Helena Študiová

Helena Študiová remembered that she already had five children when they took her husband off to a labour camp. According to her, they took eleven Roma altogether. Her husband was taken to Germany.[1] She described the time he was away as a time of hardship and anxiety about how to feed the children. Helena Študiová’s husband returned in bad shape about a year and a half later – he was brought by a non-Roma Slovak who carted the mail from Prešov. Študiová said that in the camp her husband suffered from beatings, hard work and starvation – hunger even drove the inmates to want to eat their shoes. People later hired her husband, who was the primáš, as a musician at weddings.

[1] No further details are given.

After the war Helena Štúdiová tried to earn a living as well as look after the children. How many children there were is not quite clear from her recollections but probably there were eventually ten or eleven altogether. She would make trips to Bohemia – to Dvůr Králové, and to Prague – to sell bacon and other products of which there was a shortage there, [probably she was recalling the period soon after the war when people (not only Roma) from Slovakia took bacon and other products of which there was a shortage in the Czech part of the country and either sold them or exchanged them for sugar, which was scarce in (eastern) Slovakia; the state authorities considered this to be the black market, and anyone caught would often be arrested (ed.)]. They were a large family and therefore she wanted to build a bigger home for them. She worked for ten years in a glove-making factory, then hoed round saplings in the forest, and afterwards worked for five years as a bricklayer. At the end of the interview, to a question about the presence of partisans in the village, she mentioned one man who was still living there at the time of the interview, without giving his name.