Slovakia's Gypsies |
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11 April 2025 - Košice
Slovakia is a country where one feels safe everywhere, English is widely spoken, incomes are high, and the food is great. Like much of eastern Europe nearly everyone you see on the street is white. Nearly. Slovakia also has a minority population of gypsies, who are called Romani locally. And they are treated like a lower caste here. Educational and vocational opportunites are severely limited simply because they have darker skin and speak a different language. The Nazis exterminated them alongside the Jews in the countries they controlled. In Czechoslovakia the communists forcibly sterilized them. And surveys of Slovaks today show more than three-quarters of them still don't like gypsies. On the streets here in Košice one sees them begging and picking through trash. On a walk across town yesterday I saw a particularly disturbing scene of three young children going through trash bags. The youngest, a boy of 6 or 7, had a lit cigarette dangling from his mouth. Why weren't they in school? It reminded me the shanty town of gypsies I saw along the river in Skopje where children played among garbage. It's a stain on countries like Slovakia that they refuse to integrate Romani into their society.
