Jolana Haverľová

Jolana Haverľová was the oldest child in her family; she had three sisters and two brothers. When she was fourteen years old,[1] German soldiers rounded up fifteen of the older men in the settlement, including her father. Jolana’s future husband, then a boy of nine or ten years old, was therefore spared. The Roma were falsely accused of being partisans. Only one Romani man, a famous musician, belonged to the partisans. All those arrested were murdered by the Germans.

After the front had moved on, Jolana took the place of her sick mother and set off for Zvolen on foot with other women to look for their men in the pits dug for the dead. One of them contained eighty or a hundred bodies. But none of them were recognizable.

Once, when she was home alone with her siblings, soldiers burst into their house. One of them put a gun in her mouth and yelled that they were ​“Jews”. But another German soldier stopped him, saying that they were ​“G*psies”, and so saved her.

One day, when fighting was going on in the region and there was shooting in the village, Jolana and her family hid under a bed in the house of a farmer. At one point the farmer thought the shooting had stopped and he urged everyone to go together into the cellar. But the moment he stood up, he fell to the ground, struck by a bullet fired through the window.

Then the Haverľas fled to Detva, where the Russians had already arrived. They returned home after three months in the spring. They repaired the broken windows in the house with paper and boards, because they couldn’t afford to buy glass panes; they bought some later, when their mothers received some money.

[1] This probably occurred in 1944.

After the war they went to work for farmers, herding cows, only returning home for the winter.