Another Darkness, Another Dawn Read online

  And yet, despite all the disjuncture and change, there were strong continuities too. For Gypsies, foremost in these continuities was their marginalization and absence from the official record. Within Germany this was translated into a lack of recognition for the persecution they had experienced during the Nazi period. Given that the Nazis themselves had built on pre-existing attitudes towards, and legislation targeted at, Gypsies from the Weimar and indeed imperial periods, this is hardly surprising. Although such silence, particularly around the complicity of the wider population, extended to include the treatment of the Jews at the hands of the mass of the German population, at an institutional level there was a big difference. The Allies had made it clear that German attitudes towards its remaining Jewish population would be taken as a measurement of German desire to be included in the democratic world. Consequently the Federal Republic developed a proactive attitude towards both individual Jews and Israel. Laws of restitution from the early 1950s ensured that Germany paid financial compensation, firstly to Israel, and later to Holocaust survivors, so from the mid-1950s returning German Jews received 6,000DM.3 In contrast, the Nuremberg trials, as well as subsequent military tribunals prosecuting ss personnel and other individuals for their actions in the camps, barely mentioned Roma and Sinti in their considerations: ss officer Richard Bugdalle was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1960 for the personal murder of a number of inmates of Sachsenhausen camp. Along with the evidence used in the prosecutions over Chelmno extermination camp, this was a rare case of evidence of a Sinti or Roma death being explicitly used to build the case for the prosecution. In the major Auschwitz trial, held in Frankfurt am Main in 1963–4 the persecution of Roma and Sinti as well as the liquidation of the Gypsy camp in August 1944 had no influence on the eventual verdicts.4

  Denied recognition and initially disqualified from compensation as racial victims, the treatment of Roma and Sinti survivors showed how the Federal Republic was content to carry forward Nazi stereotypes of asociality. The decree of 1950 of the Baden-Württemberg interior minister was typical: ‘Gypsies and Gypsies of mixed race . . . [have] not been persecuted and imprisoned for racist reasons, but rather because of their asocial and criminal attitude [emphasis added].’ Similarly the Federal High Court in 1956 found that Himmler’s measures of 1938 were ‘not by their nature, specifically geared to racial persecution, but within the scope of standard police and security measures’. It was not until 1963 that the idea of Gypsies’ inherent criminality and asociality was challenged, when the courts accepted that racial motives ‘may have been a contributing factor’ in the treatment of Roma and Sinti. Resulting compensation claims were, however, restricted to incidents occurring after 8 December 1938, thereby excluding restitution for incarceration in early internment camps, such as Berlin’s Marzahn. Claims could not be made for deportations to ghettos after May 1940 (primarily Radom and Białystok) and were highly restricted in relation to health disabilities caused by sterilization and medical experiments. Regulations also required individuals seeking compensation to have endured minimum periods of detention in certain officially recognized camps.5

  Added to these difficulties was the fact that any claims made were to be assessed by the police department, often largely staffed by the same personnel as during the Nazi period. Walter Winter tells how, once back in his home town, he went to register with the local authorities and only avoided being registered as ‘stateless’ because not only had he been at school with the clerk registering him, but because he protested vigorously and stood his ground. He also had to fight to have his family land and home returned, and also faced the fact that while he had to be denazified (as he had served in the Wehrmacht), ‘the old mayor, the Nazi, was still in office’.6 Indeed, his experiences were indicative of a wider phenomenon: although the Allies issued identity papers to returning Roma and Sinti survivors, German authorities commonly confiscated them on the grounds that the holders lacked proof of German nationality and were consequently stateless. Such denial of citizenship to Sinti survivors had wider repercussions, as it meant the loss of civil rights, including the right to vote, as well as being required to renew their passports every two years at a cost of 40DM.7

  In-depth interviews with survivors reveal how well-placed fear of authorities and feelings of shame fed into a deep reluctance to submit to the examinations and bureaucratic procedures necessary to receive compensation. Ottilie Reinhardt’s mother

  was declared 100% disabled, but one of the doctors contested the finding, so my mother had to go through yet another medical examination. After that, my mother simply refused to let the doctors examine her anymore. She didn’t want to be tortured again. My mother was always afraid, she said she didn’t want to repeat her experience of the war. And she had the same kind of fear of doctors. My mother did not receive any compensation.

  On top of these humiliations, interviewees, although acknowledging the pain and fear associated with the initial sterilization, stressed it was in fact the far-reaching repercussions which damaged them more. Their inability to find a place within their community, and to play a role in the passing on of culture, mattered far more than any physical pain caused by sterilization. With almost an entire generation wiped out and a second generation irrevocably damaged, German Roma and Sinti communities struggled to re-form. Nazi persecution had ensured that it was almost impossible for Roma and Sinti customs and culture to be maintained: the humiliations and treatment faced by individuals within the camps had destroyed the fundamental structures of authority and respect, which formed the basis of traditional culture; and the deaths of most elders in the camps ensured there were fewer people to pass on traditions. Something of the impact on the community’s population structure is revealed in a 1960s study of the Roma community of Hildesheim. Of the 183 individuals, over half were under fourteen and only five over 60. When we consider these factors in combination with the sterilization programme, as well as ongoing levels of illiteracy and social marginalization, we begin to get something of the sense of the internal challenges faced by the surviving German Roma and Sinti.8

  Layered on to the devastation of Roma and Sinti communities was the added fact that although the German population was aware of how Gypsies had been persecuted during the war, this did not translate into sympathy in the post-war period. As one commentator observed, ‘Hitler has sunk, but the racial hatred has remained unchanged; to those who do not believe this, I recommend a walk, accompanied by a Gypsy, in the streets of a city.’ Even in the chaotic months following the collapse of Hitler’s regime, the population of Marburg found the time and institutional energy necessary to approve the deportation of Gypsies from the town.9 Hesse in autumn 1947 saw administrators complaining how Gypsies were travelling in Rudeln (packs) again, and were again constituting a Landplage (menace).10 Similarly Bremen issued a measure for ‘the protection of the population from molestation by Travellers’ based on the Bavarian legislation of 1926, which was simply one of number passed across Germany in the late 1940s. Both Cologne and Düsseldorf from 1949 actively registered all Gypsies in their area through the local police stations, as part of a stated policy on ‘Combating the Gypsy Menace’. Registration also included continuing Nazi restrictions over the issuing of Wandergewerbescheine, as well as regulations over the registration and surveillance of all local Gypsy employment.11

  Lest we think that such attitudes were solely the feature of post-war Germany, a look at France and Britain in these years shows similar preoccupations around ideas of asociality and the need for assimilation. France’s wartime internment policies were followed seamlessly by assimilatory measures and harassment via the anthropometric notebook. Although internment technically ended on 30 August 1945, the last inmates were not released until May 1946 with the minister of the interior declaring ‘we liberate [the Gypsies] with the greatest of regret, and recommended the severest possible application of the law of 16 July 1912’, making plain the fact that internment was as much a French solution a
s it was Nazi policy.12 The refusal of the French state to extend compensation to Gypsies who had suffered internment, with the attendant disruption of familial and economic routines and networks, trauma, starvation and loss of property, can also be understood in this light. Compensation would have been an acknowledgement that French preoccupations with assimilation were flawed or morally wrong.13 Right up to 1969 nomades were prosecuted and imprisoned for offences relating to the law of 1912, and the emphasis at both national and département level remained on using legislation to heavily encourage settlement.14

  In Britain, Gypsy Travellers’ invisibility in relation to the war effort spilled over into a denial of their rights to the benefits of the welfare state as well as their absence from new planning considerations embodied in the Town and Country Planning Act of 1947 governing the use of space. In popular imagination the new welfare state (1944–8) had been ‘won’ through people’s individual and collective engagement in the war effort, and consequently was seen as a ‘right’. The reverse side of this was that those who were not perceived as having pulled their weight were vilified and marginalized. Lack of understanding of Gypsy Travellers’ roles in the war, added to traditional stereotypes of Travellers as antisocial, gave rise to a new sense that they had undermined Britain in its time of need.15 So while universal provision of services and benefits theoretically removed both the stigma and the overt social control elements from post-war welfare provision, for Gypsy Travellers things were far more problematic. Gypsy Travellers were seen as undeserving, yet it was accepted that it was both difficult and counterproductive to withhold benefits from these less-than-perfect citizens. While rarely made explicit, officials ensured that services were bestowed with discretion, based on understandings of social improvement and with a view to promoting assimilation. We can see this in punitive calculations of National Assistance payments made by local officers, who questioned the right of Travellers to receive public money, and made arbitrary deductions. Often they assumed claimants were not declaring their full income or that they did not need to maintain the same standard of living as settled people:16

  There can be no doubt that there are undisclosed resources in most cases. A number of them have ancient cars in which they move around while our allowances are largely disposed of in the nearest bar that sells ‘wine’ . . . no injustice would be done if allowances were withheld from all but the oldest and, exceptionally, those with large families of young children.17

  Gypsies and Travellers also experienced problems when they sought spaces for caravans or housing. For them the general problems presented by the post-war housing shortage was compounded by local authorities’ reluctance to put them on council-housing lists as they were not considered ‘local’, and by the absence of designated space for caravans as part of new planning controls. Where councils did develop particular housing schemes directed at Gypsies and Travellers, such as in the New Forest, authorities generally provided inferior accommodation, on the grounds that the inhabitants were not ready to meet the standards of settled society but that these dwellings could act as a stepping stone towards full assimilation.18 For the most part, they were affected by the post-war housing programme only in that it created pressure on the marginal spaces traditionally used by Gypsies. In more than one case families arrived at an old camping ground only to discover that a council estate had sprung up since their last visit. By the early 1950s it appeared that just as the physical space open to Gypsy Travellers was drastically reducing, so too shrank their – always tenuous and partial – social legitimacy.

  If western Europe was characterized by denial of both the specificity of Roma and Gypsy experiences of the war and of their distinctive culture, was this the same on the other side of the Iron Curtain? As ever, we need to be wary of generalizations: although the West depicted the ‘Eastern Bloc’ as a monolithic totalitarian system directly under the sway of Moscow, in fact while all the governments were based on versions of Marxism–Leninism, these played out differently across the region. Countries differed both in their relationship with Moscow – Tito’s Yugoslavia and neighbouring Albania maintained their independence from the Soviet Union – and in how they dealt with their different ethnic groups. Some, such as Poland, Hungary and Bulgaria, understood national identity as being fundamentally ethnically homogeneous, containing only small ‘minority’ populations. Others, most typically the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, officially had no dominant nation, but instead a complex hierarchical structure of national/ethnic communities now unified in new, ‘higher’ socialist formations such as ‘the Soviet people’ or ‘Yugoslavs’. However, within this, and as in the West, Roma were denied recognition of a separate identity, for by Stalin’s criteria, they fell short of the definition of a national minority: they had no territorial base or ‘history’, and were seen as having no unifying language or culture. As a result there was no apparent justification for extending to them any of the special measures granted to designated ‘national minorities’.19 And yet, it would be too simplistic to say that Roma experiences under state socialism were either uniform or wholly negative.

  Initially, as with the korenizatsiia policy of the Bolsheviks, many new regimes courted this most marginalized section of their populations in the hope of sowing the seeds of socialism amongst them. A year after the communist takeover of Czechoslovakia, the government commissioned a study of the country’s Roma population, which firmly placed responsibility for their poor socio-economic position on the attitudes of previous bourgeois governments. In contrast, the new People’s Democratic State would ‘successfully solve the Gypsy Question’.20 Similarly, criticizing their fascist predecessors for having neglected Gypsies, Bulgaria’s government’s aim was to ‘make every effort to change the life of the Gypsies for the better, and to weld them into the political and social and economic life of the Bulgarian People’s Republic’.21 So, the first issue of the state-sponsored Roma newspaper Romano esi in 1949 carried an appeal from the Communist Party to those who called themselves ‘Turks’ or ‘Christians’ rather than identifying themselves as ‘Roma’ to ‘tear off the mask from their faces, stop being ashamed and say that they are Gypsies’.22 Official support for Roma was also signalled through state sponsorship of the Gypsy Organization to Fight against Fascism and Racism, and for the Cultural Development of the Roma Minority in Bulgaria. At first, under the Dimitrov Constitution of 1947, Gypsies were defined as a specific nationality with their own rights. The Bulgarian Communist Party and the Fatherland Front committees actively courted the Gypsy intelligentsia, resulting in Roma – most notably the inter-war activist Shakir Pashov – acquiring seats in the national legislature and being integrated into the Communist Party hierarchy. At the same time they began actively participating in the national Gypsy cultural organization, forming more than 200 local clubs, and which boasted its own theatre in Sofia.23

  Acknowledging the cultural life of Roma was not the same as leaving them to live life as they might wish. New socialist regimes across the region moved rapidly towards implementing policies aimed at reshaping society. Dominated by Soviet party agents, emerging governments set about programmes of land reallocation, industrial restructuring and rapid urbanization. So, within Czechoslovakia, for example, thousands of Gypsies from rural Slovakia made up some of the 1.5 million people who were relocated into areas stripped of their German populations, where they formed part of the new urban proletariat in the expanding industrial conurbations.24 Other Slovakian Roma were deployed to labour camps in Moravia and Bohemia, as part of the regime’s attempt to deal with the severe labour shortage, and as a means of ‘extracting social and labour conformity from Gypsies’.25

  As in other parts of the Soviet bloc, the post-war years in Bulgaria saw rapid land collectivization and the large-scale migration of young rural Bulgarians to the towns, altering profoundly relations in rural areas. Previously, a small proportion of Gypsies had been engaged permanently in agriculture, and then mainly as labourers on farms belong
ing to rich Bulgarians and Turks in northern Bulgaria, or as hired shepherds and cattlemen across the country. However collectivization opened the way for Gypsies to find a permanent role on the new cooperatives and state farms. Still others left their villages, and moved to what rapidly became illegal settlements on the edges of the expanding cities.26 Rural Gypsies, then, although often largely untouched by the ‘Roma renaissance’, had good reason to support the new regime.

  The policy of land allocation in Bulgaria of course can also be seen as one way in which the wider policies of the state promoted sedentarization. Often this was part of broader regulations that typically included a requirement for a fixed place of residence and employment. In Hungary this process took place during the second half of the 1950s, and in Albania and Yugoslavia in the 1960s and ’70s. On top of such measures some countries also passed special legislation banning an itinerant way of life with the Soviet Union taking the lead through its decree of 1956 on ‘the inclusion of itinerant Gypsies in labour activities’. Bulgaria’s ‘resolution of the issues of the Gypsy minority in Bulgaria’, and Czechoslovakia’s ‘settlement of itinerant persons’ followed a similar model and were both passed in 1958. In Poland, after the unsuccessful attempt of the government to persuade itinerant Roma to settle voluntarily in the free western territories following the deportation of the German population in 1952, the Ministry of the Interior issued a resolution on the obligatory sedentarization of itinerant Gypsies in 1964.27

  As other intellectuals and artists found, where possible socialist regimes attempted to co-opt the emerging Roma artistic elite for their own ends. Probably the most prominent case of this was that of the Polish Roma poet Bronisława Wajs, commonly known by her Romani name Papusza. She was ‘discovered’ by the Polish poet Jerzy Ficowski, who published her work in Problemy magazine. In the tradition of much Romani poetry, her writing expressed yearning for life on the road, but in the new socialist context this yearning was interpreted as a yearning to be settled. Her work appeared in the magazine alongside a pro-settlement piece and Ficowski soon became an adviser for the state’s sedentarization programme ‘Action C’ (also known as the ‘great halt’), often using Papusza’s poems to back him up. Although Papusza maintained to the last that her work was misused, she was regarded by Polish Roma as a traitor, was ritually banished and forced to live the rest of her life apart from her community.28