EDGES MAGAZINE Issue 26

July/Aug 2001

GYPSIES OF EASTERN EUROPE
David Crowe - from the Elon University
North Carolina, makes contact with Edges
.

The Roma (singular Rom), or as they are more commonly known in the English speaking world, the Gypsies (Egyptians) entered Europe in the late Middles Ages from India. Elsewhere, the Roma are referred to as cigán, tsiganes, zigeuner, and other similar terms. These names come from the Byzantine Greek word, Atsinganoí, which means itinerant wanders or soothsayers. Because of the stereotypes and prejudice associated with these names, the Gypsies preferred to be called Roma or Romani, a name from their own language, Romani.

By the 14th century, the dark skinned Egyptians were highly prized as gunsmiths, metal smiths, equine specialists, and musicians. Despite this, the Roma remained at the bottom of Europe's socio - economic ladder either as freemen, serfs, or, in the case of Romania's historic provinces, Wallachia and Moldavia, as slaves (robi).

The gradual Ottoman take-over of the Balkans in the 15th and 16th centuries saw the status of the Roma decline further because they were often incorrectly associated with the Muslim Ottomans. This and other upheavals saw the Roma face a growing body of restrictions on their movements and freedom. These limitations were coupled with a new body of prejudice that centred on fictitious, irrational stereotypes that became an integral part of the fabric of western society.

By the mid - 16th century, most of the world's Roma lived in Central and Eastern Europe, particularly the Balkans. They found themselves increasingly trapped in a lifestyle of forced nomadism that pushed them to the edge of society.

At a distance, most Europeans saw the Roma as a monolithic group of impoverished, illiterate nomads. In reality, the Roma had evolved as a complex group of clans with various dialects of Romani and a diverse set of social and cultural values that have remained at the centre of Roma life and customs to this day. What they all share is a deep commitment to the family and clan, and an almost universal distrust of the non - Roma or gadzé.

In the late 18th and early 19th century, some Roma began to move out of the Balkans, particularly after the emancipation of Romania. Most Roma continued their nomadic way of life though some adopted a sedentary lifestyle. Unfortunately, they continued to be haunted by the age - old prejudices and stereotypes that depicted them as untrustworthy thieves and irresponsible wanderers.

For a brief period after World War I, the Roma in Central and Eastern Europe seemed to enjoy something of a cultural and historic enlightenment as the fruits of post-war democracy took brief hold in the region. Unfortunately, whatever modest cultural and political gains the Roma made disappeared as new, fascist - oriented dictatorships that took control of much of Central and Eastern Europe in the 1930s.

Policies towards the Roma had always been particularly harsh in the German states. In the early 15th century, German rulers began to adopt policies to halt Roma movements throughout their kingdoms. Later, 18th century Hapsburg rulers kidnapped Roma children and placed them in non - Roma Christian homes in an unsuccessful effort to destroy the Roma family.

After German unification in 1871, legal efforts were made to force foreign Roma out of Germany. Authorities also expected native Roma to give up their nomadic way of life. In the spring of 1899, Bavarian police created a special anti - Roma unit, the Gypsy Information Agency, which collected detailed information on the Roma. This data became the basis of the infamous Zigeuner - Buch (1905), which was later shared with police in other countries.

After World War I, some German states passed laws that required Roma to be fingerprinted, photographed, and carry travel documents. Those without proper identification papers could be deported. Other laws said that any Roma or other itinerant person without gainful employment could be punished for up to two years in a state work facility. In 1928, a national law ordered that all Roma in Germany be placed under police surveillance. In 1929, authorities transformed Bavaria's special Roma affairs office into the National Central Office for Fighting the Gypsy Nuisance, headquartered in Munich.

After Adolf Hitler came to power in early 1933, Nazi officials felt that the various anti - Roma laws and decrees put into force by the earlier German states was sufficient to oversee the "Gypsy menace." At the time, there were about 30,000 to 35,000 Sinti and Roma in Germany. Though the Germans did not initially enact any specific anti - Roma legislation, they used the new Denaturalisation Law (1933) and the Law Regarding Expulsion from the Reich (1934) to force foreign Roma out of the Reich. They also used the Law for the Prevention of Genetically Diseased Offspring (1933) to sterilise some Roma. In 1935, the Germans began to put Roma into special camps known as Zigeunerlager. This practice became particularly widespread during and after the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. Nazi officials also applied the Nuremberg Laws to the Roma. Issued in the fall of 1935, these racial acts limited full Reich citizenship to Aryans, and forbade marriage and extramarital sexual relations between Aryans and Jews. The Nazis argued that the Roma possessed "artfremdes Blut (alien blood)" and were an Aasocial criminal element that threatened Aryan German society.

Though the Third Reich never produced an anti - Roma law, by the late 1930s, officials had enough legal authority to initiate a massive campaign of deportations and other actions against the Roma, first in the Greater Reich, and later throughout Europe.

In 1941 - 1942, new anti - Roma regulations deprived them of any remaining rights. On December 16, 1942, Himmler ordered all Reich Roma deported to Auschwitz. A year earlier, German authorities shipped a little over 5,000 Roma to the odz ghetto. The first German Roma had been sent to Auschwitz in the early fall of 1942, where they helped to build the Gypsy Family Camp at Birkenau .

The fate of the Roma during the Holocaust is controversial, and there is wide disagreement on two issues - the number of deaths and whether or not the Roma were part of the Final Solution, the German plan to mass murder all of the Jews of Europe. Estimates for the number of Roma deaths during the Holocaust range from 80,000 to over 1 million. The reason for such divergent estimates and views is the lack of adequate scholarship on this particular aspect of the Roma tragedy during the Holocaust. While some scholars have looked with some depth at the Roma tragedy in the Greater Reich, they have not adequately researched what happened to the Roma in the Nazi satellite states, where most Roma lived, or in those parts of Europe under direct German occupation.

After the Holocaust, we hear little of the Roma in Central and Eastern Europe until the mid - 1950s, when the region's new communist governments begin to discover that they had relatively large, fast growing Roma populations that suffered from severe impoverishment, high unemployment, and massive illiteracy. Moreover, the Roma remained victimised by a body of prejudice that remains the principle stumbling bloc to their integration into Central and East European societies. Leaders throughout both regions mounted expensive, but insensitive efforts to force the Roma to assimilate. Roma nomadism was outlawed and their children rapidly mainstreamed into public schools without any regard to language or socio - economic deficiencies. Roma children who exhibited any sort of educational difficulty were often sent to schools for the retarded. This practice continues to this day. Roma settlements were randomly destroyed and their occupants forced into government housing projects without any regard to Roma desires or needs. Job training programs were created to help move the Roma from traditionally unskilled jobs to skilled positions.

Many of these policies were driven by fears of high Roma birth rates vis à vis almost zero population birth rates among non - Roma throughout Central and Eastern Europe. Though some remarkable gains were made in Roma education, housing, and employment, the Roma paid a price for them. The policies were often implemented without any regard for Roma traditions or input. The idea was to force the Roma to assimilate and give up all hints of their past.

Moreover, a new body of anti - Roma prejudice surfaced, driven by misplaced jealousy over what many non - Roma saw as expensive government policies that favoured the Roma over non - Roma. This prejudice intensified throughout the 1980s, a period when the economies throughout Central and Eastern Europe suffered tremendous declines. Thus, it should come as no surprise that when communism began to collapse in the late 1980s, the more open environment that replaced it saw a new, more virulent form of anti - Roma prejudice surface that had not been seen since the Holocaust. The Roma now were viewed throughout the region as the cause of everything gone awry.

Over the past decade, the Roma, often the largest minority in nations that are almost ethnically pure, suffer from discrimination and prejudices that have deep roots in the past. Moreover, they have often been victimised by governments, and particularly the police, who are theoretically sworn to protect their rights. Yet democratisation has also offered the Roma new opportunities for economic, organisational, and political growth never possible in the past. Unfortunately, their continued deep impoverishment and illiteracy, coupled with an environment of harsh prejudice and discrimination, creates an explosive situation that can only be viewed as potentially destabilising, particularly given the size of the Roma communities in these parts of Europe. As Vaclav Havel has noted, the plight of the Roma is the litmus test of the democratisation experiment in the Czech Republic. The same could be said for the rest of Central and Eastern Europe.



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