Verona Pompová

At that time there were about ten Romani families living in Chmeľnice [Hopgarten before the war, Komlóskert during the war]. The Romani men, including Verona Pompová’s husband, were taken away by the German soldiers, and they had to dig trenches at Plaveč. In nearby villages, the Germans killed many Romani people. She said soldiers caught two little girls at Kamenica or Lipany, where some girls from Chmeľnice had gone to get married, and killed them, throwing them into a stream. But the local German inhabitants[1] did not harm the Roma. They often hid them from the soldiers so that they were not taken off to Germany

Partisans from Plaveč took an old Roma man to a neighbouring village, gave him tobacco and released him. In one village, however, they murdered a Slovak teacher, probably because he sided with the Germans.

At that time, the partisans used to go mainly to the Roma. Verona Pompová and the others were afraid of them; they were said to gouge out people’s eyes and murder them. They were also afraid that if the Germans found out, they would shoot them all and burn the houses to the ground, so they always begged the partisans to leave.

They came to them about three or four times when Verona was at home with her younger sisters. There was no electricity in the house then; it was lit by a kerosene lamp. The partisans took it down and she was afraid they would kill them. But they didn’t do anything to them, she said, because there was a Roma among them. They took with them an old man who knew the area well; he was supposed to show them the way. On another occasion, however, one of the partisans hit her younger brother so hard that his face swelled up. This was because he had lied to the partisans – out of fear of their possible reaction – that the local men had gone off to play music, when in fact the Germans had ordered them to dig trenches for them at Plaveč. Verona Pompová explained everything to them and the partisans reassured them that the next day the Russians would come and they would not have to be afraid anymore. They really did arrive, she said, and it was good for them.

[1] In the village of Chmeľnica (before the war Hobgart or Hopgarten) the majority of the population was and still is German-speaking and speaks the German-Silesian dialect. At present, they make up about 60 % of the population of the municipality. Since 2023, the municipality has had the status of a German minority municipality, making German the second official language alongside Slovak.

She said that after the war, the local Germans left in wagons loaded with clothes and belongings, and everything else was left behind, such as the potatoes in the cellars.[1]

Verona Pompová’s two sisters lived in Bohemia, one in Prague, the other somewhere outside the capital. Both of them had since died.

[1] In July 1946, 101 people had to leave the village of Hopgarten due to the expulsion of the German inhabitants from Czechoslovakia. However, thanks to the good relations between the German and Slovak inhabitants and the initiative of the local Slovak priest, who opposed the expulsion of the German-speaking inhabitants from Hopgarten, most of the German inhabitants (about 600 people) were able to stay in the village. See the film Die Deutschen in der Slowakei. Die Karpatendeutschen, director Rainer Hahn, 2006, http://www.praxis-unterrichtsfilm.de/downloads/karpatendeutsche.pdf (cited 6.10. 2024).