Bury Me Standing

by Isabel Fonseca

  The difference between native and foreign Gypsies found mutations in the many false distinctions drawn between nomads and settled Gypsies, another index of who was and who was not a “real” Gypsy. Very often, the punishment engendered the crime: just as Gypsies were turned out of the church on the grounds that they were irreligious, the confiscation of their property forced them to become nomadic, or mendicant. Though nomads have sometimes been identified as the pure, noble Gypsies, nomadism has often been invoked as proof of moral degeneration. A Czechoslovak law from the 1950s explains that: “A nomadic life is led by someone who, whether in a group or individually, wanders from place to place and avoids honest work or makes his living in a disreputable way.…”

  Jerzy Ficowski, the Polish poet, patron of Papusza, and early promoter of Gypsy settlement, gave readers of the Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society a progress report from 1950s Poland: “The first great project of the authorities lay in persuading the Gypsies to work on State farms.” One hundred and twelve poor Gypsies from the mountainous southern region of Nowy Targ went to the farms at Szczecin in the northwest of the country. Despite a vast improvement in their standard of living, less than half remained. “The second great enterprise was the employment of Gypsies at Nowa Huta.” This vast industrial complex was a “community” and steelworks built together from scratch in the 1940s. About 160 Gypsies were “directed there” and more joined them. They resided in special (all-Gypsy) blocks. Ficowski mentions a housing “crisis” among the Gypsy workers; but he is able to point to successes. Children went to school and some illiterate adults also had courses. “The Nowa Huta newspaper We Are Building Socialism frequently mentions the Gypsy builders of the socialist city. On July 14, 1952, for example, it published Irene Gabor’s photograph.” Disappointedly and all too soon, Ficowski tells of the other results of this attempt to create a Gypsy proletariat:

  At times, however, the “anarchical” need for absolute independence provoked Gypsies to flee from the comfort of Nowa Huta and return to a life of misery.… Not only the nomads, but even the mountain Gypsies sometimes left. The Gypsies are attracted not so much by the nomadic way of life as by the rejection of authority and the lack of discipline and subordination. “We are leaving for liberty,” they would say on quitting Nowa Huta to go back to their old ways. The year 1952 witnessed an event which is inconceivable for non-Gypsy observers. Some families from block 37 betook themselves to a wooded spot in the neighborhood of Nowa Huta, to live there in crude huts made of planks. They said that a house was like a prison to them.

  Their departure is perhaps not so baffling to non-Gypsies as Ficowski imagined, at least not to anyone who has ever been to Nowa Huta. This industrialized suburb of Kraków now earns a mention in guidebooks only as a prime example of the ecological disasters that may be the main legacy of those hopeful regimes. Things must have looked different forty years ago, but the “houses” whose rejection so shocked Ficowski are still there: anonymous flats in the monochromatic gloom of an enormous steelworks, whose mills continue to supply more than half of Poland’s output and a steady flow of opaque and eye-hurting fumes.

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  Many Gypsies remain seasonally mobile. Others regularly move, say, every decade or even after thirty years in the same place. Where they have been allowed (rather than forced) to settle, they generally have settled. For example, although travel was soon to be banned, as early as 1893 a census in Slovakia showed that less than 2 percent of the region’s thirty-six thousand Gypsies were nomadic. And then, in the two decades preceeding the First World War, nearly a quarter of all white Slovaks—more than half a million people—emigrated to the United States.

  The fact that public land, including hidden public land, is in our time equally unavailable to Gypsies suggests that the overwrought public response has as much to do with the affront to “normal” values—based on the sanctity of private property—as it has to do with garbage. Officials everywhere have the backing of ordinary people: in an enlightened world, or at least a world lulled by euphemism, it is still okay to hate Gypsies.

  In Britain, as in France, Gypsies are no longer simply deported. Regulations vary from province to province (and are often contradictory) but they subtly enforce the same old policy of rejection. East European Gypsies tend to live in ghettos on the outskirts of villages. The reluctance to provide decent and legitimate stopping places means that West European sites are also on the edge of town, typically located at the town dump—so Gypsies become what they are supposed to be: dirty and smelly, and a health hazard. Nor is it surprising that they leave “voluntarily.”

  In Britain things seemed to brighten with the 1968 Caravan Sites Act, which required local authorities to provide available land. But it emerged that the Act was not intended merely to improve conditions; it aimed to sedentarize (“It is hoped that in the long run the Gypsies will become completely integrated among the settled population”). But British local authorities, like Habsburg noblemen and German princes, were not going to cooperate. As an example from the early 1970s, in the West Midlands alone more than a million pounds was spent on evicting Gypsies from “public” roads, while in the same five-year period only forty-five families were granted legal sites.

  Parliament repealed the Caravan Sites Act in 1994—overriding attempts to rescue it in the House of Lords—arguing that Gypsies should pay for their own ground. At the same time, the government tightened planning policy, making it virtually impossible for them to do so. (And once a piece of land is acquired, it is then necessary to make separate applications for permission to live on it, to build a shed, to build a house, to build a stable, etc.; ninety-five percent of the applications fail.) Harking back to the old debate about genuine versus phony Gypsies, Home Secretary Michael Howard confused Members by emphasizing the marginal issue of “raving New Age hippies,” and one of his ministers reached for the trusty specter of the nomadic hordes: “We want to repeal this [Act because] … the number of those who wish to be nomads has increased,” he said, referring to a “leap” from 9,800 in 1968 to all of 13,700 twenty-six years later. No one ever mentions the nearly 4,000 Traveler families—about 18,000 people—who have been on the road because they are still waiting for pitches on official sites, not because they all “wish to be nomads.” Repealing the Act instantly relieved authorities of the duty to provide these sites and also gave them powers of closure and eviction (already one local authority, in Sussex, has opted to shut down its site). The inevitable consequence is of course an increase in the number of “nomads.” The difficulties faced by people on the road were dramatically compounded by the passing of the 1994 Criminal Justice and Public Order Act that criminalized (among other things) stopping and traveling in any practicable form.

  In some parts of the West, the goal of settling Gypsies—though not of integrating them—has been achieved, as it largely has in the former Eastern bloc. And it has been a disaster. Legitimate and traditional work is ruled out, in Britain (for example) by the 1964 Scrap Metal Dealers Act—which introduced a requirement for elaborate invoicing and documentation for every rag-and-bone exchange, insurmountable to most barely literate Travelers (the illiteracy rate is about seventy percent)—or by the simple rule that no work may take place on sites (a van may not even be unloaded). At the same time, Gypsies on official sites are not allowed to leave them for more than brief periods, and so they can no longer do the seasonal farm work that they always have done in England: cherry- and apple-picking, potato-bagging, hop-stringing, and beet-singling. Traditional Gypsy life has mostly disappeared in Britain. But there was, and is, nothing inevitable about that. Mechanization—the machine-made plastic peg—is not really to blame. Rather, it is the work of lawmakers who have pandered to universal but unfounded fears. The legislation of the past few years will likely erode traditional Gypsy life more seriously than the Industrial Revolution eroded it. Regulations on all sites, public or private, rule out nearly all occupations that guarantee Gypsies some independence.
So there goes the trade in Christmas trees, scrap metal, horses, and cars, along with the traveling jobs of tree-lopping, tarmacking, and gate-making. Therefore, inevitably, everyone is on welfare. Very often, those who don’t move on become, like American Indians on their reservations, Gypsies with problems.

  But among Gypsies rich and poor, East or West, the impression of nomadism remains, reinforced by a temporary aspect to even their solidly built, long-term lodgings. In Chisinau, capital of the newly independent republic of Moldova, for example, I met a Gypsy who had moved there from Romania and had made a small fortune manufacturing “Chanel” underwear. In his factory he employed over a hundred seamstresses. They were either Romanian or Russian; none of them was a Gypsy, a fact of which the pantymaker was exuberantly proud. He invited me to see his brand-new house—a palace, in fact, with nine turrets, balconies over an inner court, three grand salons whose textured, opalescent walls were elaborately painted with pastoral scenes of romantic-looking Gypsies traveling in caravans. This family was so rich that they feared for their safety, and kept big dogs between themselves and their jealous neighbors. But there were no toilets or bathrooms in this mansion; and though they’d lived there over a year, electrical wires sprouted from holes in most of the walls, as if they had run out of money in mid-decoration. (They hadn’t.) The women cooked outside in the courtyard over a fire, and then the whole family ate and slept out there, children all in a heap, as they might in a tent. Jean Cocteau spotted it in the famous Gypsy guitarist, Django Reinhardt: “He lives as one dreams of living, in a caravan. And even when it was no longer a caravan, somehow it still was.”

  It is a commonplace among nomad-watchers that sedentary people have a fear of travelers not because they are strangers; we fear them because they are familiar: supposedly they remind us of who we really are. What Herbert Spencer called our “restlessness inherited from ancestral nomads” (and it was he, not Darwin, who coined the term survival of the fittest) may sound like a wistful fantasy of travel writers—and little use to tired poor people who settle, for a while, when they can. But most Gypsies, like the Caribou Eskimos with their “Great Unrest,” have also kept something of their wandering past and reputation; it usefully demarcates them, in their own minds, from the stuck people all around them.

  The fear evoked by Gypsies, sometimes aggravated by or coupled with regional underpopulation, has prompted every attempt to assimilate them. Yet the earlier and more central motive behind assimilation was that feudal societies needed them, as craftsmen and laborers. The earliest systematic efforts (“enlightened” compared with the mass killings and brandings of other regimes and eras) must be those of the Habsburg monarchs, the Austrian Empress Maria Theresa (1740–80) and her son Joseph II, who from 1765 shared her throne. Only the communist regimes, using mostly the same tactics, attempted the social transformation of Gypsies on such a grand scale. Under these Habsburgs, Gypsies in Slovakia were inducted as serfs, forbidden to move, to own or trade horses, to speak Romani, to have leaders, or in many cases to raise their own children (who, on the model of the German lands, were taken away to be raised by white Christian families). Maria Theresa insisted that Gypsies be called Ujmagyar, New Hungarians, or Neubauern, New Farmers, and remade in that image. The more positive reform efforts of mother and son—for example, to improve education and housing for Roma—also collapsed because the Hungarian nobility was unwilling to bear the costs. A few weeks before he died Joseph II wrote his own epitaph: “Here lies Joseph II, who failed in all his enterprises.”

  Sure enough, after his death in 1790, life for Gypsies reverted to normal: one of endless persecution, and general slander (including the charges of cannibalism). On the other hand, no one was interested in their children anymore, and occasionally a philanthropic society came along, such as one started by Slovak doctors in 1929 which brought Gypsy performers to the stage and sponsored a famous all-Gypsy touring football club. Now perhaps worse than persecution was their deepening poverty. “The penalty of imprisonment has no effect on them,” a Slovak official noted in 1924, “because imprisonment only improves their living conditions.” After the war, and the beating they received from the fascist Slovak Hlinka Guards, thousands of desperate Gypsies migrated west, to Bohemia and Moravia. There was some work for them in these industrial centers, there was room (they often occupied houses abandoned by Sudeten Germans), and there were no other Gypsies—all save six hundred Czech Gypsies had been murdered by the Nazis.

  The Communist Party held attractions for Gypsies, as it had for Jews: the Party recruited Rom members, and everywhere the Red Army was—and still is—remembered with affection. However, it wasn’t long before this flow to a land of hope was willfully and tragically diverted. The usual fear of the Gypsy hordes inspired elaborate campaigns of “maximum dispersal”—not expulsion this time but (by 1965) an unconstitutional scheme of “Transfer and Dispersal,” which involved demographic planning according to strict quotas. The result was that extended families were separated and forcibly resettled in far-flung parts of the country. Given this background, it is especially depressing that the newly independent, postcommunist Czech government should be manipulating, or enforcing, a migration of Roma, this time eastbound, back to Slovakia.

  Since 1993 all Slovaks living on Czech territory have been required to apply for citizenship—even if (following the German model) they were born in the Czech lands. The law looks as if it was designed to disfranchise, and then to evict, Gypsies in particular: nearly all of the three hundred thousand Gypsies in the Czech Republic (or their parents) migrated or were sent over from Slovakia. In order to obtain citizenship now you needed to be fluent in Czech (most Gypsies speak Romani and Slovak), you had to have stable residence for at least two years, and you needed a clean criminal record for the preceding five years. Significantly, the last requirement stretched back into the communist period, when many un- or self-employed Gypsies acquired records for such crimes as “avoiding work” or “neglect,” both of which were frequently used as a pretext to remove baby Gypsies to state children’s homes. The law has encouraged violence against Roma (even before it came into effect, some Czech residents of Ústí nad Labem got off to an early start by forcing a Czech-born Gypsy to go to Slovakia to have her baby), as well as a surge in asylum-seeking. Several families have been ping-ponged between the two states. Thousands—perhaps hundreds of thousands—are likely to find themselves without citizenship in either the Czech Republic or in Slovakia: that is, stateless.

  If Eastern Europeans have just begun to adopt the traditional Western preference for expulsion, there is nothing new about the notion that it is a crime just to be a Gypsy. Equally serious was the offense of pretending to be a Gypsy—the traitor, the spy, and the “counterfeit Egyptian”—as if elsewhere there were some nicer, nobler Gypsies, not like our ones.

  Evidently the citizens of Elizabethan England really believed that the strangers deliberately darkened themselves with walnut juice, even though this would have been the equivalent of wearing a “kick me” badge. As one English pamphleteer put it in 1610: “They goe alwais never under an hundred men or women, causing their faces to be made blacke, as if they were Egyptians.” The stain is a stubborn one. “Gypsies only look black because they don’t wash,” an Englishman, distressed about his new neighbors, told the Daily Telegraph in April of 1969. Their language too was often assumed to be Rotwelsch, or thieves’ cant, itself proof of delinquency to those who didn’t understand it.

  The Spanish word gitano, like the English “Gypsy,” comes from “Egyptian,” the most persistent tag, which first turned up in popular Byzantine poetry. The designation was taken up by Gypsies identifying themselves to local authorities, perhaps in the belief that it was better to come from somewhere than from nowhere, and preferably somewhere incontestably exotic (particularly useful for fortune-tellers).

  Gypsies have often turned the enigma of their origins to advantage. In the fifteenth century they had already realized that appear
ance was always at least as important as reality, and that aristocratic credentials, however obscure, were indispensable. Pilgrim status was also good: the Gypsies would have observed, on their way west through Greece and Byzantium, that pilgrims were privileged travelers. And so they came over, the dukes and counts and captains and kings of Little Egypt, along with their colorful flocks of supposed supplicants.