Anna Mižikarová

Anna Mižikarová grew up in the village of Hromoš, in northeastern Slovakia, near the Polish border. There was not a large Romani community here; the Roma had about eight or nine houses in the village. Mižikarová’s father worked for farmers and died before the war. It happened at a time when her mother was undergoing an operation, so Anna was left alone with her brother. She recalled that they had a ​“splendid” non-Romani mayor in the village, who arranged for people from the village to take care of the children until their mother returned from the hospital. They slept at their aunt’s house and every day someone else from the village gave them food – either a Roma or a gadjo.

When the Hlinka Guard came to power, the mayor at Hromoš protected the Romani people there.[1] Anna Mižikarová actually quoted his admirable words in their defence: ​“Our G*psies are not G*psies, they are citizens.” He also protected them from the German soldiers who came to the village at the end of 1944 and arranged for the Roma to work for them. They dug trenches for them; the work was hard and exhausting, but the Germans paid them and gave them food and cigarettes. Anna recalled that they were employed in this way for about eight months. They were commanded by an SS officer in a black suit; ​“he was a bastard”, she said, but it was possible to get along well with the rank and file soldiers in ordinary uniforms.

When the front approached, a Hungarian warned them to flee or they would not survive. They fled to the Ruthenian village of Jakubany, where Anna Mizikar’s mother came from, and together with the locals they hid in bunkers in the surrounding dense forests.

At the age of 17, Anna’s brother joined the partisans along with five or six other Romani men. When the local Hlinka Guards found out, they threw grenades in revenge among children playing in a meadow. Two girls, aged ten and eight, died as a result of the explosions. Otherwise, however, all the Roma in Hromoš survived the war, but only thanks to the mayor, according to Anna. Three villages away, [name not mentioned] all the Roma were taken to a camp.

[1] In 1944 the mayor of the village of Hromoš in Slovakia was Michal Šarnik. After the liberation of the village on 23 January 1945, Šarnik was appointed chairman of the Revolutionary National Committee.