From a Romany settlement to a dreamt-up house

Text: Vlastimil Jílek, Praha
Photographs: Karel Tůma, Praha

Ladislav (44) is Romany (Gypsy) from eastern Slovakia. He has three children and six grandchildren. For two years he has been working at the Škoda car factory in Mladá Boleslav, Czech Republic, as a welder. Every second month, and sometimes more often, he takes the bus or drives his Renault for a long weekend at home to see his family. Although the distance between the two places is only 900 km – about 10 hours by car – each place belongs to a completely different world.

Photo gallery

In Jarovnica, in eastern Slovakia, there are two churches. The first, located in the middle of the village, is a Gothic building and frequented only by whites. There is no one in the street in front of it, only a couple teenagers sit on the stairs of the near town hall that was built during the socialist past. As we turn off the main road, the sleepy atmosphere suddenly changes. The road fills with adults and children and along the creek, wooden huts are clustered. Among the labyrinth of houses, people walk alone or in groups, disappearing behind drapes indoors, appearing all of a sudden and disappearing again in the maze of beaten tracks. Not a straw of grass is visible, just beaten brownish earth and a few solitary willow trees. Men stand in front of houses or wander aimlessly through the settlement. Some are training dogs. Women wash laundry in the creek and converse lively with one another. Here, in the settlement, is Jarovnice’s second church. Four thousand Romanies live here in a relatively small area, in one of the largest Romany settlements in Slovakia.

We meet Ladislav. “Come on in”, says the father of the family and welcomes us in a simple house dominated by the gray disc of a satellite aerial. Through a wooden entrance room, we step into the only room built of bricks, which is the home of six people. We push the drape away. Inside are Terezie, Ladislav’s wife, his first son Ladislav with wife and a child, and his second son’s seventeen-year-old girlfriend who watches us curiously as she breastfeeds her child.
In the corner a large, wide-angled Samsung television is on, showing a music program from the Hungarian Romany TV station Féni. The music video shows a young man with an open shirt as he jumps off a horse and dances with a girl in a colourful dress. Next to the TV hangs a picture of Jesus; a photo of a bodybuilder is stuck behind the glass. From the ceiling hang plastic flowers in bright colors. Ladislav’s daughter-in-law is cooking lunch on the porch – a strong broth with vegetables and noodles. After a short while, she places two bowls of hot soup in front of us.

Ladislav is one of thirteen children – he has six brothers and six sisters. Two of them live in the Czech Republic. Migrating to Bohemia for work is a family tradition: his 68-year-old father Bartoloměj, also living in Jarovnica, worked in Czechoslovakia during the 1970s as a manual laborer on a farm.

Although Ladislav has Slovak citizenship and has spent most of his life in eastern Slovakia, he was actually born in the Czech town of Chomutov. “I have relatives there. When I have time, I visit them, but I grew up in Jarovnica”, Ladislav says when we ask him why he did not choose Czech citizenship after Czechoslovakia split up.

“In Slovakia, there is no work for us Romanies. In the Czech Republic Romanies do not want to work since they have social benefits, but in Slovakia [the benefits] were cancelled,” Ladislav says, adding: “When I went to look for work in Slovakia, the employers told me right away that they did not give jobs to Romanies. In the Czech Republic I have never met with that attitude yet. So it was not hard to decide.”

Ladislav works as a welder in the Škoda car factory in Mladá Boleslav. “I weld the girder for the motor, the left stringer”, he says. “I have no training, so I am glad I got that job”. On average his salary is 18,000 CZK a month. “If I work 16-hour shifts I have night premiums and make 75 CZK an hour. I save most of it, send some money to my wife for the household and the rest I put in the bank. I do not drink or smoke,” he explains his economising. “When I first left for the Czech Republic, I had only 1300 Slovak crowns on me, but I was given an advance in the first week and it all went well.”

According to Ladislav, it is crucial to know somebody when looking for a job: a mediator, who introduces you into the new settings. And if it is a member of one’s own family, even better. “First two of us went, our neighbor Gyňa and I. Gyňa now lives in the Czech Republic and has already worked in Boleslav before, so he took me with him. There used to be more people from here working in Bohemia, but they left because they are weak workers,” Ladislav says.
The learning process is very fast. Ladislav’s brother Josef, who drops by, explains: “My brother came over and showed me one day and the next day I already worked on my own”. Josef has been working in the Škoda factory for four months. Although he wanted to quit after a couple days, Ladislav made him stay. “He wanted to go home, he was not used to the work, everything hurt him,” Ladislav says.

In August, Ladislav was recruiting people for the Zetka personnel agency that employs him in the Škoda factory. From the 20 people he brought with him, only three stayed -his son and two brothers.
In the meantime, one of his sisters also started working in the factory, doing the same job as her brothers. The men agree that for those who gave up the hard work after a couple of days and left for home, this is a reason to be ashamed. “She was used to work, she used to work in a veneer factory,” Ladislav explains the reason why his sister could stand up to the job. Her husband and children followed her to the Czech Republic as well. The children now go to school and her husband found work in the Škoda factory as well.
Ladislav and his brothers are lucky, since they have a contract from their Czech employer. “ Most Slovak Romanies work illegally,” he says. Already before 1989, Slovak Romanies were migrating for work to the western part of Czechoslovakia but within the last year and a half, it has been happening on a much larger scale. The change came after Slovak authorities cut social benefits. The main areas where Slovak Romanies migrate to are Prague and the regions of Mladá Boleslav and Plzeň.

It is Monday, seven a.m. Many buses from Slovakia arrive at the Florenc bus station in Prague at this early hour, stopping at the long exit corridor. The buses go overnight and the passengers go directly to work. We wait on the platform to meet Ladislav, arriving on a bus from Sabinov, the closest bus junction from Jarovnice.
Together, we leave Prague by another bus for Mladá Boleslav. Hotel Bičík, a two-story grey house from the first half of the past century, serves as a workers’ hostel, and is located at a busy crossing. Ladislav, with his 16-hour shifts, only comes here to sleep, but complains about the noise from the street. He shares a room with three other people – all of them his relatives – and they have their own fridge, two wardrobes, a table and a TV set on a table near the window. The accommodation is paid for by the agency they work for. Living with his brothers and son makes for a merry atmosphere; they tease each other and tell stories from their lives in the settlement as well as in the city. A bottle of slivovic (plum brandy) circulates around the room. “When we come back from work, food is cooked and ready – whoever comes back home first in the afternoon cooks for everybody,” Ladislav says. When the fridge is empty they go shopping, like today. Afterwards, we try to squeeze the content of seven plastic bags, mostly meat, into the small fridge. We put the pasta in the wardrobe.

Almost 20,000 people assemble cars in the Škoda factory. The factory takes up about one third of the town and employs three-quarters of the economically active inhabitants of the town. But that is not enough, so people from the whole region work here, as well as Poles, Slovaks, Hungarians and Ukrainians. Škoda cooperates with personnel agencies like Zetka, which employs Ladislav. Ladislav was offered to work for Škoda directly but he declined. He would not be able to go home for long weekends. When working for the agency, he only needs to find a replacement and can leave for four, five days at a time.
We are standing at gate seven of the factory. The road between the main street and the gate is lined by dozens of booths and little shops. The employees rush by. We walk Ladislav to his afternoon shift, but are not allowed to go inside with him – it takes about two months to get the entrance permit. Judging from the expression of the lady in the gate window, the hope is probably quite small.
“There is no future in Slovakia, that’s why I want to live in the Czech Republic. I want to build a big house here,” Ladislav plans. “Once I have saved enough money, I will buy some property and start building.” Two years of work in Bohemia have left their legacy – for the people in the settlement, Ladislav is a “boss” thanks to his work in Bohemia, but he is also becoming estranged from the life there.

His wife Terezia does not want to move away yet. “In Bohemia, it is like in church, I would miss my family and life in the settlement”, she says. The older son shares this view. Ladislav tries to solve this dilemma by getting all family members jobs at Škoda. By the end of the summer, five of his siblings were working here, four brothers and one sister. His son, who just finished building a house in the settlement with the financial help of his father, has been working at the Škoda factory for a couple days now.