This article discusses the role of the Roma in Slovak society and different situational grounding of various approaches occurring in the 1930s and 1940s. The studied decades include the period of validity of the law Act No. 117/1927 Coll. about nomadic Gypsies from 1927 until 1950. Finally, few typical and recurrent examples were chosen based on research of archival materials (altruism, hatred, tendencies to isolation, confinement to labour or concentration camps, labelling of Roma etc.) and put into a wider historical and theoretical context. As a theoretical background, postcolonial approaches and the alterity concept by Emmanuel Levinas were employed. The main goal is to draft the notion of Slovak society about Roma at that time and what exactly it meant to be called “a Gypsy”.