The 'Devouring': A look at the Romani Holocaust|
The Porrajmos, literally "the Devouring," is the term that the
Roma use to describe the Nazi regime's attempt to wipe their people off
the face of the Earth; for the genocidal wave of terror known to most of
the world as the Holocaust. An estimated half million Roma were killed
during the Second World War only five percent of the Czech-born
population survived. Nearly all who lived through internment in the
Czech-run labour camps near Hodonin and Lety now the site of a pig farm
later perished in the so-called "Gypsy family camp" at
Inmate number 1-9-9-6 was among the few Roma to survive Auschwitz. The
Nazis didn't bother to tattoo an ID number on Antonin Hlavacek's arm
Romani children, like the elderly, weren't meant to live long, so his
number was written in ink. But sixty years later, Mr Hlavacek can no more
forget the number he answered to at Auschwitz than the atrocities he
witnessed as a young boy.
"The transports would come in when it was dark. We weren't allowed to
go outside but heard it all. They'd pull everyone out of the train, pile up
their clothes and belongings on the floor and send most of them straight to
the 'showers'. Instead of water, it was gas that came out of the pipes.
There was also a group of prisoners, selected every three months, that was
given more food and made to work in what we thought was a bakery. Only much
later did we realise it was a crematorium, where they burned people. The
toilet was just one big hole with a piece of wood over it and in order to
get to it, we had to move aside dead bodies because they were only taken
away every three days."
The horrors of the death camps have been exhaustively documented, but the
wartime fate of the Roma who, like Europe's Jewish population, were
singled out for extinction by the Nazis along racial lines is less
widely understood; their tremendous suffering and loss often reduced to
little more than a historical footnote. No Roma were called to testify at
the post-war Nuremberg Trials and no one spoke there on their behalf.
Artur Radvansky a Jewish Holocaust survivor whose of Auschwitz has
made a point of bearing witness in recent years, travelling to Germany to
explain the Holocaust to students of all ages. One horrific event stands
out in his mind above all the others the day he watched camp guards
bring in a group of Romani war veterans from Germany.
"I witnessed the most terrible thing, something which no-one else
knows about in this country because no-one else is alive to remember it.
One day, the Auschwitz guards brought in between 400 and 600 Roma from
Germany. Many of the men were former German soldiers who had fought in
Poland during the First World War. Some of them were still wearing their
medals: the Knight's Cross, if you're familiar with it. They were
decorated soldiers German soldiers and yet one night the guards came
and took them to the gas chambers to be killed."
While the fate of the Roma a dark skinned people who largely lived on
the margins of European society and had known persecution for centuries
may now seem inevitable, in the earliest days of the Third Reich, the Roma
and Sinti people, then commonly referred to collectively as
"Gypsies," posed a problem for Hitler's racial ideologues. The
Nazi anthropologists knew that the Roma had arrived in Europe from India
and believed them to be descendents of the original "Aryan"
invaders of the subcontinent, who returned to Europe.
So Nazi racialist Hans Gunther found a justification for measures already
long in place to control "the Gypsy plague": if the Roma were no
less "Aryan" than Germans, he theorized, then their supposed
"inherent criminal character" must have stemmed from their
having mingled with "inferior" races over centuries of nomadic
In 1933, after Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany, the Nazis
introduced a law to legalize eugenic sterilization, to control population
growth among "Gypsies and most of the Germans of black colour."
In 1939, the Nazi's Office of Racial Hygiene issued a statement saying
"All Gypsies should be treated as hereditarily sick [...] the aim
should therefore be the elimination without hesitation of this
defective element in the population."
The following year, at a concentration camp in Buchenwald, 250 Romani
children were used as human guinea pigs to test cyanide gas crystals.
It was in January 1942 that the Nazi bureaucrats decided on the
"final solution" to the "Jewish problem"
extermination in mass concentration camps. At that time, so-called
"pure Gypsies," as members of the "Aryan race",
initially weren't targeted for extinction along racial lines and even
continued to serve in the Germany army.
But in December that year, Heinrich Himmler, the commander of the German
SS and the principal executor of the "Final Solution," gave
orders that all Romani candidates for extermination be transported to
Auschwitz; and in November 1943, expanded the order: all "Gypsies and
part Gypsies" were be treated "on the same level as Jews and
placed in concentration camps."
"Contrary to the fate of the Jews, Roma and Sinti were still taken
into the German army until 1942 and only then did Himmler give the order
to deport all the Roma and Sinti to Auschwitz, to the so-called
'Zigeunerlager'[Gypsy camp] - no matter what kind way of life they led,
but only on the basis of their race."
Markus Pape is spokesperson for the Prague-based Committee for the Redress
of the Romani Holocaust (VPORH). He has done extensive research on
Czech-run labour camps and his organization has been gathering testimony
from Romani survivors for some time now. The vast majority of Romani
people living in what is today the Czech Republic are descended from
Slovak Roma; their ancestors transferred here to the Czech lands in
communist-era resettlement programmes.
Mr Pape says most Romani survivors agree to speak about their experiencs
only if they are not shown or identified on Czech media, so painful is the
memory and so great their fear, even today, of persecution by skinheads and
repurcussions from other racist groups active in Czech society.
Czech officials have been slow to acknowledge the wartime persection of
the Roma. Not only do precious few memorials exist to honour the memory of
those killed in the war, but the site of the largest Czech labour camp,
near the town of southern Bohemian town of Lety, where over 1300 Roma were
interned at a time, is today home to ... a pig farm.
Markus Pape again:
"Even though the Czechoslovak authorities made a major investigation
into what happened at the Lety camp and found most of the perpetrators
who caused the death of at least 241 children none of the guilty persons
was ever punished. This is one fact which is to this day very difficult to
explain to the Roma."
"The other fact is that in the 1970s, a huge pig farm was built on
the former camp site and is being run until today. In spite of protests
by Roma and annual memorial vigils held right next to the former camp
site. The [Czech] government has not managed to explain why this is the
way it is."
A law establishing Lety as a work camp for "nomads" read the
Roma was passed in March 1939 by Czechoslovakia's proto-fascist Second
Republic. In 1942, the Nazis designated the Lety facility as a
concentration camp for Roma.
Nearly all of the Roma who survived the torture, malnourishment and
typhoid rampant in the Czech-run camps of Lety and Hodonin, met their
death in a special "Gypsy family camp" at Auschwitz-Birkenau,
but not without a fight, says Mr Pape.
"In May 1994, thousands of Sinti and Roma barricaded themselves in,
ready to fight the SS men. They had found out that on that same day all of
them were to be killed, by gas, at once. The SS decided not to attack, or
try to kill these people. Unfortunately, later on, the ones who were still
healthy enough to work were sent on to other concentration camps and only a
few of them survived; and the children and old people were killed in a
massacre in Auschwitz."
The liberation of the Auschwitz sixty years ago this Thursday (January
27) came too late for the Roma, as it did for over a million Jews, and
tens of thousands of Poles, and political prisoners, homosexuals and
"asocials" of all nationalities. Months before the liberation,
camp authorities closed the "Gypsy family camp," gassing some
3,000 Roma in the first days of August, 1944. Over 20,000 Roma had already
died there from starvation and disease, or in the gas chambers.
The interned Roma had been allowed to stay together as families only
because the Nazis had learned from past experience that separating Romani
parents from their children made them impossible to control as a group and
exploit for forced labour. Far more Roma people died outside the camps than
in them, especially in Eastern Europe, where pogroms and summary executions
were a daily occurrence.
Antonin Lagrin's mother and father were among those who somehow survived
"the Devouring" - the Romani Holocaust. But despite the stories
his parents told him, he was shocked to learn the extent to which his
family had been decimated.
"I saw a list of names of prisoners at Auschwitz-Birkenau which had
the names of about fifty relatives. That came as a big surprise. I didn't
know there were so many of us there. I just knew of my close relatives. My
great grandfather was shot there and my great grandmother was kicked to
death just because she tried to get snow off her head when she was working
outside in the freezing cold. Camp prisoners must have gone through
horrific things, but my parents don't like to think about them."