Gypsy Hunt

The title is deliberately provocative. The word cigan, “Gypsy,” is a slur that many still use for members of the Roma community. People who don’t call their fellow human beings names call them Roma. The word Rom, like the Roma themselves, originates in India and simply means “person.” You may object that this is a newfangled woke invention aimed against traditional values and views of a world in which there was no room for Roma, only for Gypsies. To some extent that is true. Gypsy is the traditional and, in the past, dominant term for members of the Roma community. The part of the Auschwitz concentration camp in which, on August 2, 1944, the Nazis murdered almost three thousand inmates, many of them women and children, was not called the Roma Camp but the Zigeunerlager. On the anniversary of this event, the Roma, and with them all people who don’t call their fellow human beings names, commemorate the Roma genocide. These three thousand victims are only a small part of all the Roma killed during the Second World War. The exact number is hard to determine, but most estimates range between 300,000 and 700,000 Roma. Many also call the Roma genocide the forgotten genocide, because, unlike other categories of victims of Nazism, there was no systematic research into this chapter of what remains the darkest period in recent history. For a long time the memory of the Roma victims of Nazism lived on only among the Roma, in silence, as part of oral tradition. There were no institutions, no states, no prominent individuals, no collective sense of guilt or responsibility that would have prevented the Roma victims from becoming merely a statistical detail in the footnotes of historical reports.

The girl with sad eyes who, in one of the most harrowing surviving photographs from the Holocaust, looks out fearfully from the half-open door of a cattle car on the way to a concentration camp, was long believed to be a young Jewish girl, until one of her surviving fellow passengers recognized her. In fact she was a Roma girl, Anna Maria Steinbach, whom those close to her affectionately called Settela. She was born on December 23, 1934, in the small village of Buchten in the south of the Netherlands. On May 16, 1944, the Nazis arrested Settela together with her mother, brothers, sisters and other relatives and locked them up in the Westerbork transit camp, where the photograph was taken. Just three days later, on May 19, 1944, they were crammed into cattle cars together with another 244 Roma and some Jewish prisoners. Ahead of them was a long and grueling journey to the death camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau. There Settela spent the last few weeks of her short life. Between July 31 and August 3, 1944, she was taken, together with her mother, siblings, aunt and nephews and nieces, to the gas chamber in the aforementioned Zigeunerlager, or Gypsy Family Camp, as the official Nazi name went. And then the end, silence and oblivion.

The long neglect of the genocide of the Roma was no accident. Although at least a third, and by some estimates more than half, of Europe’s prewar Roma population was killed during the war, the prejudices of the majority population against them survived entirely. The German government adopted the first official recognition of and compensation for Roma victims of Nazi violence only in the 1980s, four decades after Settela and her family were put to death in the Zigeunerlager. All that time there was a concealed belief that the Roma, because of their behavior and “antisociality,” were somehow themselves responsible for everything that happened to them.

How deeply rooted and full of hatred these prejudices were, during the war and after it, is also shown by the fact that it was not only the Nazis who killed Roma. The executions of Roma families during the Second World War by local Partisan groups, above all in Dolenjska, are a dark stain on the legacy of the national liberation struggle in Slovenia. According to all known information, these were acts decided at the local level, born of personal prejudices and suspicions, without the consent or direct order of the supreme Partisan leadership. Nevertheless, the fact that these events were hushed up after the war and that to this day there has been no official acknowledgment and dignified remembrance of the victims allows some politicians in Slovenia—who are otherwise not known for their tolerant attitude toward the Roma—to instrumentalize these acts in an attempt to discredit the entire national liberation struggle and the anti-fascist movement in Slovenia. The only effective answer to such manipulation is acknowledgment, respect and remembrance.

Historical memory of the suffering and discrimination against members of the Roma community in Europe, and in Slovenia too, is essential for understanding today’s situation, the problems and tensions we are witnessing, which led to the recent statement by a member of the National Assembly that Slovenians should join shooting clubs so as to protect themselves more easily against the Roma. This in no way means that taking past injustices into account in any way justifies violent acts or inappropriate behavior by individuals in the local communities where they live. Coexistence with some Roma families in some parts of Slovenia is difficult, and the people who live there have a legitimate right to demand that things be sorted out and that the problems and incidents preventing them from living normal lives come to an end. These problems cannot be solved only with lessons on human rights from the capital, where we don’t have these problems and don’t know them. I understand people’s discontent and frustration over the long absence of effective solutions. But just as we cannot look for a way out merely in haughty preaching from the capital, we will not find it in sweeping stigmatization and the collective responsibility of all members of the Roma community either, and least of all in a state response that increasingly focuses only on repression.

The Interior Minister’s recent statement referring to the “responsibility of the Roma community” for the situation is symptomatic. OK, Minister, but let us not forget the responsibility of the “Slovenian community,” or rather the state, for the mess in which both the Roma and the people who live alongside them as neighbors find themselves and suffer. There are so many problems that we will hardly solve them overnight, but we must start solving them differently, and immediately. Let us look critically at what we have done so far and why things went in the wrong direction, and then decide how to move forward, together with members of the Roma community and not merely against them. It is wrong and dangerous to leave everything to local communities and allow tensions to cause conflict and intolerance. The direction in which to look for solutions is indicated by Article 2 of the Slovenian Constitution, which states that Slovenia is a state governed by the rule of law. This means that laws apply equally to everyone, including members of the Roma community. But Article 2 of the Constitution also says that Slovenia is a social state, and that too must apply to everyone, including the Roma. If we go on merely preaching or threatening, this will give even greater momentum to boorish bigots such as the MP mentioned above, who are cheering for mutual problems to be solved with weapons. It wouldn’t be the first time. And in the end the Roma will, once again, because of their behavior and “antisociality,” somehow be themselves responsible for everything that happens to them.