Among the most poignant episodes in recent history was the extermination of some tens of thousands—we do not even know the approximate figure—of Gypsies by the Nazi terror. Here was German racism run wild, devouring its own myth: one of the oldest Aryan groups in Europe was destroyed because it did not suit Hitler’s 20th-century brand of nationalism. In this article Dora E. Yates sets down what is known of the Gypsy fate at the hand of the Nazis.
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It is more than time that civilized men and women were aware of the Nazi crime against the Gypsies, as well as the Jews. Both bear witness to the fantastic dynamic of the 20th-century racial fanaticism. For these two peoples shared the horror of martyrdom at the hands of the Nazis for no other reason than that they were—they existed.
The Gypsies, like the Jews, stand alone in the history of the world as an isolated race; both are, seemingly, miraculous survivals. Each of them has handed down its customs and traditions from generation to generation, as well as an ancient mother-tongue unknown to other peoples: the Jews, Hebrew, and the Gypsies, Romani. Through-out the ages both these peoples have been persecuted unmercifully: the Jews ostensibly because of the steadfastness with which they clung to their faith and because of their economic successes, and the Gypsies for exactly opposite reasons: because of their supposed want of religion and their aloofness and poverty.
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In the Dark Ages both groups were subjected to the rack and wheel for preserving their own traditions and refusing to intermarry with the Gentiles. Anti-Gypsy legislation existed from about 1500 to 1800 CE in several countries of Europe (except Hungary and the Southeast), but in Spain and France it became a dead letter, and in England and Italy was seldom enforced. In point of severity there is little to choose between these laws, though those promulgated in Germany were more numerous than in other countries and perhaps some-what more barbarous. By the 18th century, however, we are told (Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society, Third Series), “even the German conscience began to prick German writers: one was at great pains to justify inhumanity, another could not think without shuddering about ‘the old, helpless, perhaps quite innocent Gypsy woman who was buried alive’; and a third asks ‘What judge would without judgment and right send a man to be hung who was guilty of no particular crime, but simply because he belonged to a particular race?’”
Before the close of the 18th century, such specific anti-Gypsy legislation had come to an end. The Romanis in Europe were left, more or less, to pursue their normal nomadic life, unharassed by any restrictions except the vagrancy laws and frontier regulations. Throughout the 19th and the first three decades of the 20th centuries, they earned their living by their own traditional occupations and handicrafts. In Bulgaria Gypsy men plied the trades of tinkers, comb-makers, iron-workers, gimlet-makers, spoon-makers, sieve-makers, and carpet-weavers, or reared the buffaloes by which their traveling carts were drawn. In Serbia smithcraft was considered the noblest occupation for the Romani; while in Turkey Turkish Gypsies sank so low in the social scale that they accepted employment as common hangmen. Many sedentary Gypsies in Albanian towns were occupied as porters, donkey-drivers, brickand tile-makers and scavengers, and their women-folk found employment as charwomen. In other countries Gypsy fiddlers played at village weddings and dances; Gypsy horse-dealers and blacksmiths carried on a prosperous trade; old Gypsy women put their extensive medical knowledge and herbal lore at the service of the country folk among whom they dwelt; young Gypsy girls sold flowers in the streets of Bucharest and thereby gave to that capital much of its color and gaiety; and everywhere Gypsy fortune-tellers advised all and sundry as to their future fate.
After the First World War some of the more progressive countries of Eastern Europe tried out various cultural experiments to fit the Gypsies into modem life. At Uzhorod in Czechoslovakia, for instance, a special open-air school was started for Gypsy children, surrounded by a playground enclosed with trees, and the curriculum included drawing, handicrafts, and violin instruction—with the result that this institution became a general cultural center for the entire Gypsy colony and was able to produce a Gypsy theatrical company which was invited to tour the whole of Southern Czechoslovakia. Long before 1939 Gypsies had their own Romani newspapers in Rumania, Yugoslavia, and Soviet Russia, and already there were Gypsy doctors, lawyers, teachers, engineers, priests, and authors of considerable ability.
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No exact statistics are obtainable on the distribution of the Gypsies in Europe before the two world wars—their ceaseless migrations from one country to another within Europe itself, and from Europe to Australia and North and South America, make an accurate estimate impossible. But at the beginning of the 20th century Arthur Thesleff and other investigators gave the rough total of 1,422,000. For the present we have no accurate information as to how many have survived Hitler’s New Order; but we do know that their losses were extremely heavy.
Hitler revived and exceeded the savagery of the old 17th and 18th century laws against the “Zigeuner.” He decreed the wholesale massacre of Gypsies in Central, Eastern, and Southern Europe, for the sole reason that they were Gypsies, a race of free men and women. In Germany, before he came into power, tribes of Sinti, Ungri, and Gelderari had wandered peacefully from one village to another, peddling their small wares, mending the kettles and pots and pans of the villagers, and providing the music at their festivities.
The precise date at which Hitler decided on the extermination of Gypsies is unknown to us, but it was obvious that the men and women of this dark-skinned, black-eyed race were not “Nordics.” At first Hitler tried to persuade the German professors of ethnography and anthropology to declare that the Gypsies were non-Aryans, and many men of learning were interned for refusing to deny the Indo-Aryan origin of the Romani people and their language. So Hitler and his gangsters then chose to classify the whole race as “asocial”—i.e., a nomadic people who did not fit into his New Order, and a proper object for genocide.
Of the hideous deeds of barbarity towards the Gypsies in Germany itself, we possess no written testimony. But from trustworthy interviews with “Zigeuner” whose relatives were liquidated at the Belsen and other concentration camps, it has been estimated that of the five thousand nomadic Gypsies who roamed the roads of the Reich in 1939, less than seven hundred are alive today.
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Reliable data on what actually happened in Nazi-occupied countries during the war are naturally difficult to secure. But from the evidence supplied by survivors I will quote two typical examples given by literate Gypsies from Latvia and Czechoslovakia respectively. The first of these is an account written by the Lettish Gypsy, Vanya Kochanowski, a university student who managed eventually to escape into France, “a living skeleton, with no flesh on my bones, but with feet swollen to the size of an elephant’s paws.”
“Before 1940,” he writes, “life in Latvia was very wonderful. We Gypsies enjoyed absolute freedom and we could live and study as we wished. Anyone who wanted to work could earn a good livelihood, but work was not compulsory. Everyone carried on his own life according to his wishes. Then in 1940 our ‘liberators’ appeared from the East. Free discussion came to an end . . . but the Soviet government treated us Gypsies well, and although we were obliged to work hard and to attend school or university the Tziganes were satisfied with their régime. . . .But that stage did not last long. The new ‘liberators’—the Nazis—were a hundred times worse than any medieval oppressors, and deportations and tortures became the order of the day. All Jews were herded into ghettos and soon the forests near Riga became a veritable charnel-house. . . .”
In Eastern Latvia all the Gypsies were assembled in three towns, Rezekne, Ludza, and Vilane. At Ludza they were locked up in a large synagogue where they died, in hundreds, of hunger and disease. When Kochanowski succeeded in telephoning to Ludza, the only reply he received was: “The Gypsies have already been reported to the forests”—the Nazi code phraseology for “murdered.” The bitter protest he then lodged with official Nazi headquarters was met with the retort: “If you cannot prove to me that an adequate number of Gypsies are decent, hard-working folk, you will every one of you be exterminated.”
So, with the collaboration of the chief of the Latvian Gypsies, Janis Lejamanis, this young student set to work to compile a register of “Tziganes honnêtes.” Then, in accordance with the ironic cruelty of the Nazi authorities, who thought the boy had had no education, he was ordered to write a dissertation proving that the Gypsies were Aryans. This, however, he accomplished satisfactorily and in scholarly fashion, giving as his source Miklosich’s Mundarten der Zigeuner in Europa. At last there came a decree that the Gypsies were not to be liquidated. But the “order of release” was diabolically delayed until it was too late: it arrived at 2 AM, exactly two hours after fifteen to twenty-five hundred Gypsies had been massacred. Kochanowski himself, then a youth of strong physique, was spared, and in 1943 with other Lettish students sent to work for the Nazis, often for thirty-six hours on end under deadly fire from Russian troops, outside Leningrad. He was later imprisoned in a gruesome underground cell at Kaunas (Kovno), from the effects of which experience he still suffers in a sanitorium in France.
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The second piece of evidence was contained in a letter written by Antonin Daniel to S. E. Mann of the British Ministry of Information, who before the war was lecturer in English at the Masaryk University in Brno and knew this Gypsy student well. In Czechoslovakia, in pre-war days, there was at Oslavany a flourishing colony of some one hundred and fifty Gypsy men, women, and children who contentedly followed their own trades and had made themselves acceptable to the country folk in that district by their skill as basket-makers, their exceptional knowledge of horses, and above all by the magic of their music. After the war Mr. Daniel wrote to Mr. Mann: “The whole Oslavany colony was taken a few years ago by the Nazis to Oswiecim, where they were done to death. There were only five survivors, among them myself, my sister, and my mother.”
The Belgian review Message of November 13, 1942 reported a crime in Serbia more horrible than any in the three centuries of anti-Gypsy legislation: “One of the most recent crimes of the Germans seems to us to surpass by far all others, because in addition to the suffering it gave rise to, it destroyed gentleness and beauty: all the Gypsies of Serbia have been massacred! . . . These merchants of poetry, prognostications, lies, and songs were hunted down on the roads over which they fled, mounted on their galloping scarecrows of horses, their rolling caravans full of cries, color, and mystery.”
At that date it was impossible to get any confirmation of this tale of terror, but since then the following authentic evidence has been collected by the Gypsy Lore Society (of England) from eyewitnesses, Gypsies and others, who had survived these holocausts. From Sarajevo Professor Rade Uhlik, whose carefully corroborated evidence is indisputable, writes:
Before the war no Gypsy settlements had ever been more prosperous and self-supporting: today they are utterly derelict, and the Gypsy survivors have fled to North-east Bosnia. . . . In so-called ‘Independent’ Croatia some twenty-eight thousand Gypsies were mercilessly butchered, and this computation, if not strictly reliable, is certainly underestimated. For the few children of fortune who did manage to escape from the hell of concentration camps and crematoria relate with horror that it was among a hundred thousand or so candidates for death that they witnessed the most awful and heart-rending scenes, when these barbarians tore Gypsy children from their mothers and fathers and hurled them into the crematory ovens. . . . The whole of Gypsydom in Croatia between the rivers Sava and Drava have been exterminated. They were massacred chiefly as ‘Non-Aryans’—what a terribly ironic fate for the oldest Indo-Aryan race in existence!—being so designated on racial-political grounds, but also because they professed the Greek Orthodox faith. . . . I have to report with deep distress that their splendid, unique dialect of Romani has now become extinct. Only a few adult men, who at the outbreak of hostilities happened to be in prison, have survived the wholesale massacre. And since this remnant (perhaps one per cent of the whole number of Gypsies), having become nervous wrecks, are also useless from the biological point of view, owing to the total extermination of the women and children, there can be no Gypsy posterity for them—or for the world.
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M.Frédéric Max, of the French Embassy, early in 1946 sent us a first-hand account of the treatment of Gypsies in Nazi concentration camps. Though himself never at Auschwitz “where thousands of Gypsies were interned and where whole tribes were sent to the gas chamber,” he received faithful reports from a convoy of surviving Gypsies who came to Buchenwald in May 1944, which reports he confirmed by information from non-Gypsies, chiefly Jews, who had the rare good luck to return from that camp of death.
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At Buchenwald the Gypsies from Germany, Bohemia, and Poland, he says, were lodged together in a block of “Blacks,” so called because the inmates of this part of the camp were branded on the chest with a black triangle, to distinguish them as “asocials” from political prisoners, German law-breakers, and religious adversaries, who bore respectively a red, green, or violet stigma.
At Birkenau camp, the antechamber to Auschwitz itself, the Gypsies from Slovakia and the South of Poland were subjected to unspeakable tortures before being consigned to the gas chambers. “Many Gypsy women were selected for the ‘experimental pavilion,’ where German doctors experimented with artificial impregnation followed by abortion.” In January 1945, before the approach of the Russian Army, the Auschwitz camp was evacuated, and the prisoners were driven westward by long forced marches without food, so that many of them died of cold and hunger or exhaustion or were suffocated in the barns into which they were crowded at night. Others were beaten to death by the SS or murdered in the forests by the Volkssturm. Very few survived.
In Dr. Bendell’s evidence, given in the Belsen trial at Luneberg (as reported in the London Daily Telegraph of October 2, 1945), the information supplied by M. Max is confirmed by the statement that “of 11,000 Gypsies in a special camp at Auschwitz all were killed except 1,500 selected for working parties,” i.e. slave labor. But no further corroboration of this coldblooded mass murder is needed beyond the callous sworn testimony of the Nazi commandant of Auschwitz himself, Rudolf Franz Ferdinand Hoess, as published by William S. Shirer in End of a Berlin Diary.
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Throughout the war young Gypsies who regained their freedom, together with hundreds of others who had never come under the Nazi heel, devoted their liberty to helping the Maquis and other resistance groups in their fight against Hider, and more than one escaped prisoner-of-war has had reason to thank his Gypsy hosts who passed him from camp to camp till a neutral country was reached. No wonder that a young Gypsy writer recently suggested that “the United Nations institute an enquiry into the source of those monstrous Nazi orders to exterminate our race . . . so that the Gypsy martyrs at Auschwitz be avenged, like those of France or Poland, not by the fury of barbarism but by the hand of Justice.”
It would be proper, also, for the nations to see that the Gypsy survivors who may find a refuge among them are treated with decency and respect, and allowed to lead their own lives in their own way, unharassed by the authorities. Since peace came to the world, many hidebound government officials seem to regard the Gypsies as an “anachronism.” There are protection societies for wild birds, wild flowers, and other rarities—but there is no protection, even in America, for wild Gypsies.
“What we Gypsy survivors desire,” declared Matéo Maximoff, a talented Romani author now with his people in Montreuilsous-Bois, in France, “is complete liberty—that is the right to travel freely in the pursuit of our various trades, which would mean that facilities to cross frontiers should be extended to all Gypsies. . . . Just as no one could prevent the flower from budding or the bird from making his nest in the spring, so no one should stop the Gypsy from wandering over the face of the globe. For our race is a part of nature. We bring joy and gaiety to the villages through which we pass, because wherever we go we carry with us that element of mystery that intrigues the whole world.”
History has proved again and again that the well-meaning but misguided attempts of philanthropists and missionaries to cure the Gypsies of their nomadism will never succeed. Though they may settle down contentedly in their winter quarters and send their children to school regularly during six months of the year, as soon as spring returns “wanderlust” will attack them and the urge to take to the road prove irresistible. If Gypsies are allowed to fashion their own fate and are freed from public interference, they will find their own way of fitting into the modern world and contributing their own unique value to their fellow-men.
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