Anna Grundzová

Anna Grundzová was 10 years old when the war began to manifest itself in her native village of Habura in eastern Slovakia, close to the Slovak-Polish border. Until then, they had lived in peace with the German occupiers, and the Germans gave the children food, sweets or canned food. Grundzová recalls that they even had camels, which they rode like horses. The situation began to change as the front approached from the east. The mayor of the village warned of the approaching combat and advised all residents to evacuate.

Anna Grundzová was evacuated along with her parents, siblings and three other related families. They reached the village of Giraltovce, about 30 km east of Prešov, where the mayor was a Roma. He gave them an apartment, and the local Roma were very hospitable to them. Grundzová remembers going to Giraltovce to beg. On the outskirts of the town, a gadjo woman took her in and gave her a new dress. Anna then created a temporary store place for the things she managed to beg for in the town. She and her brother had to make three trips to carry everything. This way, all four evacuated families were clothed. She brought them food and tobacco leaves for smoking. She remembers one Hungarian soldier to whom she gestured that her father was cold. He then gave her a military coat. He cut off the buttons on it so it could not be easily identified, and so they should not fall under suspicion of having stolen it. He also wrapped food in her blanket, and put the whole bundle on her back in front of the house. The family worried about her when she went into town alone.

German soldiers used to go looking for local Romani girls. Anna would watch through the cracks in the door. The daughters would always send their mothers off to pay someone a visit, so the Germans could do what they liked with them, and then the girls would receive parcels from them, the contents of which they shared with the family. One beautiful girl contracted the ​“French disease” (syphilis, or syphilis) as a result of which she died in isolation.

The family moved from Giraltovce to the village of Kurima, about 40 km away, where her father had a cousin called Čiriklo. Along the way, they stayed overnight in peasants’ barns and attics. The Russians were barricaded in the village of Remen near Kurima and shot at them. Anna, who was carrying a communal pot, fell into the water with it because of the shooting. Her brother pulled her out and they hid in a cow shed. It was cold and she was soaked through. They were finally reunited with their family at the other end of the village. In Kurim they stayed with relatives for a week, baking bread and washing their clothes. With the arrival of the Russians, they went back home. The Russian soldiers advised them which way to go in order to pass safely through the mined area.

They stayed overnight in one of the Russian soldiers’ camps. Anna’s father was ill; they covered him with blankets by the fire and treated him with brandy and hot soup. All night the women scraped potatoes and sang Romani songs. Then they went back home to Habura via Stropkov.

Before they were evacuated, Anna’s father had buried grain in their house so that they would have something to live on after the war. But they found the house empty, the peasants had taken everything apart. But the decent ones came forward and promised to return everything to them when they had crops. They respected Anna’s father as a blacksmith.

Their homecoming was difficult, nobody had anything, not even the peasant families. They went as far as Trebišov to find food and clothing. Anna recalled one such trip, when their cattle train did not return from Trebišov until 4 o’clock in the morning. The women carried straw into the waiting room and laid down on the benches and under them. A Russian soldier came into the waiting room and harassed a pregnant woman. Anna sneaked away and brought help from the nearby kitchen, where she said ​“the elders” were sitting by a fire.

After the war, Anna Grundzová’s family had a hard time getting out of poverty. It was only when her father recovered and was able to resume his trade as a blacksmith that life got better. Anna’s brother and sister left for the Czech part of the republic; she stayed with her parents and helped them. Later, her siblings persuaded her to move to the Czech lands to join them, and the world ​“opened up” for her. She met her husband, who came from Radvaň, a village near Habura. They started a family together in Prague and raised seven children.