Josef Miker

* 1965

  • “My mum’s mum died when my mum was about two or three so she was raised by a stepmother. My grandad came from a blacksmith’s family but was not a blacksmith himself as only one of the sons could be a blacksmith. This was a kind of Romany tradition when there were over five sons, one had to be a blacksmith. So one of them was a blacksmith, I don’t know whether there were five or six of them, but only one of them was a blacksmith and he lived elsewhere. The dad of my mother used to serve a Jewish family who had a shop, field and a small farm. He went there for service and took my mother along since she was five. And when our parents married, they lived in Velké Zalužice, where my father had a house. And in 1962 or 1963 there were floods in Slovakia, the river Šírava spilled out of its banks and flooded my father’s land with all the community. They decided to make it into a big lake and Romany people of that community were distributed along neighbouring cities and villages. My parents ended up in Sobrance, where I was born in 1965.”

  • “When it first happened there… this was in 2000. I knew that there had been a concentration camp since the time young Mlynář was the minister, as he said it publicly, including where exactly it was located. So I started to get interested. And then, when I knew my present partner, we spoke with her granddad and they claimed that they were original Czech Romany people. I just asked them where they had come from in Slovakia and he replied: ‘I don’t come from Slovakia. We are the original Czech Romany people.’ So I asked him about the Lety camp at the time of the war. And he said, ‘Yes, son, I remember it. I was there.’ And the he started telling me about it. Then came uncle Ruda who was six years older than her granddad, so he remembered even more. And he told me about the dreadful things that they had gone through there. How their sisters were raped, how their nephew who was like brother to them was killed, they spoke about him like he was their brother but it was their nephew Sidonius.”

  • “He went to serve in the army but as he was illiterate, never went to school, he was assigned to the infantry regiment. And then – he could not serve as a guard, could not learn the directives since he couldn’t read – he was transferred to the unit of the politically-unreliable persons, PTP, and was sent to mines in Ostrava. And he liked it so much that he stayed well until 1977.”

  • “We didn’t expect it. This was really a huge difference between the Czechs and the Slovaks, I have to say. In Slovakia, they tended to ridicule us, whenever they saw a Romany person: ‘A gypsy, sold his horse and is tipsy’, things like that. And in Czechia, we were welcomed really nicely. For instance, we waited for our furniture to arrive for about a week and neighbours around, one neighbour asked my mum, ‘You have your flat empty, don’t you?’ And my mum said, ‘Yes, we’re waiting for our furniture to arrive. But we have been waiting for a week already and still nothing.’ And out neighbour went around other neighbours and everybody brought us something. Some brought duvets, others brought a sofa. We didn’t expect it, really. I cannot complain about my neighbours or anybody that they would abuse me, calling me a gypsy or something like that. I cannot really say a wrong word, here in Czechia.”

  • “Well, there’s a big difference as in the early 1990s – 1992 1993 – there were skinheads who joined up with punks, they they fell apart and went against themselves. And the difference between that and 2009, when there was Litvínov and other places, was that these were no longer skinheads but the so-called ‘decent citizens’ and this was much worse. I’ll never forget it. When the march got to that Romany house and the woman shouted, ‘Burn the gypsy swine to death’ and my daughter was just looking from a window and said, ‘Look, this is our teacher!’ this was something I really could not understand. Well, and then later, I even was several times hit by the police during the demonstrations.”

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    Eye Direct, 05.05.2017

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People can’t be like sheep all the time. There is freedom and we must use our freedom

Josef Miker, 2017
Josef Miker, 2017
photo: Natáčení Eye Direct

Josef Miker was born in 1965 in Sobrance, Eastern Slovakia, near Michalovce. His father travelled to work in the Ostrava region since the 1950s and in 1977 he decided to take up the opportunity and to move with his whole family to Trnovany in Teplice region. Josef Miker completed his primary school in Trnovany and went to study at the Secondary Industrial School  in Dolní Jiřetín. Already as a student, he started working on the surface mine in Bílina, where he eventually spent 31 years as a miner. In 2011, he had to retire out of health reasons. Since the 1990s he has been active in his work for Romany people. He became an activist at the time of the first race-motivated murders and hateful marches against Romany people. Jointly with Miroslav Brož they founded an initiative called Hatred Is Not A Solution and the civic association Konexe. Since 2000 he has been active in an initiative to closed down the pig farm near Písek, located in the position of a former concentration camp. He lives in Krupka, where he dedicates his time as a volunteer to Romany youth and poor Romany families.