Malmö stads råd för den nationella minoriteten romers årliga konferens gick av stapeln den 29 november. Ett välarrangerat event som besöktes av över 200 personer. Temat för årets konferens var Förintelsen av romer, med anledning av att det i år är 80 år sedan romska fångar gjorde uppror i Auschwitz-Birkenau och att det i januari 2025 är 80 år sedan befrielsen av Auschwitz. En av talarna i Malmö var Ian Hancock som även var med under Södertörn och Kritiska romska studiers konferens “Antigypsyism: history and memory” den 2-3 december.
This talk was first given at the Roma Advisory Council’s Conference in Malmö, Sweden, on November 29th, 2024, and again at the Critical Romani Studies Conference Antigypsyism: History and Memory at Södertörn University in Stockholm, on December 3rd. It is a collage of points that I have made many times before, in many places, for many years. But they must be repeated. Constantly. Bibliographical sources for all quotes will be provided upon request. The offensive word ‘gypsy,’ commonly not written as a proper noun, occurs only with lower-case ‘g’ as spelt in those quotes.
HOLOCAUST DENIAL
Ian Hancock
This is not about the kind of Holocaust denial we are most familiar with—the revisionist nonsense fueled by anti-Semitic bigots. What I am addressing today is another kind of Holocaust denial; the denial that Hitler’s Endgültige Lösung der Zigeunerfrage—the Final Solution of the Gypsy Question—what we call in Romani O Agoruno Impačimos e Rromane Pučhimaske—was not also a dimension of the Holocaust.
I remember the handful of us having to plead to be given just a few minutes to speak at the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’ international forum here in Stockholm nearly a quarter of a century ago. Forty-six different countries were represented, and each one was given a voice. With no country of our own, however, we were invisible. It was only thanks to the good grace of the Czech representative who gave me five minutes of his own time, that I was able to say a few words.
Among the forum’s aims was to coordinate an international task-force intended to (quote) “preserve memory of the Holocaust [and] expand education about that disaster.” It restricted the word Holocaust to the fate of its Jewish victims alone, using, interchangeably, the word Shoah — and its published 239-page report contained not a single reference to Romanies. The follow-up conference on Combating Racism and Intolerance which grew out of it and which took place the following year, once again included no acknowledgment of the Romani Holocaust.
We must demand a re-examination and an explanation of why those omissions were allowed to happen unchallenged. Annegret Ehmann, a member of the Wannsee Haus documentation group who attended the Stockholm forum, told me that she overheard Yehuda Bauer tell Elie Wiesel “We must not let the Holocaust get away from the Jews.” Wiesel made exactly the same statement in response to my own student Tina Rauch, a child of Jewish survivors, who questioned him about the exclusion of Romanies at his talk in San Antonio, Texas some years later.
We, of course, know why. It was because long before the forum took place, agreement to refuse to use the word Holocaust to include us was already firmly in place. It was, for official bodies such as the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in the United States and the National Holocaust Centre and Museum[IH1] in the United Kingdom; the World Holocaust Remembrance Centre in Israel defines it (emphasis added) as the
unprecedented genocide, total and systematic, perpetrated by Nazi Germany and its collaborators, with the aim of annihilating the Jewish people;
the EU-funded European Holocaust Research Infrastructure in Amsterdam has
The Holocaust was the genocide of European Jews during World War II. Between 1941 and 1945, Nazi Germany and its collaborators systematically murdered some six million Jews across German-occupied Europe, around two-thirds of Europe’s Jewish population,
and the Swedish Holocaust Museum here in Stockholm, defines
the Holocaust, in which over six million Jews were murdered. Additionally, millions of others were persecuted and killed by the Nazis and their allies during the same period, including Romani people, people with disabilities, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and political opponents.
Because the word is not copyrighted, we can speak for example about a nuclear holocaust, as well as for the fate of other persecuted populations, as its Wikipedia entry states; there is the Black Holocaust Museum in Milwaukee, or a massacre in Kanpur in the 1800s that has now been referred to as ‘the Indian Holocaust.’ It is also used in our own case—the Helsinki Commission news bulletin of July 31st, 2003, was entitled “Helsinki Commission Chairman Recalls Romani Holocaust Tragedy,” and includes the line “Each year, gypsies from around the globe . . . remember their experiences during the Holocaust.”
Nevertheless, there is a determined, ongoing, and very real effort from some quarters to exclude our people from the word Holocaust’s definition. It provided the theme in Sydney Schiffer’s 1986 play The Far Side of Enough, which is about the representative of a fictitious international Romani organization who offers to give a talk on the Romani Holocaust at an equally fictitious Jewish Holocaust memorial centre, but is told that while such a talk would be possible, even welcome, the wording would first need to be changed. The rabbi explains that
We believe the Nazis singled us out for extermination in a way that justifies our applying the term ‘The Holocaust’ to us and us alone . . . I would feel honored to have you speak, if you would only agree to substitute the term ‘Genocide’.
The Romani man becomes angry, and the discussion after his departure is about how any trouble he could make might be (quote) “neutralized,” since his having “wandered into the precincts of the Jewish establishment.” Someone else says, “let the Gypsy speak. We’ll ask our friends in the media to bury it—so deep no one will notice.”
But first, let me make a couple of points. While the exclusionism I’m addressing is entirely Jewish, I must emphasize the fact that we have many Jewish friends and colleagues who also find this position insupportable. The head of Jewish Studies at my university and I team-taught a course called Jews, Roma and Race—the first in the country. Some thirty years ago Toby Sonneman, author of Shared Sorrows, and I co-founded The Romani-Jewish Alliance, Inc., and I should like to see that organization grow. Antisemitism and Romaphobia are an increasing threat, and we must stand together. I have often said—and written—that we can learn much from our Jewish brothers and sisters, whose centuries-long experience as Europe’s other eternal outsiders so closely matches our own. Also, why will I be mentioning the United States Holocaust Memorial Council and Museum especially, while I am here in Europe? Because it is the largest and best-funded such body in the world, and greatly influences other, international memorial organizations, and because I was myself a member of that Council and can speak at first hand.
* * *
So why does this exclusionism matter? Some people say it doesn’t, some say why not simply use two separate words instead, one Jewish and one Romani?
It matters, because it provides a rationale for our being omitted from Holocaust history and memorialization at the very highest international levels. It concerns us because official, and most unofficial, institutions that commemorate Hitler’s genocidal plan use just that one word, and in so doing, ignore his Romani victims altogether, excluding us from commemorative agencies and ceremonies and statements and schoolbooks, and thus the historical record and the public conscience.
It matters, because it is factually wrong. It is simply false to claim that “the Jews of Europe . . . [were] the only people to be singled out for complete physical annihilation” (Alexander), or that
there is a crucial difference . . . non-Jews were not part of a race targeted for total extermination; that is the significance of the Holocaust (Eisner).
Accepting this as fact allowed a then-assistant professor at my own university, Dr. Mia Carter, angrily and adamantly to refuse to include Romanies in her course on the Holocaust. It allows Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to claim that “the Holocaust was designed to destroy the entire Jewish people and not any other peoples,” or President Biden only to acknowledge the murder of “millions of Jews in the Holocaust” in his memorial address at the 80th anniversary of the D-Day landing in Normandy. It allowed the Holocaust and Genocide Research Partnership to host a talk this year on “the topic of elderly peoples’ experiences during and after the Holocaust,” but only the Jewish elderly. It allows the Monument to the Memory of Child Victims of the Holocaust in Warsaw only to memorialize Jewish children. During the speeches at Auschwitz on the 2nd of August this year, the representative from Yad Vashem spoke of our people as the brothers or sisters of the Jews, who were incinerated in the same ovens; but he pointedly avoided using the word Holocaust in relation to us.
Please understand me: I would have no problem at all if these were instead “the topic of elderly Jewish peoples’ experiences during and after the Holocaust” or “Monument to the Memory of Jewish Child Victims of the Holocaust in Warsaw.” But they’re not. They leave our grief out entirely, as irrelevant.
And it matters too, because it trivializes and devalues our worth as human beings, and seriously impedes our never-ending struggle for equality. If we are not taken seriously as a people, if we are dismissed as “only gypsies,” our real-life experience, both in history and today, cannot be taken seriously either. The French medical genealogist Professor Montandon wrote “everyone despises Gypsies, so why exercise restraint? Who will avenge them? Who will complain? Who will bear witness?” In 2018, Charles University history professor Jan Rataj wrote that our genocide “is a so-called ‘unknown’ . . . due to society’s lack of interest in it.” Noam Chomsky too, wrote
Take the Gypsies. Nobody supports the Gypsies. You don’t have to worry about alienating anyone. There isn’t much study of the Gypsies because nobody cares about them, and you know how everybody hates them anyhow, so they don’t study it. The Gypsies were treated just like the Jews in the Holocaust, and nobody’s batting an eyelash about that, because nobody gives a damn about the Gypsies.
As a personal note, by the way, I am proud to have taken credit for Chomsky’s awareness of our situation, in an essay I wrote for Shmate: A Journal of Progressive Jewish Thought that appeared in 1987, to which he very supportively replied.
* * *
I shall elaborate upon these various reasons why this matters, but let me say a few words about the word itself before I go on: its roots are Greek—holos (ὅλος) meaning ‘whole,’ and kaustos (κάυστος) meaning ‘burning;’ think of caustic soda, or a caustic remark. It was first used in 1833, in a book describing how the 12th century King Louis VII (quote) “once made a holocaust of thirteen hundred persons in a church.” They were French villagers who were seeking safety in a church from ongoing battle, but who once inside were locked in, and burnt to death. The word emerged again in March, 1945, in a letter home from a U.S. Army medical officer named David Wilsey, who wrote “we are in a nightmarish holocaust,” after entering war-torn Germany with his unit on its way to liberate Dachau, and seeing the devastation all around them. The word got picked up and gradually applied to the Jewish tragedy exclusively, sometime after 1945.
By thus keeping the Holocaust, in Nobel Prize winner and Chair of the President’s Commission on the Holocaust Elie Wiesel’s words “an essentially Jewish event,” and its Romani victims merely as wartime “casualties,” as we were referred to in the first issue of the Museum’s Newsletter, then by its self-created definition, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council was never meant for non-Jewish victims, since non-Jewish victims were not a part of the Holocaust as now being defined, and the memorial museum would thus be under no obligation to involve, more than as a courtesy, other groups singled out by the Nazis. He made it clear that, while the Council sought “no omission” of Hitler’s non-Jewish victims, it would countenance “no equation” either. As a former Council member myself, I can certainly testify to that. The question, though, is why.
So—if we are not a part of the Holocaust, it is because we are not Jews. I quote Gutman & Berenbaum from their 1994 book Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp, who wrote that “[t]he fate of the gypsies was in line with Nazi thought as a whole: gypsies were not Jews, and so there was no need to kill all of them”— there are, incidentally, also Jewish Romanies.
This statement implicitly acknowledges therefore that someof them were killed, so by setting us aside in a category of “other,” i.e. other than Jewish, victims, they could ensure acknowledgement, but not equality, as Michael Berenbaum told the New York Times:
The Nazis targeted different groups, but singled out Jews for annihilation . . . inclusion is not equivalence—saying that their fate was equivalent. All the victims of Nazism are memorialized in the museum [but the] distinction between their fate and the fate of the Jews, is preserved.
Holocaust survivor Jack Eisner is another of many chroniclers who make this same distinction, writing
Another misleading idea frequently advanced by those in the public eye is the conclusion that our concept of Holocaust should embrace several million non-Jewish civilians who perished at the hands of the Nazis along with six million Jews.
The Council relegated us to third place in its own website’s Holocaust definition (quote):
the Nazis also targeted other groups for persecution and mass murder—these groups included Soviet POWs, ethnic Poles, Roma, and people with disabilities, among others.
We are in eighth place in Stewart Justman’s The Jewish Holocaust for Beginners, (quote)
In addition to the Jews, the Nazis murdered prisoners of war, innumerable Russian civilians, political prisoners, common criminals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals, vagrants and some 100,000 gypsies, among others,
But we were in no place at all in Adam Kirsch’s New Yorker review of a book on the Nazi concentration camps, in which he listed the victims as
Communists, criminals, dissidents, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses and Jews.
In the 1970s, the late Donald Kenrick, co-author with Dr. Karola Fings who is here with us today, remarked at a talk he gave at the Wiener Library “I don’t yet know when the movement started to make the destruction of the Jews a separate unique event, different from that of the Gypsies . . . It was a surprise to me.”
The answer was provided by Edward Alexander in his 1980 article “Stealing the holocaust,” in which he wrote
there never was a Nazi policy to apply the measures used against the Jews to other national communities; this is why the term ‘Holocaust’ came into use, apparently between 1957 and 1959, to describe the uniquely terrible fate that had befallen the Jews of Europe . . . the only people to be singled out for complete physical annihilation.
He was actually writing about a (quote) “worldwide campaign of misrepresentation of the Holocaust” by not treating it as a uniquely Jewish event; but what he said was wrong. A decade later, by now having heard something about our protests, the same writer returned to his concern, though still unacquainted with fact. He wrote
Ignorance and arrogance are in full flower . . . ‘Holocaust’ has been used to encompass more than the murder of the Jews. From the casualties in our Civil War to the wholesale murder of gypsies in World War II,
and three years after that, language specialist William Safire raised the issue of the “uniqueness of Jewish suffering” in the New York Times, in which he complained that the word Holocaust was being misapplied, because of the notion that “not only Jews . . . but gypsies were chosen by the Nazis for annihilation.” This last statement was not in restricted-readership specialist literature like Alexander’s, but in a national newspaper, a source of information read by millions of people.
Where was this information coming from? It seems to have been initiated by Yehuda Bauer of Yad Vashem, who first introduced it in 1978 in his book The Holocaust in Historical Perspective, and whose position Sybil Milton, then senior historian at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, said represented “the most extreme example” of the ‘uniquist’ claim.
Then, in the following year, Elie Wiesel, in his Report to the President, wrote “the Jewish people alone were destined to be totally annihilated.” He was followed by Lucy Dawidowitz, author of The Holocaust and the Historians, who wrote “the fate of the Jews under National Socialism was unique.”
At this time, the United States Holocaust Memorial Council was still in its planning stage. In his controversial 2003 book The Holocaust Industry, Norman Finkelstein wrote that Elie Wiesel “[led] the offensive to commemorate Jews alone” together with Yehuda Bauer, to whom he “deferred . . . as ‘the undisputed expert on the Holocaust period’.” The uniquist stance by now having been repeated several times, the word of these presumed experts was taken as fact and, is so often the case in academia, no need to check independently was thought necessary—proving Edward Alexander’s point that ignorance was certainly “in full flower.”
It was becoming clear from the increasing number of references to “gypsies” that these writers were putting the Romani victims into a different category from the other “others,” for whom the statement made by Israeli survivor Miriam Novitch, of the Ghetto Fighters’ House in Asherat in 1968 did not apply, namely that
The motives invoked to justify the death of the Gypsies were the same as those ordering the murder of the Jews, and the methods employed for the one were identical to those employed for the other,
Or the statement from the Wannsee Haus in 1981, that
The treatment and practical realization of the genocide of the Romani people was no less cruel or radical than that of the Jews.
We were beginning to be seen as the single challenge to the uniquist position, since we were the only people beside Jews, that were selected for total destruction because of what they were born.
Yad Vashem, the European Holocaust Research Infrastructure and others specifically define Holocaust as genocide, providing no other criteria than planned and implemented mass murder. By that equation alone, we Romanies also qualify; but since we are still not allowed to, we must examine the other arguments that have been made to support the exclusionist position. Philip Lopate advanced four:
The position that the Jewish Holocaust was unique tends to rest on the following arguments: (1) scale—the largest number of deaths extracted from one single group; (2) technology—the mechanization of death factories; (3) bureaucracy—the involvement of the state apparatus at previously unheard-of levels; (4) intent—the express purpose being to annihilate every last member of the Jewish people (1989:291-292).
His only argument that is in fact supportable in light of what we know now, is the first—that the number of Jewish deaths was indisputably the largest. But according to the Nazis’ own census conducted by Behrendt in 1939, there were nine times as many Jews as Romanies in Nazi-controlled Europe, and the argument would only be valid if the number of Jews and the number of Romanies had been the same to begin with. But when we discuss genocide, we must do so in the context of the destruction of entire peoples, and in terms of overall percentage, Strom & Parsons wrote “The Nazis killed as many as 70 percent of the gypsies in those areas where Nazi control had been established longest, Heger that “the gypsies of Europe were rounded up by the Nazis and sent to their death in almost similar proportions to the Jews,” Simon Wiesenthal that “the gypsies had been murdered [in a proportion] similar to the Jews; about 80% of them in the area of the countries which were occupied by the Nazis” and the Wannsee Haus education centre has
Contemporary experts estimate that 50 percent of European and 70 percent of the mid-European Roma were killed . . . The vast majority of the European Roma, however, was exterminated in Eastern Europe by immediate execution, whenever they were found in the forests and mountains by police forces, Einsatzgruppen and collaborating militia or army. Exact statistics for the total number of Roma murdered in Eastern Europe are difficult to establish, because they were not registered as precisely as in Germany.
And by the same token, if we have to talk about numbers, consider that the number of Jewish survivors was several hundred times larger than the number of Romani survivors.
* * *
To return to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s list of “other victims,” in which we are ranked third behind Soviet Prisoners of War and Poles, yet share with them the same “not Jewish” category, and why this categorization is untenable:
They are wrong in so doing, because the Holocaust itself was the implementation of Hitler’s Final Solution, his genocidal programme intended to accomplish his vision of ethnic cleansing, in which just two “racial” populations defined by what they were born were thus targeted: the Jews and the Romanies. As Director of the Wannsee Haus educational division Annegret Ehmann told the Institute of Contemporary Jewry at The Hebrew University in January 1981,
for both groups this challenge and its resulting problems was forcibly solved by the Endlösung (Final Solution), the physical extermination planned and carried out by the Nazis and their collaborators.
It is this fact alone, that puts Romanies and Jews in the same overriding category. Despite our being ranked in the Holocaust Museum’s third place, there was NO “Final Solution of the Soviet POW Question,” and there was NO “Final Solution of the Polish Question,” or systematic attempt to exterminate either one, NO other genocides. One Romani activist said “to rank the attempted extermination of an entire people on the same footing as the imprisonment of political dissidents [e.g. in the category of ‘others’] is egregious and a distortion of history.”
One must interpret the underlying rationale of the Holocaust therefore, as being Hitler’s attempt to create a superior Germanic population, a Master Race, by eliminating what he viewed as dangerous genetic pollutants in the Nordic gene pool, and why he believed that we constituted such contamination. Mental illness and homosexuality too, though not “racial,” were seen as genetic aberrations to be rooted out. In his study on eugenics, Jakob Tanner writes
After 1933, the Nazi state forcibly sterilized hundreds of thousands of people (approximately one per cent of Germany’s population). The declaration of ‘racial purity’ as the superior national value already led in 1933 to the persecution of Jews, Gypsies (Roma and Sinti) and homosexuals (2012: 471).
Hitler’s “racial” motive was clear, for less than six weeks after the Second World War was declared following Germany’s invasion of Poland on September 1st 1939, western parts of that country were brought into the Third Reich, while the remaining area, the General Government, was set aside as a dumping-ground for his genetically unwanted. His policy of “Aryanizing” saw Romanies and Jews being rounded up and cleared out of the newly-annexed Reichsgau and confined in various camps, later to be moved on to Auschwitz.
Hitler’s obsessive and complex hatred of the Jews has been abundantly documented; far less is known about why he sought to eradicate our own Romani people, who presented no problem numerically, politically, militarily or economically. It was in fact purely genetic, i.e. “racial.” Our inherited flaw was criminality, to be bred out through extermination because as Himmler said, Romani blood was “very dangerous” to Aryan purity, and that “Gypsies place the purity of the blood of German peasantry in peril” as Dr. Tobias Portschy wrote to Hitler’s Chancellery, when he recommended mass sterilization as the only solution. In his post-war memoirs, SS Officer Perry Broad of the political division at Auschwitz wrote that “it was the will of the all-powerful Führer to have the Gypsies disappear from the face of the earth,” and that “the Central Office knew it was Hitler’s aim to wipe out all the gypsies without exception.” In September 1947, at the Nuremberg Military Tribunals, former SS General Otto Ohlendorf told presiding Judge Michael Musmanno that in the killing campaigns, “there was no difference between Gypsies and Jews.”
Despite this and other documented evidence, claims continue to be made that there was no Final Solution of the Gypsy Question, or there was even a Romani genocide. Richard Breitman, editor of the journal Holocaust and Genocide Studies (on whose editorial board I served) stated that the term
‘Final Solution’ at least applies to a single, specific group defined by descent. The Nazis are not known to have spoken of the Final Solution of the Polish problem or of the gypsy problem.
In his work The Nazi Persecution of the Gypsies which is on sale in the Holocaust Museum’s bookshop, Guenther Lewy writes
There is lacking a clear and traceable chain of orders, analogous to the order for the ‘Final Solution of the Jewish question’ . . . there is no evidence for the existence of a program to annihilate all Gypsies physically (p. 223).
There are in fact abundant references to the Final Solution of the Gypsy Question. A Nazi document addressing the creation of a “Gypsy law” referred to “the introduction of the total solution of the Gypsy problem on either a national or an international level;” it was drafted under the direction of State Secretary Hans Pfundtner of the Reichs Ministry of the Interior in March 1936.
In his 1938 address to The German Association for Racial Research, Dr. Adolph Würth of the Racial Hygiene Research Unit said
The Gypsy question is a racial question for us today . . . it will have to settle the Gypsy question once and for all. The race biological research on Gypsies is an unconditional prerequisite for the Final Solution of the Gypsy Question.
In March the same year, a letter to Heinrich Himmler from Dr. Werner Best, Head of the Nazi Security Police, addressed the “initiat[ion of the] Final Solution to the Gypsy problem from a racial point of view.” The first official publicly-posted Party statement to refer to the Final Solution of the Gypsy Question was issued at that time. It wassigned by Himmler, in his ‘Decree for Basic Regulations to Resolve the Gypsy Question as Required by the Nature of Race,’ on December 8th, 1938, and a few months later Johannes Behrendt of the Office of Racial Hygiene issued a brief stating that
All Gypsies should be treated as hereditarily sick; the only solution is elimination. The aim should therefore be the elimination without hesitation of this defective element in the population.
A conference on racial policy to decide, inter alia, upon the Final Solution of the Gypsy Question, was held in Berlin on 21st September 1939 and organized by Reinhard Heydrich, who was Head of the Reich Main Security Office and the leading organizational architect of the Nazis’ Final Solution of the Jewish Question. At about this time, Adolf Eichmann made the recommendation that the ‘Gypsy Question’ be solved simultaneously with the ‘Jewish Question’.
On January 24th 1940 a memorandum from Leonardo Conti, Secretary of State for Health in the Ministry of the Interior, which was sent simultaneously to the Main Office of the Security Police, to the Kripo headquarters, and to the Reich Health Department in Berlin, read:
It is known that the lives of Gypsies and part-Gypsies are to be regulated by a Gypsy Law (Zigeunergesetz) . . . I firmly believe, now as before, that the final solution of the Gypsy problem can only be achieved through the sterilization of full and part Romanies.
On July 31st 1941 Heydrich also included the Romanies in his ‘final solution’ shortly after the German invasion of the USSR, ordering the mobile killing squads (the Einsatzkommandos) “to kill all Jews, Gypsies and mental patients”. He informed the Reich Commissioner for the East, Hinrich Lohse, of this inclusion of the Romanies in the Final Solution, and on December 24th 1941 issued the order that they “should be given the same treatment as the Jews.”
Himmler signed the order dispatching Germany’s Romanies to Auschwitz on December 16th 1942. The ‘Final Solution’ of the ‘Gypsy Question’ had begun (Burleigh & Wippermann). Erika Thurner adds:
Heinrich Himmler’s infamous Auschwitz decree of December 16th can be seen as the final stage of the final solution of the Gypsy Question. The decree served as the basis for their complete extermination. According to the implementation instructions of 1943, all Gypsies, irrespective of their racial mix, were to be assigned to concentration camps.
Although the word ‘genocide,’ is now being used more often when applied to Romanies, it remains, like us, still widely unacknowledged. The California State Board of Education obviously devalued us and the word when it compiled its Model Curriculum for Human Rights and Genocide for use in the schools in that state. In it, Jews were listed as an example of the victims of genocide in the Holocaust, while ‘gypsies’ were relegated only to a category of “people who have suffered from totalitarian policies.” This California curriculum ensured that school children statewide receive only a partial account of what happened in the Holocaust.
In the late 1970s, the advisory board responsible for detailing the mission of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum stated that “this museum belongs at the center of American life because America, as a democratic civilization, is the enemy of racism and its ultimate expression, genocide.” But we have no representative member on that Council. The Texas State Holocaust and Genocide Commission likewise has no Romani member, and under Sinti and Roma in the ‘definitions’ link on its website, it says, simply, “under construction.” I was a member of that agency for four years, and distributed copious literature to my fellow commissioners, but they still don’t know who we are, or perhaps, as Professor Rataj said, simply don’t care.
Although there are diehards such as Guenther Lewy who wrote “. . . the various deportations of Gypsies to the East and their deadly consequences do not constitute acts of genocide,” the uniquist position based solely on genocide has been shown to be wrong; even the Museum’s on-line Holocaust Encyclopedia now has an entry on the Genocide of European Roma (Gypsies), 1939–1945. But while ongoing research made it less possible to deny the application of that word to us, the word Holocaust is still off limits, and its protected status began to be defended using other criteria. Some thirty years ago I listed, and responded to, some sixteen that had been made at various times (Hancock 1995).
Most are the result of insufficient research, but some defy being addressed pragmatically. Yehuda Bauer wrote that “not to realize that the Jewish situation was unique is to mystify history,” and there is Giambattista Vico’s argument discussed in Keable (1994) that the Jewish experience cannot be compared to that of any other people, because Jews alone “dwell inside divine history;” Elie Wiesel’s argument on the other hand, was that it was “outside of history” (Robin 2016). Another criterion was that made by Rabbi Emil Fackenheim, that “Auschwitz [wa]s punishment for Jewish sins,” improper observance of the Sabbath and an abandoning of piety. Yet another is the fear that sharing the Holocaust with us dilutes the Jewish claim to a homeland. As a people without any homeland at all, without a place of refuge of our own, we can understand, but not agree, with that position. We pose no threat.
Either way, ours is not a shared history, and it is the shared history that I am addressing today. Of course, we as Romanies cannot possibly know what the Holocaust meant and means to the Jews, any more than Jews can possibly know what it meant and means to us. But these are areas for the philosophers, not the sociologists and historians.
* * *
Let me come now to my last point: Hitler’s attempt to destroy us has been trivialized and devalued in the historical record, and that means we as a people have been trivialized and devalued.
There have been empty words: in September 1986, we were allowed an official Romani victims remembrance ceremony in Washington. Elie Wiesel made a very brief appearance at that event, where he told us
I couldn’t be here today, and yet I couldn’t not be here . . . we have not done enough to listen to your voice of anguish. We have not done enough to make other people listen to your voice of sadness. I can promise you we shall do whatever we can from now on to listen better.
Probably not sarcastic, but certainly insincere. I was given a window-dressing position as “special advisor on Romani issues” to Wiesel, though my advice was never sought, nor did we ever meet. It was later explained to me that it was only ever an ‘honorary position.’ Two non-Romani experts were consulted instead. Butcertainly sarcastic was the response Chairman Benjamin Meed gave William Duna at the January 1991 meeting of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council’s Annual Days of Remembrance planning committee, when he asked whether Romanies would ever be included as well. Meed replied “ask me again in about twenty years.”
This scornful attitude is well illustrated in Frederic Rafael’s novel The Glittering Prizes (1977) in which there is a debate about the claim to a country after 1945:
“Gypsies?” Wexler said. “What’s gypsies got to do with it? . . . [they] have no historic homeland.”
“The gypsies,” Mrs. Hersch said, “what culture have the gypsies got?”
“No culture?” Adam said, “to hell with them.”
That is a work of fiction, but some actual resistance has become quite strident and offensive, as Chomsky noted:
The treatment of the Gypsy people by the Nazis looks pretty parallel to the way the Jews were treated [but] there are people who just flat out deny that in the most vulgar fashion.
In 1980, for example, the German Sinti proposed the establishment of a cultural centre for their people at Dachau as a sign of recognition and compensation for the persecution and suffering of their people by the Nazis. The municipality of Dachau harshly rejected this proposal, however, stating that the citizens of that town had already been sufficiently shown in a bad light by the sinister memories that the name Dachau evokes; the Zigeuner would only add to the negative image of the community (Ehmann). When some of the younger Sinti, together with some of the elders who had survived the concentration camps announced a hunger strike at Dachau in order to to draw the attention of the public to their claim, the district magistrate threatened them with one year of prison if they showed up in Dachau. In the summer of 2018, Professor Eve Rosenhaft, co-author of The Legacies of the Romani Genocide in Europe since 1945,was openly accused of anti-Semitism for using the term Romani Holocaust, when that accusation was being deployed to attack the left in the UK Labour Party, and Stockholm’s International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’ definition was becoming the yardstick for political acceptability.
Darmstadt city mayor Günther Metzger too, told the German Council of Sinti and Roma that it had “insulted the honour” of the memory of the Holocaust by wishing to be associated with it; former Bavarian Minister of the Interior Gerold Tandler called our demands for war crimes reparations “slander[ous],” and in a blame-the-victim statement, Guenther Lewy wrote “certain characteristics of Gypsy life tend to reinforce or even create hostility.”
Vulgar certainly—the Holocaust Council’s chairman Seymour Siegel told a reporter from the Dallas Times Herald that those of us protesting were “cranks” and “eccentrics;” acting executive director Micah Naftalin told The Washington Post “the problem with gypsies is that they’re not well schooled [and] they’re quite naïve.” Leslie Doolittle, a reporter for the Dallas paper, told me that she was warned by the Council’s liaison officer to be careful when talking to me, because I was a “wild man.” And instead of reaching out to us, Council spokeswoman Marcia Feldman told Los Angeles Times reporter Edward Boyer that the Council was going to hire “a specialist in Gypsy affairs,” and later reported that after contacting the (non-Romani) Gypsy Lore Society, the Council had “located a Jewish expert in Gypsy studies about doing a research project this summer.” Imagine if the situation had been reversed. Another of the Council’s chairmen, Rabbi Seymour Siegel, told the Times Herald reporter that he doubted that we really constituted a distinct ethnic people, whether we actually existed, whether “there really is such a thing” as ‘gypsies.’ Of course there isn’t—that is a fictitious entity created by gadže. But we Romanies are very real.
Yehuda Bauer wrote that “[t]he whole gypsy ‘problem’ was for Himmler and most other Nazis only a minor irritant” and the editor of Midstream: A Quarterly Jewish Review wrote that he believed that the Jewish tragedy was unique, because the treatment of our people was “merely an afterthought” on the Nazis’ part.
Playing into the racist stereotype of happy dancing ‘gypsies’ is the statement by Lagnado & Dekel in their book on Mengele, that the Romani death camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau was a “vast playground, an ongoing carnival.” Were either of those authors there at Birkenau in 1944?
And then, besides these hurtful and unwarranted examples, we have been ignored completely; in January 2009, the United Nations held its annual observance of the International Day of Commemoration in memory of the victims of the Holocaust, in the General Assembly Hall in New York. No Romani representation was sought or included. Requests asking why from a number of Romani agencies, including the Spanish Union Romaní and the IRU to both Mona Gillet of the Department of Public Information (with which it is affiliated) and to Kimberly Mann, manager of the United Nations Holocaust Outreach Programme, remained unanswered. In my capacity as a former councillor, I wrote to President Obama urging the appointment of a Romani representative to the Council, but received a form-letter in response, only thanking me for “contacting me and providing your thoughtful suggestions.” A similar letter to the Director of The Office of Presidential Appointments received no reply at all. And no Romani was appointed. We still do not have one today. These are just two examples; we are overwhelmingly ignored in this way.
* * *
The persistence of this attitude is cause for deep concern. What constitutes “uniqueness” here? Is it a matter of who was victimized earliest? Or the extent of the agonies endured? Or numbers lost? Or whom God chose as His own? It seems quite tasteless to engage in a one-upmanship of suffering or the ranking of human worth. Hitler himself did that.
Presenting the facts of the Romani Holocaust before the public does not qualify as one-upmanship, nor should it be interpreted as confrontational, or grounds for “replacement.” These are facts that have been obfuscated for the past forty years. If they can be disproved, that would only be cause for gladness; if the gloomy details can be shown to be fiction, then it would mean that the Romani people were mercifully spared the fate endured by their Jewish brothers and sisters. But if they can be shown to be factual, then they must be acknowledged fully, without resentment or rancour or competitiveness.
Revisionists are to be denounced for meddling with history, for writing out or denying the episodes they want hidden. When facts of history are not even given the chance to find their place in our chronicles, when events are minimized or allowed to fall through the cracks and become lost in time, this is as unacceptable as rewriting history. One can mislead as much by what is not said as by what is said—either way, the record is distorted; no lesson is learnt.
When academics have approached the subject, invariably it has been from the perspective of their own interests; emphasis is necessarily placed upon the areas of greatest concern to them.
Gerald Posner and John Ware’s Mengele: The Complete Story (1986) does not even list us in its index, although Romanies, and especially Romani twins, were Joseph Mengele’s obsession. Some descriptions of medical experiments in their book, such as that on page 37, actually describe children that we know to have been Romanies, but they are not identified as such.Displayed on the walls of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum are photographs of our people in the camps, but unless one has access to the files—which are closed to the public—their identity as Romanies is not made known, nor would the visitors’ assumption be made that they were.
When Yehuda Bauer wrote that the Nazi policy against us was “more apparent than real,” it is clear that very little effort was spent on his part to research or to understand the Romani situation. He just didn’t want to. I believe it was actually Spiderman who said “may heaven protect us from those who know all they need to know about anything;” we say na ansučin ma tjire faktonsa; džanav so džanav—“don’t confuse me with facts; I know what I know.” It is to such books as Lagnado’s and Posner’s and Lewy’s that researchers go for the “history,” the “complete story” of the Holocaust.
Ignorance of the details of the Romani genocide cannot be allowed to be an excuse, and if it is not ignorance, then the suppression of the details of the genocide can only be explained as deliberate policy, since attention has been drawn to our parallel fates for the past several decades; Holocaust historian Dr. Erika Thurner of the Institut für Neuere Geschichte und Zeitgeschichte at the University of Linz told the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s The Other Victims conference in Washington, that
Jews and Gypsies were equally affected by the racial theories and measures of the Nazi rulers. The persecution of the two groups was carried out with the same radical intensity and cruelty.
The State Museum of Auschwitz-Birkenau’s Memorial Book includes
The final solution, as formulated by Himmler, in his ‘Decree for Basic Regulations to Resolve the Gypsy Question as Required by the Nature of Race’ of December 8th, 1938, meant that preparations were to begin for the complete extermination of Sinti and Roma,
and Roman Herzog, Federal President of Germany, said publicly nearly 25 years ago that
The genocide of the Sinti and Roma was carried out from the same motive of racial mania, with the same premeditation, with the same wish for the systematic and total extermination as the genocide of the Jews. Complete families from the very young to the very old were systematically murdered within the entire sphere of influence of the National Socialists,
Nevertheless, the resistance continues.
Why this situation?
We have been manipulated, insulted, and devalued. Why? For three reasons: first, because our treatment after arriving in Europe has not made possible a level playing-field; second, because our traditional culture has stood as a barrier between us and the rest of the world, and third, because we have allowed it to happen. We did not speak up loudly enough. And we didn’t write the books.
Hitler’s wasn’t the first attempt to exterminate us; the first was in 1721. Our eight hundred years in the West have been fraught with persecution, including the Inquisition and over five centuries of slavery in the Balkans; there have been laws against us in every single country we’ve lived in, self-preservation has been our constant preoccupation.
After 1945, no help was offered to our precious survivors, some of whom stayed hidden in the abandoned camps fearful of leaving. There were no war-crimes reparations, and we were not even called to testify at the Nuremberg trials. Our post-war situation as a shattered people allowed The Economist to report later that
Gypsies in Europe today are at the bottom of every socio-economic indicator: the poorest, the most unemployed, the least educated, the shortest-lived, the most welfare dependent, the most imprisoned and the most segregated.
Historical circumstances have determined that we have simply not had the means to speak out or be heard. Our few voices get lost in the wind. Even now, it is non-Romani voices that speak for us the loudest. If we had received war crimes reparations following the Holocaust, if the stolen Romani gold that is still held in the Vatican had been returned to us, if human rights organizations had helped us back then, I believe that our situation would be vastly different today.
In addition to all this, the Romani world is a very private and inward-looking world. The roots of our culture are in our distant homeland India, and a barrier originating in the caste-system separates us from the outside non-Romani world as “impure,” and even from other Romani endaja (subgroups), thus impeding our own goal of mutual effort and thereby achieving a stronger voice. Our cultural perspectives on death too, place restrictions on how we deal with genocide, memorialization and even remuneration.
Overriding all of this, is the fact that somewhere along the way West, our ancestors lost the facts of our own history. Unable to provide them to others, they were provided to them—non-Romanies gave us our history and identity as they imagined it, and were thus in control of who and what we are. And that is precisely why the details of our experience in the Holocaust have been controlled as well.
What to do?
Following today, we must do two things:
First, demand of the USHMC and other official bodies, that they provide, explicitly and in detail, what the specific differences were between the genocidal actions taken against Romanies and against Jews that justify one human group’s rank as being worth more than another’s—the destruction of one human group as being more of a loss than that of another. Does this constitute racial discrimination? Is it legally actionable?
Second, we must demand that the restriction on the use of the word Holocaust, viz. that it can apply only to the Jewish genocide, be changed to include the genocide of both our peoples. And if Romani- or Jewish-specific words are needed, all of the following have been proposed: for Romani, Porrajmos, Pharrajimos, Maripen, Mudaripen, Samudaripen, Sa o Mudarimos, Murdaripen, Berša Bibaxtale, Kali Traš, Uštavipe, Sarvnaš, Baro Xaimos and even Shoah (Stewart 2012), and for the Jewish tragedy Shoah, Ha-Sho’ah, Khurbn and Judeocide. A group-specific label is necessary because for each of us, Romanies and Jews, the experiences of our attempted extinction are separately inherited, deep rooted and deeply personal—as I’ve already said, we as Romanies cannot ever know Jewish pain, nor can Jews ever know our own: the legacies of our respective inherited traumas are each unique. The only uniqueness. The experience of every group targeted by the Nazis was unique—but the genocide our two peoples both suffered, was not.
I spoke in Malmö a couple of days ago about our reluctance to speak out. We cannot and must not continue to remain silent—about this issue and others that contribute to our weakness as a people. The unheard plea to Antonescu at the time of the Transnistrian deportations said “We don’t scream; we whisper and go down.” We are at a crucial period in our millennium-long history; do we scream and assert ourselves and resist manipulation from outside, will we take control of who we are and of our history and of our choices, or do we continue to remain silent, even denying our own identity or having it denied for us?
I will finish by addressing a different, but intimately related, topic by returning to my lifelong mantra, the need for education. We must understand that that does not mean losing our Rromanipe, our “Romaniness” as some fear; we must understand that learning the lost details of our single distant origin will bring our different endaja closer together and strengthen our voice as a united people; we must understand our rights as citizens of the countries we live in, and how they protect us, and not be afraid to use them. We need our own lawyers and doctors and teachers and politicians and not have to rely on others, or see ourselves as victims; we need people who take pride in who we are and the fact that although we have endured slavery and genocide and centuries of racism, we are still here—a testament to our determination to survive. Only by speaking more loudly and with confidence and with the truth as our weapon, will the changes that we intend be achieved.
Ušten Rromale!
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