Jozef Synů

Jozef Synů cursorily described his life as an orphan before the war. He didn’t know his father at all, and after the death of his mother his older siblings looked after him as the youngest of eighteen children. He described his hunger and how he wandered from village to village.

He recalled how when he was about seventeen or eighteen, he was taken from his native settlement in the night, together with other Roma men, by members of the Hlinka Guard to a camp in Hanušovce nad Topľou. He remembers the bad sanitation, the ever-present lice and bedbugs, the inadequate clothing, the hard work, the beatings with sticks, his hunger, and stealing crops from the fields even at the cost of physical punishment if he was betrayed. Synů described how he had no trousers and went around naked with a blanket wrapped round him. In the camp they exchanged clothing for food, as the families of Roma who worked well and were from the locality were allowed to bring them food, and those with no one to improve their lot exchanged their top garments for something to eat. The camp was meant to be purely Roma.[1] Jozef Synů escaped twice from the camp, once on the advice of a Roma chief,[2] who assured him that they would not do anything to him because he had reached the age when he could be conscripted [and thus with a view to his youth was employable as a soldier]. Once Synů and a Roma youth escaped together and worked secretly for farmers in Červenica, helping them to cut the hay. Synů described one non-Roma farmer as decent because he did not report them to the authorities. He was however conscripted again for military service and placed in a camp,[3] where he spent a year and a half. Synů was later deployed to bury the dead bodies of soldiers, for which they were well paid.[4]

[1] It was a forced labour camp for ​“gypsies and other anti-socials elements” where they were mixed, but the Roma were accommodated separately and probably some work teams were purely ​“gypsy”. (ed.)

[2] It emerges from the context that he was referring to the Roma kapo in the camp, not the Roma chief who was the mediator between the local majority and the Roma in a given settlement or village. (ed.)

[3] Meaning a military unit for gypsies. (ed.)

[4] The testimony refers to the time when the front line crossed the region; other witnesses also testify that conscripts, chiefly Roma, cleared away the fallen; the farmers to whom this order likewise applied often hired the Roma to do the job for them. (ed.)

Jozef Synů briefly mentioned an act of revenge – after the Liberation, some Roma who had been interned during the war killed a Roma, probably a Roma kapo who had injured them in the camp. Synů also supplemented the recollections of Mrs Slepčíková, who was present, with a sentence about how traitors were hanged in the square in Košice – she herself did not know who by, possibly the Russians.