Czech court stands up for Romanies persecuted in Slovakia in WWII

The Czech Supreme Administrative Court (NSS) has just informed that it stood up for the Romanies who went into hiding out of fear of persecution in Slovakia during World War Two and now demand compensation under the law on a one-off payment to national liberation struggle participants.

The court said in the latest issue of the collection of its key decisions that the Czech Social Security Administration (CSSZ) should not demand excessive quantities of proofs and testimonies since the persecution of Romanies is historically unchallengeable.

“Romanies in Slovakia were victims of racial persecution. It is a generally famous fact that need not be proved,” the court said.

It said the applicants only need to submit a confirmation that they were really hiding in Slovakia and two credible testimonies or other written evidence.

The NSS dealt with the case of a Romany man who was born in west Slovakia in 1941 and is now a Czech citizen. According to two written pieces of evidence, he, as a small child, and his family together with other Romanies were hiding for five months in forests.

“They were dying of cold and hunger without medical aid and the last sacrament,” a female witness wrote. The CSSZ refused to pay the man a compensation of 60,000 crowns in 2005 because he allegedly did not credibly prove the exact period and place of hiding and because he gradually submitted different data.

His complaint was dismissed by the Regional Court in Brno to which the NSS has now returned the case for reappraisal.

NSS judges, when assessing the man’s complaint, drew information from a publication by historian Petr Lhotka on the situation of Romanies in Slovakia during World War Two.

Lhotka writes that they started to be persecuted right after Slovakia declared independence in March 1939. The situation gravely deteriorated after Germans’ arrival in the country in 1944.

Romanies were executed en masse, their settlements were burnt out, two internment camps were created. The living conditions in the camps were disastrous, Lhotka writes.