of Journalism and Education at the Charles University in Prague, where in 1970 she was the first Roma woman from Slovakia to graduate. She was forty-nine years old and by that time had nine grandchildren.

Lacková wrote many articles and plays for radio and the theatre. Her best known work is her autobiography Narodila jsem se pod šťastnou hvězdou (I was born under a happy star) which was published in cooperation with the specialist in Indian and Roma studies Milena Hübschmannová. She travelled with Lacková from 1976 to 1984 and recorded her narration in the Roma language. It was 1997 before the transcribed, translated and edited memoirs were published by the Triáda publishing house.

Elena Lacková was the first Roma personality to be awarded a high state award – The Order of Ľudovít Štúr Third Class, which was awarded to her by the Slovak President Rudolf Schuster in 2001. The Slovak President likewise awarded her his Commemorative Medal for her lifelong efforts to bring the values of the Roma nation to the non-Roma society and for her artistic depiction of the holocaust of the Roma.

Select testimony

Select period

Map Show on map

Testimony origin

The interviews were conducted over the course of eight years and became the original basis for the writer’s autobiography, Born Under a Lucky Star, which includes a chapter on the wartime fate of Elena Lacková, her family, her native community of Roma from Šariš, and the Roma community of Kapušany, where she was married.

However, for the book After the Jews come Gypsies, the editor chose only memories of the forced eviction of Romani people from the village. She did not use the edited and published Czech version, but returned to the Romani originals, which in the mid-1980s were to become part of an unpublished publication about the wartime fate of the Roma in Slovakia. Elena Lacková’s narrative was therefore published in a new translation and in a different way from the autobiography as a book.

The facts described probably do not always correspond to the time frame provided by historians. For example, the proceedings over the announcement of the ban on Romani people entering Prešov and their deportation to a forced labour camp as punishment for non-compliance could not have taken place immediately after the declaration of the Slovak state. The forced conscription of Roma into the labour camp in Hanušovce nad Topľou did not begin in the Prešov region until the summer of 1942.

Where to find this testimony

Milena Hübschmannová (ed.): ​„Po židoch cigáni.“ I: Svědectví Romů ze Slovenska 1939 – 1945 (“After the Jews, the Gypsies.” Testimonies of Roma from Slovakia 1939 – 1945)

Our partners
Our Donors