Ján Telvák
Ján Telvák (1913, Dlhé nad Cirochou, Humenné district– year of death unknown)
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In Dlhá nad Cirochou, just a few dozen kilometers from the border between Slovakia and Subcarpathian Ruthenia, Romani people had houses built outside the village in a meadow by the water. Mr. and Mrs. Telvák started their family before the war, and had two sons.
In 1944, a German on horseback rode into the settlement at night and told them that they would all be taken away in the morning. At 4 o’clock in the morning the settlement was surrounded by Germans on horseback and entire families were taken to Humenné in wagons. From Humenné they were transported in cattle cars to the camp at Dubnica nad Váhom. They spent the first night in a large building before the men, women and children were separated. The Telvaks’ sons were eight and six years old at the time.
At first there were also non-Roma prisoners in the camp, but they were eventually released and it became a purely Roma camp. The Telvaks describe the inhumane conditions there. Soon an epidemic of [louse-borne] typhus broke out in the camp. The work was hard, they had to collect sand and rocks from the water while a [water channel] was being dredged. They had to work in the water even in winter. They only had an hour break for lunch, and they were not allowed to stop, otherwise they were beaten with clubs. They suffered from hunger, and even ate garbage, such as rotten potatoes or calf skin.
Babies died because their mothers were unable to produce milk because of hunger.
The couple also recalled the humiliating shaving of their entire bodies, including their private parts. They were all then smeared with ointment against scabies.
One morning they woke up and the camp was unusually quiet. They learned from the guard that the German soldiers had retreated before the approaching Russian soldiers and they were told to make their escape. They hid for another month in the woods, where the partisans were also operating, before heading home to Dlhé. They found the house half-destroyed and had to repair it.
While fleeing, they learned from gadjos about the massacre that had taken place in the Dubnica camp after it was disbanded: the Germans had taken those who were ill and weak to a forest, where they forced them to dig a pit, then shot them all and covered them up with earth.[1]
[1] This tragic event occurred on 23 February 1945, when German soldiers and the Slovak Emergency Division took 26 Romani people from the camp and murdered them in the grounds of a local arms factory.
In 1946 the Telvaks moved to the Czech part of the republic.
Testimony origin
The interview with Mr. and Mrs. Telvák was recorded in 1985 in Prague by one of the students of the Romani language course at the Language School in Prague. The interview was edited for a publication Devleskere čhave, which was prepared and never published.[1] For the purpose of that publication, the interview was reworked into a continuous narrative without questions and without distinguishing between what each of the spouses said. The book’s editor, Milena Hübschmannová, did not have access to the original interview, so she prepared only this heavily edited text in Romani with a Czech translation for publication.
[1] In the mid-1980s, Milena Hübschmann was preparing a bilingual publication with testimonies of Romani witnesses for publication. The publishers, however, refused to accept a bilingual publication, so the publication was to be published as educational material on Romani under the auspices of the Language School in Prague; this, however, made the publication conditional on the interviews being reworked into coherent texts. In the end the publication was abandoned, even in this form.
