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An escape or a runaway? The Departure of Lovára from Czech Lands to Slovakia in 1939

Publication at Faculty of Arts |
2022

Abstract

The contribution focuses on the departure of the Lovára from the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia to Slovakia upon Czechoslovakia's disintegration in 1939. Based on a combination of archival research and oral history methods, it shows the Lovára's departure in the context of the contemporaneous measures and efforts of the state administration to control the mobility of "nomadic Gypsies" in the Czech lands, continuous throughout the pre-war period. This description is enriched by the perspectives of participants-narrations of Roms who were perceived as "nomads" and witnessed these events.

The author reconstructs the presence of the Lovára's stay in the Czech lands during the First Republic from gendarme reports and other state administration documents. Their presence terminated upon Czechoslovakia's disintegration in 1939 when the Lovára and other Roms of Slovak home affiliation had to relocate themselves from the protectorate to Slovakia. The author analyses the circumstances and the course of the departure of Lovára and other Romani families from the Czech lands to Slovakia on the eve of the Second World War and presents the narrators' reflections on the sudden departure and subsequent peripetia of Romani families in Slovakia during the war.