In 1938, Jan Klinec was seven or eight years old. [Jozef] Tiso headed the Slovak government and the Roma were experiencing the first wave of repression. They were not allowed to travel by train or bus, and had to walk everywhere. Ján recalls that they were not even allowed to go to the cinema. He wanted to go with his friends to see a film about Jánošík, but even though they were well dressed, his friends with dark skin (he himself had lighter skin) were not allowed into the cinema.
The Hlinka Guards were feared. Ján said they were not all the same, and he recalled that there were also guardsmen who came to warn them not to hide partisans as they were about to be raided. On one occasion the gendarmes raided their settlement at night, two local drunken guardsmen trampled on their blankets and poured a bucket of water into their beds, but a third guard brought them into line.
The headman of the settlement in Dúbravy in central Slovakia was Ján Klinec’s uncle and he was known to inform the guards when someone stole a chicken or potatoes, for example. But Ján did not condemn him for that, believing that he acted out of fear.
Partisans were operating in the forests around Detva. They included Jews and Roma; they were united regardless of their origin. There were four Roma partisans in Detva and two in Dúbravy, one of them was Ján’s cousin. The guardsmen in Detva were commanded by [Ján] Nemčok, a manager of the [Central Slovak] Bank; Ján Klinec thought that he must have known about the partisans but he did not inform on them.
Ján Klinec mentioned in passing the massacre at Belová, where the partisans coming from Poľana were shot.[1] And he described in more detail how Romani partisans derailed a train carrying German plunder from Romania. Rozálie Balážová, a woman who delivered milk, told the partisans about the train. Nemčok did not intervene in that case either.
Ján was too young to join the partisans, but he helped them as a messenger. On one errand to Poľana, he was caught by the Germans in the area “above Bujač”. He had no documents with him, and they did not believe his spontaneous explanation that he was going to ask a forester for wood. He was arrested and taken to Hriňová, where he had to perform tasks not only for the Germans but also the Vlasovites; he groomed the horse of one of them, for example. He saved himself from transport to Germany by taking advantage of the confusion when boarding the wagons and escaping. He reached an aunt of his in Lieskovec who was hiding partisans in a bunker in the dung. She advised him to hide with his paternal aunt’s family — the Hriskovs in Očová. They took care of him, but he could not stay there long, and the next day he walked home. On the way he was warned by a man named Šimjak and then by a farmer named Bažijak not to go home, because the men had been taken from the settlement and the Germans were still patrolling there. He hid in the woods until a Mr. Trnák found him and sent him to an engineer named Živčenko. He hid with him until the end of the war. Later, he learned what had happened to his father: the men from the settlement had been seized and taken away after being denounced by Malovecký, the commander of the Hlinka Guard in Dúbravy. None of them returned.[2]
[1] We have not yet been able to identify the historical event.
[2] Probably on 8 December 1944, a Romani partisan named Jozef Klinec, known as Bimbó, visited the settlement in Dúbravy, but he was betrayed. The following day, members of Einsatzkommando 14 occupied the settlement and took all the men over the age of 14. They were taken to Detva and then to Zvolen Castle, where other people were imprisoned. Some of the prisoners were deported via Turčianske Teplice to Nazi concentration camps, others were executed in the Jewish cemetery in Zvolen. Among those executed were fifteen Roma from Dúbravy, including Ján Klinec’s father. (ed.)
