Bury Me Standing

by Isabel Fonseca

  Certainly the Nazis were more interested in the Jewish Question than the Gypsy Plague. After all, the Gypsies, already invisible both socially and economically, represented only a tiny fraction of the European population: .05 percent of the 1933 population of Germany. While the Jew was represented as a nefarious and exotic creature—old stereotypes found new life in violent propaganda, such as Julius Streicher’s Der Stürmer—Gypsies didn’t need any further blackening. Inconsequential as they were in numbers, they had remained the quintessential outsiders of the European imagination: sinister, separate, literally dark, and synonymous with sorcery and crime. Their unpopularity could be counted on. (“Never before,” a typically ironic Rom leader said to me, as we watched a political meeting disintegrate into a brawl, “has a group been so persecuted and so unlovable.”)

  The Enlightenment brought European Jews opportunities for education and commerce previously closed to them, and they therefore advanced socially in a way that Gypsies did not. For their part the Gypsies rejected assimilation (including education) and kept to themselves. This divergence is reflected in the markedly different responses to the Jewish Holocaust and to the Gypsy porraimos.

  Forgetfulness about the porraimos is sometimes abetted by certain persistent and hopeful cases of national amnesia—in the occupied territories, but also in France. (The French still refuse to release wartime documents which relate to Gypsies, presumably to protect French officials.) More generally, documents have been made available, and still the Gypsies appear as a footnote, if at all. Raul Hilberg, in his vast three-volume study of the Holocaust, has fewer than fifteen pages on the fate of Europe’s Gypsies; Lucy Davidowicz, in her fascinating book about the misappropriation of the Holocaust by historians, deals with them in two paragraphs.

  If the ignorance about the fate of Europe’s Gypsies under the Nazis sometimes seems willful, perhaps it is because their inclusion undermines what Sybil Milton, the senior historian of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, identifies as the fundamental belief of her historian colleagues: “all have continued to focus on the killing of Jews as a unique departure from earlier persecutions, accepting Hitler’s antisemitism and that of the Nazi movement as the only motivation for mass murder.” As Milton points out, it was the same government, agencies, doctors, anthropologists, and other “racial scientists” who developed and applied the eugenic measures against Jews, Gypsies, blacks, and the handicapped. Starting with marriage laws and sterilization and ending in murder, the methods used to register, to isolate, and finally to eliminate these groups “for the protection of German blood” were similar and sometimes identical.

  Whereas Jews were fingered as agents of an international criminal conspiracy, the Gypsies (branded as spies centuries earlier) were now attacked as congenital criminals. The latter libel better stood the test of time.

  In war-crimes trials, Nazis attempted to justify—or differentiate—the killing of Gypsies by stating that they had been punished as criminals, not as Gypsies per se. And they succeeded: although sufficient documents were available immediately after the war, the mass murder of Roma and Sinti was not addressed at the Nuremberg trials, and no Gypsy witnesses were called. To this day, just one Nazi, Ernst-August König, has received a sentence specifically for crimes against Gypsies. On September 18, 1991, the seventy-one-year-old former Auschwitz guard sentenced to life hanged himself in his German prison cell.

  Many “experts” on “Gypsy affairs” during the Nazi period continued to work on the problem in the Federal Republic, making the collapse of the Third Reich a matter of irrelevance to most Gypsies. In 1953 Ritter’s files, genealogies, and “racial testimonies” were given to the newly created—or the newly named—Travelers Office of the Bavarian Criminal Police, whose staff included one of his former SS colleagues. Ritter himself, commended by an adviser to the federal government for his “profound appreciation of the situation of Roma,” returned to his work as a child psychologist.

  A federal court in 1956 chose as the starting point for the racial persecution the year 1943—when the deportations to Auschwitz began—thereby disclaiming responsibility to most Gypsy survivors. Before that date, “police and security” measures against them were legitimized by their alleged “asocial characteristics.” This claim was back-dated by the German courts to 1938 only in the 1960s, by which time many survivors were irretrievably dispersed or dead. In the Eastern bloc countries the Gypsies have also been disowned. It has often been convenient for governments to understate the numbers of unwanted people living in their territories; in this way, even for regimes ready to honor the “victims of fascism”—and in Hungary and Czechoslovakia reparations to Jews were made eagerly and early—ludicrously low figures for Gypsies made it politically possible to ignore their legitimate claims. (At the same time, the culture of Gypsies—particularly the contribution of Gypsy musicians in Hungary—has been a prominent feature of the country’s folkloric identity.)

  The Nazi genocide against Sinti and Roma was officially acknowledged only in 1982, by Helmut Schmidt. But little has changed. The few Gypsy survivors who are able to navigate the bureaucratic obstacles may find that it isn’t worth the trouble. For example, all social-security payments received by the successful claimant since 1945 are automatically deducted from any reparations, as if they were the same thing. Nor need the children of victims apply; unlike their Jewish counterparts, Gypsies orphaned by Nazi actions do not qualify. But who is going to complain?

  Very few Gypsies know much about their collective history, but none is unaware of its hallmark of persecution. Many (but far from most) Gypsies living in the Balkans have an idea of their fate under the Third Reich and its kindred regimes in Bulgaria and the Czech lands, Croatia, Hungary, Romania, and Slovakia, as well as in occupied Albania, Serbia, and Greece. So was it ironic, or even perverse, that among them now there was such a rush for Germany? (It is hard to imagine that country’s exerting magnetic force on today’s remaining East European Jews.) Though Romany emancipation movements are working to change this, the instinct to suppress the past remains powerful.

  Among Roma, though, “forgetting” does not imply complacency: its tenor is one of—sometimes buoyant—defiance. On a 1993 visit to a miserable Romanian Gypsy settlement which had been razed by a white Romanian mob, I was accompanied by an English Gypsy, Pete Mercer, the head of his community in Peterborough. His reaction to the arson attack, which had left some crippled and hundreds homeless, was spirited—and at the same time characteristically prim in its abbreviation of the swear word. “Hony swacky mally Asbestos,” Pete wrote in my notebook, with a translation beneath—not of Honi soit qui mal y pense, or “Shame be to him who evil thinks” (the motto of the Most Noble Order of the Garter), but a loose translation of the sense of it: “F. you Jack, I’m fireproof.”

  The Jews have responded to persecution and dispersal with a monumental industry of remembrance. The Gypsies—with their peculiar mixture of fatalism and the spirit, or wit, to seize the day—have made an art of forgetting.

  Historically the Gypsies have not had an idea of, or word for, themselves as a group. In place of a nation, they recognize different tribes and, more locally, extended families or clans. Their European names—like Gypsy or Zigeuner—suggest a monolithic whole. This isn’t an accurate reflection of how they see themselves: it is a reflection of how they are seen by outsiders.

  But things are changing. Just as Eskimos have chosen to call themselves the Inuit—which means “people”—“Roma” is emerging as a common name and signaling the arrival of a new collective identity. It is this fledgling recognition that makes the project of remembrance possible. A sense of local and personal misfortune is developing into a broad consciousness of historical wrong. And so for the first time, Gypsies want to commemorate the porraimos.

  On April 14, 1994, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum held its first commemoration of the Gypsy victims. Among the participants was Ian Hancock, an English Gypsy, now livi
ng in Buda, Texas. It was Hancock who coined the term porraimos; it was Hancock who more or less single-handedly waged the long battle for inclusion of the Roma in the museum—and on the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council (founded in 1979), whose sixty-five members already included Poles, Russians, Ukrainians, and more than thirty Jews. It was only after the 1986 resignation of President Elie Wiesel, the survivor and Nobel Peace Prize winner, who had opposed Gypsy representation, that one Gypsy was invited onto the council.

  A handful of Gypsies gathered that spring day in the museum’s marble Hall of Remembrance. They came from New Jersey, Minneapolis, Los Angeles, Budapest, Bucharest, Bratislava, and Krakow. Hancock (of London and Buda), whom over several years I had rarely seen in anything other than defiant mood, was proudly and solemnly brimming with tears. All the same, he was still fuming about the Gypsy nook upstairs in the museum, decorated like a school play, with a Gypsy caravan and violin. There, under the label “Enemies of the State,” his people were as usual lost in a crowd of sundry “undesirables”: “communists, Social Democrats, trade unionists, pacifists, homosexuals, dissenting clergy, Jehovah’s Witnesses, freemasons, Roma (Gypsies), Slavs and others.” In the museum’s permanent exhibition only the Jews are described as racial enemies and therefore uniquely slated for annihilation.

  Three Eastern European Roma spoke. Although the very fact of their presence in the Hall of Remembrance was evidence of change—as was their testimony, earlier in the day, before a special congressional hearing on the human-rights abuses of Gypsies—the stories they told mainly suggested that the Holocaust had been a lesson in the usefulness of “forgetting” for their parents, and how richly they felt the role of baxt, of luck, chance, or fate. A significant representation of Gypsies would become part of the community of remembrance; but most would remain apart, preoccupied, and vivid to themselves only in the present.

  Jan Yoors—the twelve-year-old Belgian boy who in the 1930s had left home to join a passing troupe of Lovara Gypsies—wrote a memoir, many years later, of his adopted people.

  I often wondered at their strange, inexplicable lack of traumatic reactions to their often violent personal persecutions. I observed, and eventually learned to understand, their rejection of hate or personal bitterness as a response to outside pressures. Pulika, my adopted father, said, “Too often the courage about dying is cowardice about living.”

  During the war, Yoors was contacted by the British Resistance. Gypsies, with their expert knowledge of the forests and byways, the psychology of authorities and of survival, would make natural members of the underground. In addition to the skills developed by an underground nation, however, it was the Gypsy instinct to live so responsively in the present which made them valuable to the Resistance, and which also accounts for their “peculiar” lack of interest in the past. In a second book, about the war period, Yoors returns to Pulika and his family with a mission. As an epigraph Yoors offers an example of Pulika’s wartime wisdom: “The problem is still one of interpretation, and the response of man is the meaning of his life.” Or, as a Welsh Gypsy proverb has it: “The winter will ask what we did in the summer.”

  EIGHT

  The Temptation to Exist

  IN A 1972 PAMPHLET called Romania’s Population, Romanians, Hungarians, and Germans were found to account for 99 percent of the population, the remainder comprising “other nationalities,” including “Ukrainians, Ruthenians, Hutsulains, Serbians, Croats, Slovaks, Russians, Tartars, Turks, Jews, etc.” Thus the Roma of Romania, long the country’s largest minority (and in 1992 accounting for 15 percent of the entire population), were registered simply as “etc.”

  Nicolae Gheorghe—a scholarly and somehow unlikely activist—was one of those “etc.” But after 1989 he emerged as a kind of star, feted by “the international community,” and hailed as one of the new celebrities of ethnic conflict and minority rights (along with, for example, Nobel Peace Prize winner Rigoberta Menchú and the martyred Chico Mendes). To this company, Nicolae Gheorghe brought not only the Gypsies but his own continental flair. Every news story in the foreign press about Gypsies mentioned or quoted him.

  Like most celebrities he was also elusive. Under the “G” tab of my address book I have a half-dozen numbers for Gheorghe, none of them his own. Tracking him down required half a dozen conversations: one by one the assistant/wife/sister would tell you (wearily/impatiently/boredly) that Nicolae was at a conference/collecting an award in Helsinki/Warsaw/Geneva/New York. He slalomed from summit to symposium, visiting a score of different capitals a year, and he lived frugally, on expenses. Fittingly for a spokesman for a stateless, notionally nomadic people, even at home in Bucharest Nicolae had no fixed address but only a post-office box. In his carry-on luggage he kept a portable computer, the ring binder in which he logs his life, and a few shirts and ascots. Nicolae was always trying to deflect attention away from himself; such scrutiny illuminated not his cause, but his personal conflict. An academic by inclination, Gheorghe became an activist out of a sense of duty (though he imaginatively combined these roles by being an activist of the intellect, agitating for ideas, picketing for theory). He was also genuinely uninterested in aggrandizement, and donated all his awards to projects benefiting Roma. He had no particular Roma constituency on which he could rely, and other ambitious Gypsies envied the apparently glamorous way he lived, which in truth was the kind of arduous and disconnected regime of a traveling salesman.

  The family of Nicolae’s childhood was romanizat, Romanianized, and they spoke only the national language. His fair-complexioned mother had discouraged identification with tigani. This was hardly a real option, as her husband’s side of the family was extremely dark-skinned; but with her son she was adamant. In her own lifetime, passing for a gadji had saved her from deportation. At home the Gheorghe family acknowledged that they were Roma, and, long before the advent of political euphemism, they used the term to distinguish themselves from tigani, by which they meant—as did all Romanians—variously corrupted and/or socially inferior Gypsies.

  Such taxonomies were not respected at school, though, and Nicolae, who is no darker than many Romanians, has a painful early memory of other boys squawking Gal at him, Gal Ciora! Ciora is the Romanian for “crow”—the black nuisance—and ga is the sound the crow makes. (“Ciora, Ciora,” goes the schoolyard taunt, “mata zboara tactu, cinta la vioara”: “Your mother flies, your father plays the violin.”) In the state military academy, where he spent six years, Nicolae became a leader of the Communist Youth League; he went on to university and joined the Party, moving ever further from any tigani identity. Although Gypsies, valued for their particular skills, had once been integrated in the Romanian territories, in the sixties large numbers of them were being assimilated for the first time: educated and inducted, for better or worse, into the rank and file. They had less “cultural mobility,” as Nicolae would say, but certainly they had more social mobility than ever before or since. Nevertheless, Nicolae does remember being called an African at the military academy.

  And then, while doing field work for his sociology degree, Nicolae came into contact with “real” Gypsies. It was a revelation. According to Sam Beck, an American sociologist who met Nicolae during his own field work in Romania in 1979, Gheorghe had by then already been trying to organize what he called “a formal voluntary association of Roma”: a brave venture during a period in which “ethnic politics were understood either as a threat against the state or illegal chauvinism.” At the same time, under Ceausescu, his work and indeed his advice were used to inform policy about which he could only feel ambivalent.

  Although Gypsies continued to be a mere “etc.” in the official view, secretly the Romanian Communist Party grew anxious to do something about its vast population of a certain dark people who failed to reflect the modern achievements of the Romanian state. And so a committee was formed. Nicolae Gheorghe served the Commission on Demography from 1976 to 1989. He was not deluded about its aims—to disperse and thereby assim
ilate Gypsies—and cannot have been surprised that the police were the most active element on the project.

  In 1983, the Propaganda section of the Central Committee produced a report evaluating the work of the Commission and found that

  a large number of them, persisting in retrograde traditions and mentalities, tend to lead a parasitic way of life, refuse to work, and live in precarious conditions.… [They] resist hygienic and sanitary steps … and refuse to take part in activities for the welfare of society.

  Gypsy “resistance” to hygiene could be explained by the fact that then as now running water and sanitation services did not extend to the Gypsy neighborhoods, not even to those in cities. But garbage collection wasn’t among the remedies offered by the committee, which instead included the issuing of police identification cards to all Gypsies and the removal of all private means of transport, such as horses and carts. Vagabonds and beggars should be taken into care, where their education would focus on the moral and the sanitary, as well as “special stress [on] respecting laws, Party decisions and documents.”

  Following the publication of the commission’s report in 1984, Nicolae wrote a report of his own: an article disclosing and denouncing the oppressive new policies, which was smuggled out of Romania and published in a French journal. Soon enough, someone denounced him, and Nicolae was subjected to a campaign of terror which resulted in the loss of his job and the ruin of his family. His children, who are only half Gypsy, not surprisingly have been raised far from the world of Romany emancipation, which is also to say far from him. He seemed to have lost everything.

  Ten years later, Gheorghe was still driven to argue from both sides. He maintained his original attraction to the internationalist, humane values of communism; his self-criticism was exemplary. His dilemma derived in part from the fact that he owed his education to that system. Furthermore, like all people from disfranchised groups who enfranchise themselves, his conflict thereafter was over the extent to which he then remained Gypsy—not only in his own mind and in the minds of Gypsies left behind, but also in the view of a state which maintained that a Gypsy was that ineducable thing, innately criminal: a social problem.