Helena Surmajová

Helena Surmajová grew up in Stropkov; she had seven siblings. She remembers that she and her mother worked for a Jewish family. Their mother cooked for them, did their laundry, and bathed their children. Helena carried water. With her sister Berta, she also attended a school reserved only for Romani children. They were taught by the parish priest, who was very strict and beat them on their fingers, and they had to attend church.

Helena recalled that the Germans first deported the Jews to concentration camps, and then wanted to do the same to the Roma. They took her family to the local Jewish house of prayer, where they herded them into the water [the mikveh] that the Jews kept there. Then they shaved off their hair because they had lice.

During the war, they hid at the home of Roma in a village she called ​“Řeporyje”[1], which had two rooms. The entire extended family lived there: grandparents, uncles and their families, perhaps as many as fifty people. Helena recalled that one night a drunken German soldier came there in search of a wife, knowing that their host family had two daughters (he knew about the daughters from another Roma, who was then ​“caught by the others and beaten!”). He kicked in the door to the room where everyone was sleeping. Helena’s grandfather confronted him and the women and children fled through the window. Without shoes or warm clothes, they ran to the cowshed, where they hid because the cows gave off some heat. The soldier was then shot the next day by his superior, and the Roma had to bury him in the local forest.

They continued on to Strážske. Having nothing to eat, her family once sent her to the village to beg, but she brought back only a few potatoes and she was too scared to go again. Helena recalled that towards the end of the war they were in Prešov for about two months, at a time when the bridges were being bombed. She helped her mother take care of the youngest twins, who were eight months old. The mother had a little boy [name not given] with her at night and Helena had the little girl Jolanka. One night she woke up and the baby sister was dead. The father begged a gadjo for planks for the coffin and they buried her.

When the fighting subsided, they set off on foot again to Stropkov. The journey was difficult, especially for the children. When her brother Emil could no longer walk, his grandfather dragged him behind him on a rope. On their feet they wore so-called ​“janoščiky” – pieces of cloth with straw stitched into them. Along the way, they passed dead horses and people – and that image still haunted Helena.

After returning to Stropkov, they stayed in the house of a Jewish family. It had broken windows, which their father sealed with paper. They suffered from hunger, and in the fields they would pick up frozen potatoes that had been forgotten, and their mother would use them to make flatbread. They would also search the attics of empty houses.

[1] Probably Repejov near Strážske where the Roma fled to get away from the front line of fighting.

After the war, Helena and her father worked on the construction of a building for the local national committee. She remembered carrying mortar and bricks up to the fourth floor. They worked for five crowns an hour and she earned fifteen hundred crowns a month. However, she suffered an accident when a builder’s trolley overturned on her and injured her leg. She was hospitalized in Prešov for two months, and when she returned home she found her family in poverty again, because only her father was earning money. In addition, typhus began to spread in the village and some Roma died of it.

Helena Surmajová eventually married in Prague and worked for 45 years at the Tatra tram works[1] as a crane operator and binder, and also drove a forklift truck.

[1] The Tatra Smíchov factory that was part of the ČKD Tatra concern.