"Slaughter them all!" Collective Violence and the Dynamic of Anti-Gypsy Measures in Czechoslovakia and After, 1918-1942
Abstrakt
On 14 July 1927, the Parliament of the First Czechoslovak Republic in Prague passed the Act No. 117/1927 on Wandering Gypsies and Similar Vagrants. This law was created after two major trials against criminals of Roma origin in 1927.
The first took place in Písek (Southern Bohemia) and encompassed a group of bandits, former deserters from the Austro-Hungarian army. The second held in Košice (Slovakia) was a case of several murders and alleged cannibalism by a group of Roma men from Moldava and Bodvou.
Just one year after the law passed in the Czechoslovak Parliament, a crowd of supposedly 70 citizens of Pobedim, a village 30 kilometres north of Piešťany in Slovakia, attacked a local Roma community, damaged their houses, killed seven Roma including small children, and wounded at least 20 Roma. During the interwar period, several other cases of collective anti-Roma violence occurred in Czechoslovakia.
Violence played a significant, however not yet fully investigated, role in the process of creating and implementing anti-Gypsy measures in interwar Czechoslovakia as well as in Europe. In the presentation, I will focus on the case of an anti-Roma pogrom in Pobedim in 1928.
Based on the analysis of the pogrom, its aftermath, and the implementation of the Czechoslovak Law on Wandering Gypsies and Similar Vagrants in the region of Nové Mesto and Váhom, I will reconstruct the dynamic of the enforcement of anti-Gypsy measures in Czechoslovakia and shed new light on the Holocaust of Roma and Sinti in the Czech lands and in Slovakia.