'The Gypsy Scourge!' Creation and Implementation of Anti-Gypsy Measures in interwar Czechoslovakia and After, 1918-1941

On December 22, 1926, an opening ceremony of the so-called Gypsy school was held in Uzhhorod, the capital of the Czechoslovak administration in Carpathian Ruthenia. Czech officials who gave talks pointed out pedagogical significance of the established institution which they described as unique and exceptional "experiment". The creation of a special school for children of those inhabitants who were labelled as "Gypsies" on the territory which was annexed by Czechoslovakia only later after the First World War and which in the contemporary imagination represented specific, "backward" region of the newly established state, served to consolidate the legitimacy of the First Republic as a democratic, progressive, modern, liberal state which belonged to the developed and civilized West. More than a half year later, on July 14, 1927, representatives in the Czechoslovak Parliament in Prague passed the Act No. 117/1927 on Wandering Gypsies. The development of this law was related to an immense interest of the contemporary media in "Gypsies" which was encouraged by the arrest of approximately twenty "Gypsies" from a village located in East Slovakia. They were charged of numerous robberies and murders. In contrast to the situation shortly after the First World War when the central Czechoslovak authorities...