Agnesa Horváthová

“We were afraid, much afraid. And you know that we met them even as an ensemble. We were in costumes, we didn’t have time to change. We met a group of young boys, fifteen sixteen. They were drunk. And they attacked us, adults. You walk down the street and have nothing in your hands. They had the chains. A girl took our side and they started abusing her: ‘You are a Jew, that is why you take their side.’ And they attacked her again. The very first stop our tram stopped we got off and walked. I said, ‘This is not worth it.’ We had great problems here.”

“About two years of the ensemble’s existence we met Mrs Hübschmann. She was a kind of personality that you’ll never meet again. A great person. You could talk to her just about anything. I started telling her about what happened home in Slovakia. She pressed on me, ‘Write it. Put it down to paper.’ I told her, ‘I’ll write it in Czech or Slovak.’ She replied, ‘No, you must write it in Romany.’ We didn’t speak Romany at home, I only learned Romany in my husband’s family, since his family spoke this language. I told her, ‘Mrs Hübschmannová, but I can’t write in that language. It’s spoken and written differently.’ She said, ‘Well, you’ll take lessons from me.’ So I went to her. She taught me to write in the Romany language. I asked, ‘What now?’ She replied, ‘Write. Don’t be afraid, we’ll do everything the way it should be.’ So I wrote stories, poems, into newspapers. They were about to compile a Romany text book, I don’t know whether it was published. It was compiled by Dr Ščuka. We contributed to that. Then I started writing, Mrs Hübschmannová helped me and the book Pal e bari Rama was published. It contained all the stuff I used to listen to. I put something of my own, but most of it came from the narration“.

“We met for a long time, on the daily basis we were in touch. I told her everything that happened, this and that. And she asked me, ‘Why don’t you write it, why don’t you write it?’ I say, ‘I don’t know.’ I learned Romany only here, we didn’t speak the language in Slovakia. We didn’t speak formal Slovak either, rather the Hutorat, that is the Eastern Slovakian dialect. We spoke formal Slovak only at school, at home we used the dialect. ‘So you will come to me and I’ll teach you to write in Romany.’ Romany is spoken and written differently. I went to her and she showed me how it was written. I started with small poems, stories into newspapers, journals, etc. And then she told me, ‘Now, it’s good, you can start writing.’”

“After the Revolution we thought, ‘We’ll go into politics’. So we did. We even took part in demonstration. I still regret it and so does my husband. He always said, ‘We did the worst thing we could do.’ What do we get from it? We harmed ourselves. You go to the TV, newspapers and eventually your son gets stabbed by skinheads and there is nothing you can do about it. Phone calls and threats followed. We met every day so I told (to L. Rusenko): ‘So you see what you got us into? Look, I could have lost my son.’ So we had a meeting and agreed that we would go abroad. We went to Belgium. But it was not it abroad, home is home. My husband had parents and siblings here. Not me, I had all my siblings with me. I was sorry but not so much as my husband. We parted ways there. I am sorry because Rusenkos stayed there and I and my siblings returned to Czechia. It was because of my husband.”

“Then in Slovakia we already had electricity, when I was about thirteen or fourteen there was electricity, but not before. We had oil lamps, we sat around them, or in summers there was a fire in the centre of the village and we sat round it. People told stories. You learned a lot, perhaps too much. And who listened carefully, remembered everything. And this was where the tall stories were told. Grandmas and grandpas told them and I listened.”