by Becky Taylor
We were nomadic at that time, from one village to the next. I was twelve . . . the fascist Nyilas [national socialists] came and took us, we were transported in trains . . . it took some two weeks before we reached Komáron. I can remember Komárom as if it were yesterday. Anyone who collapsed was immediately thrown into the Danube. They squashed us in . . . Those who couldn’t move were put on top of the bodies of those who had died . . . There was one Romani woman, she was so beautiful . . . They abused her so much she could no longer stand. Then they tied a rope between two trees and took a tin of petrol and hanged her by her hair on the rope and put the tin under her. It was petrol or oil or something. They burnt her alive. She couldn’t even scream.107
Across Europe, then, Gypsies were harassed and persecuted, their lives increasingly restricted. They were often interned, imprisoned or forced into slave labour brigades. And yet this was not the worst. Despite the vast and painful literature devoted to the subject it remains impossible to do justice to the experiences of those who faced deportation and internment in death camps or those whose lives ended in the gas chambers. As survivor Bernhard Steinbach from Worms put it, ‘What I describe is only scraping the surface.’108 Part of that scraping the surface involves briefly looking at first-hand accounts of two Auschwitz survivors. In doing this we are able to construct some understanding of how personal histories and circumstances produced different routes to the camps, allowing us a small insight into what they experienced and witnessed.109
Walter Winter was a German Sinto whose family had travelled widely around northern Germany but by the inter-war period had made its base in Cloppenburg in Lower Saxony.110 His memories of these years demonstrate the extent to which the state and wider socio-economic changes had shaped his family’s decisions: the requirement to have a permanent address in order to qualify for a Wandergewerbescheine meant they bought some land. Here they settled each winter, while using it also to raise fowl which they bartered for provisions. He and his siblings attended school either in their home village or when they were travelling, and so all of them were literate. Although his memories of the years up to 1933 show they encountered prejudice, ‘generally, the people in the country were not so unfriendly’, and they were able to make a comfortable living. After 1933 they started to run a travelling shooting gallery and so ‘became’ showpeople, able to carry a legitimate Wandergewerbescheine and continue moving around. In fact, during these years they did well economically, although they faced growing official pressure, including in 1936 being barred from the meetings of the Association of Fairground Workers. On the outbreak of war their preoccupation was with being called up rather than being singled out. Barred from promotion, Walter and his brothers nevertheless served in the Wehrmacht until the autumn of 1942 when all Sinti and Roma were deemed ‘unsuitable material’ and discharged. For the next six months, aided by the fact that his family owned two vehicles, his forced labour involved driving for the local council. But this did not prevent him and his siblings (although not his parents) from being deported to Auschwitz in March 1943. They arrived at the camp as the work details were returning from their day’s labour:
I thought, ‘You aren’t seeing right’. They were carrying two corpses covered in blood. The corpses were slung from poles, tied by the hands and feet, like deer. Two men carried each corpse, streaming with blood. Our column became as quiet as a mouse despite there being children among us. You could have heard a pin drop . . . we were unable to utter a word. We thought, ‘Is this going to happen to us? Oh God, oh God, oh God!’
His testimony, as with that of all survivors, shows the importance of a combination of luck, contacts and determination in contributing to his survival. Being literate and an ex-serviceman led him to being appointed roll call clerk and his brother block senior. Together they were able to run their block with as much humanity as conditions allowed. A friendship with someone working in the kitchens ensured access to vital extra food, and while he, his brother and sister all at various times stood up to and were punished by camp guards, this did not result in summary execution. Most crucial to his survival was the fact that on the eve of the closure of the camp, all those who had served in the Wehrmacht and their families were moved to Ravensbrück and so escaped the gas chambers. During the final period of the war he was conscripted back into the army, where he remained until able to surrender to the Russians.
Roman Mirga, in contrast, was a Polish bareforytka Roma (‘big-town Gypsy’) who spent the years up to 1942 playing accordion in his family’s band in the prestigious nightclubs of Warsaw.111 There they played for a clientele of Polish elite and occupying German officers, including Josef Mengele. Alerted by a cousin who had been interned in the Łódź ghetto, the family rejoined their kumpania (extended kin group with whom they would normally have travelled) with the aim of persuading them to move to Hungary, where conditions at that point were better. Over the late spring of 1943 the kumpania, which had only then been finally convinced to move after the overnight deportation of a neighbouring Kalderashi group, made the journey south, attempting to evade the ss as they did so. While hiding in the forests Roman witnessed the execution of some Lovari Gypsies. After the men were forced to dig their own mass grave before being shot, the women and children were then made to get out of the trucks:
They were hit by rifle butts or booted down, and then shoved ahead until they, too, slid into the ditch. Those who, in their rage, spat at the Nazis and their Ukrainian helpers, had their babies wrested from them and, in front of their mothers’ eyes, the babies heads were smashed against the tree trunks . . . As the lamentation and cries for mercy got louder, the ss officer impatiently gestured to the machine-gunner who lowered his fire directly into the ditch. The screaming ceased almost immediately.112
Nearly half of their kumpania were caught and shot on the way or when crossing the Hungarian border. The survivors were able to live relatively easily until March 1944 when an invading German convoy caught them on the road and sent them straight to Auschwitz. In a vivid passage, Roman remembered the shaving of his wife’s head and body hair. This act features in many survivor testimonies as epitomizing the ‘worst possible humiliation’ and sense of shame felt by people whose cultural values centred on the strong separation of male and female spheres, and of numerous taboos around nakedness, cleanliness and the dignity of elders.113
On arrival Roman’s family were recognized by Josef Mengele, who assigned his father to play in the Gypsy orchestra, while the women were detailed to the kitchens. Roman, as he could speak Polish, German and Romani, worked under Mengele himself as a clerk and translator. In this capacity he witnessed the experiments carried out on Gypsy inmates: ‘a world of spot fever and scarlet fever, typhoid and dysentery, tuberculosis and noma, and smallpox or varieties of scurvy which inevitably led to gangrene and death’, as well as Mengele’s notorious experiments on twins.114 Roman also witnessed the final clearance of the camp:
There was furious resistance. I heard sounds of terror, the screams of sobbing children trying to reach their fathers for protection, the women’s shrieks of ‘Mörder!’, but also the cries of men, even the old ones, fighting back. From the dark camp came the vicious howling of dogs, gunshots and bursts of machine gun fire, as those who threw themselves on the Nazis with knives, razors, sticks or their own bare hands, willingly selling their lives dear . . . The operation lasted for several hours, because the Germans were short of transport . . . I saw the SS men and their dogs turning on their assistants, the Gypsy kapos who had been helping them to round up their own people . . . finally only Barrack No. 1 was left. Just one squad of young workers who were still needed to speed up the process of dispatching to their death the incoming mass of Jews . . . Mengele pointed with his riding crop at the empty barracks, ‘Schade um die Romatik des Zigeunerlage’ [‘What a pity we have lost the romance of the Gypsy camp’].
Roman was able to escape with the one surviving member of his kumpania, and was hidden by a local Polish wo
man until the Russian arrival in January 1945. That only two from the original kumpania of 84 survived gives some sense of the devastating impact of the Nazi period not just on individuals but on the wider kin and social networks which were absolutely central to Gypsy society and identity. Like all concentration-camp survivors, ex-prisoners were marked for life by the physical and emotional scars of their experiences. Added to this the Nazi policy of sterilization ensured that the ramifications of its racial doctrine extended far beyond the liberation of the camps, as the oral testimony of camp survivor Anna W makes clear:
I was sterilized myself, but in Ravensbrück.
Q: In Ravensbrück. How old were you back then?
Sixteen.
Q: And did you know what . . .
Not quite sixteen.
Q: Did you know what kind of . . .
No, I did not know that. They said they were just examining, but the pain afterwards, so then you realized.
Q: That was of course very, very . . .
There were several young girls, of, how old were they, twelve years, twelve, fifteen-, sixteen-year-olds.
Q: And Friedel [her husband], too?
No.
Q: No, not him. Because I know that they also did this to the boys . . .
Yes, I even know some where they did it.
Q: Yes, I think Ranko B., no?
Yes.
Q: He spoke about it. This is something very terrible, for a woman, no?
Very much, yes. For now I have to suffer from it. Since I could have had a family, could have, I could have had grandchildren who would be twenty years by now, my grandchildren . . .115
Consequently it was not only through the devastation of entire communities that the legacy of the war and Nazi policies were felt: forced sterilization ensured that racist ideology was to be carried in the bodies of Roma and Sinti women, ensuring that their loss was felt in the absence of future generations. And it is no accident that Anna W’s testimony above, as well as the writings of both Walter and Roman, appeared decades after the end of the war. Now often regarded as the ‘forgotten Holocaust’, as we shall see, one of the central experiences of Gypsies and Roma trying to go forward into the post-war world was repeated denial and silence over their experiences.116 In part this came from individuals and Gypsy communities themselves, as a combination of shame, deep trauma and a desire to ‘get on with life’ served to bury their memories of the war years. And yet this was overlaid by the active suppression of the facts over the fate of thousands of Roma and Sinti on the part of governments and majority societies which went hand in hand with ongoing harassment and persecution.
IN REFLECTING ON THE DEEP SIGNIFICANCE of the Roma Holocaust to both Roma and Gypsy communities and to wider European history, we have seen the importance of paying attention to time and place. Roman’s account, taken alongside Walter’s, demonstrates something of the complexity of experiences of Gypsies under Nazism. Whether settled in a town, or still travelling, serving in the German army, or as a civilian carrying out a ‘typical’ Gypsy occupation, the racial policies and regulations governing everyday life affected Gypsies, but often in different timescales and in different ways. Some Gypsies lived in camps from the early 1930s, others were able to sustain something like a ‘normal life’ until the decree of 1938, or sometimes until as late as 1942 or even 1944. The wartime experiences of a Gypsy in France was likely to be different to that of one in Croatia, Germany or Romania: while all experienced degrees of marginalization and repressive legislation, those in France experienced internment, but were unlikely to have been deported to Auschwitz; Romanian Roma experienced racially motivated policies which were translated into the trauma of harsh deportation policies; while Croatian and German Gypsies were most likely to feel the full force of Nazi genocidal intentions. All this shows, that despite near universal negative stereotypes of Gypsies, the actions of different regimes at different times were crucial to the treatment and survival of their Gypsy populations. And as we move on to the second half of the twentieth century it is the actions and ideologies of states which were to remain so telling.
SIX
A New Dawn?
IT IS HARD TO OVEREMPHASIZE the extent to which Europe lay in ruins in 1945: it was not only physically devastated, but socially, politically and culturally battered. The protracted fighting in 1944 and 1945 produced millions of refugees fleeing mass bombings, the terror of the advancing Soviet forces, the shifting Western Front, as well as the increasingly savage actions of the Nazi regime as it tried to maintain a grip on its domestic population. While impossible to count, estimates put the number of refugees in 1945 at around 30 million.1 Ruined harvests and broken supply lines meant they faced starvation on top of homelessness and violence. The closing months of the war saw the biggest mass migration in German history, involving 20 million people – Jews, forced labourers and ethnic Germans from the east, as well as those fleeing bombing and military advancements – moving in all directions, as they tried to return home, escape further persecution, or formed part of one of the mass population transfers.2 As much as others, Gypsies formed part of this churning population, as refugees, camp survivors and as part of population transfers.
Politically, of course, alongside material problems and infrastructure collapse, the complete disintegration of both the Nazi state and its ideological basis affected not only Germany, but the fascist regimes of Hungary, Croatia and Italy. This was further compounded by the major redrawing of international boundaries – notably the massive German loss of territory east of the Oder–Neisse line and the imposition of direct rule by the Americans, French, British and Soviets. And on top of this within a very short time Communism was able to assert itself as the dominant ideological force of eastern and south-eastern Europe. Having learnt something from the aftermath of the First World War, the American-funded Allies rejected a humiliating package of reparations in favour of a more generous notion of reconstruction. This was given material expression in the Marshall Plan of 1947, whose aid and trade packages aimed to ensure that the German territories under western control were increasingly dissociated from the Soviet zone, and were firmly incorporated in the wider network of economic and political organizations emerging to counter Russian influence in the east.
Hindsight allows us to see how the Cold War, in exporting active conflict beyond Europe’s borders, gave four decades of peace to the Continent. For those living through these years, however, this was by no means given: one of the reasons that Hungarian refugees to Britain in 1956–7 were so desperate to emigrate immediately to the us, for example, was because they feared immediate nuclear reprisals from the Soviet Union. And yet despite such fears, these years undoubtedly gave Europe the breathing space it needed to engage in reconstruction. The post-war period saw not only new visions of the built environment realized, but the emergence of new socio-economic conditions and political entities aimed at protecting populations and removing the future possibility of total war.
Reconstruction was therefore one front on which the Cold War was fought, yet what is perhaps most remarkable is not the differences between these two political systems, but rather their similarities. Both socialist and capitalist nations sought to create welfare systems, provide employment and a new vision of the world for their citizens. At their core both were wedded to modernist ideas of progress, built around industrialization, technology, urbanization, control of physical space and expanded state support, including free education and a package of welfare benefits. Bureaucrats and regulations, instructed either by Party committees or parliamentary bodies, took centre stage in the creation and enactment of policy. What is noticeable for Roma and Gypsy populations is that, despite apparent ideological differences, intentions towards them on both sides of the Iron Curtain were remarkably similar. After an initial post-war divergence in attitudes, all states moved very rapidly towards policies pushing settlement and assimilation, differing only in their methods and the extent to which they realized their i
ntentions. By the end of the century what was obvious was how partial their successes in this area actually were.
We must not mistake the stability provided by the Cold War for stasis. It was with remarkable rapidity that Europe moved into a period of something like full employment, mass education and unprecedented affluence, although this was more pronounced in western than eastern Europe. In the West the space created by being able to focus on matters beyond immediate material concerns allowed the emergence of new forms of political expression in which issues of identity and self-determination came to the fore. Socialist states could not remain insulated from these changes, and although regimes attempted to adapt, economic crises and nascent protest movements ensured, by the end of the 1980s, the collapse of state socialism. The closing years of the century saw ex-communist states struggling with the impact of uncontrolled capitalism as well as the revitalization of the paused politics of nationalism. In this new climate, alongside new political freedoms and possibilities for self-organization, Roma communities felt the brunt of economic uncertainty, resurgent racism and the collapse of state support. On the accession of many of the eastern European states to the European Union in 2004 it was by no means clear that their social or economic position was any better than it had been 100 years previously.