“There were no Roma witnesses at the Nuremberg Trials”
JVL Introduction
It took until 1979 for acknowledgement that the persecution of Roma and Sinti by the Nazis was racially motivated. The stories of their experience are few and far between. It is important not only that their experiences are acknowledged but that they are known, as individuals, as families and as communities.
We also know that prejudice and racism towards Gypsy, Roma and Traveller people continues today, especially but not only in Eastern Europe. In the UK, the Police Bill threatens to criminalise their whole way of life.
This moving piece by the grandson of a survivor provides a small glimpse into these little known stories.
This article was originally published by Travellers Times on Wed 26 Jan 2022. Read the original here.
“NO ONE NEVER ASKED”
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Everytime I read something new about the Nazis hatred of human beings my heart hurts.
The first time I was taught about this shameful human episode I was 18, leaving school .
The school had arranged for school leavers to go to Stoke Dabanon, a contry house & grounds & each day we had lectures about a variety of subjects. Photographic & film history about concentration camps & all the horrors of pits of dead bodies thrown into pits of lime!
The mountain of shoes, clothes, personal belongings. Boxes of wedding rings, gold teeth even lampshades & book covers made of human skin….
Those photos, films have remained in my head since I was 18. I’m nearly 74 now.
Every single school everywhere should show young people exactly what humans are capable of. The hatred that causes these barbaric horrors that divide the pure white & blonde to the dark haired.
The healthy to the deranged mentally ill, to the disabled physically, the gays who were born gay.
Yes people must SHOW THOSE HORRORS because they are beyond belief.
No one should be allowed to hate, torture, starve & discriminate . NO ONE. I weep at the horrors people still inflict on others in 2022.
Thank you JVL for posting this article about the Roma as a target of Nazi racism. More need to know about this
Considering we are all “Out of Africa” it is dismaying that we hate each other just because of some perceived difference in culture or skin tone, both of which are dependent on the part of the earths surface we reside upon. Considering the so called size of the human brain is it not time we stopped believing the fairy stories our leaders tell us to make us fear each other, this fear being sufficient for us to kill our neighbours babies.
Roma & Sinti culture is unwritten. Reading & writing is usually taught in schools but life on the road excludes this luxury as all knowledge must be practical & relevant to a hand to mouth existence. These are the most persecuted people throughout western European history; with no claim to a homeland of their own, they belong nowhere, not wanted. The Porajmos has no significance in western culture.
thank you – important to note that there are many highly educated Gypsies, Roma and Travellers but it is true that for a long time history was conveyed orally (or not so much as this piece outlines) – it may be a small part of the reason why we know so much less about their experiences of oppression but the evidence is there.
Shocking piece of Hidden history. Thank you .
Thank you for this moving article, all the more timely because of the vile Patel’s Police Bill. I am called overly dramatic or ridiculous when I say England is becoming a fascist state, but are the measures in that Bill, particularly regarding Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities anything but fascism?
Thankyou for thus
Thanks for posting this article, a piece both incredibly beautiful in the writing, and heartbreaking in its content. Individual Jewish victims’ response was not that different: shame, repression of appalling memories, determined silence. The difference is that at the more public level, the community suffering of European Jews is widely known, and, because of obsessive Nazi documenting, pretty accurately recorded. I reckon this puts a special obligation on Jewish people and organisations to reach out to Roma communities and offer to help record their experience and try to narrow that incredible gap between numbers murdered, between a quarter of a million and two million.
When the Roma from former Czechoslovakia came to the UK in and after 1997, I became aware of two families who had survived Auschwitz. Many others were killed in different ways, as Szymon Glowacki records. Only a few hundred Czech Roma survived, so most of the refugees who came here were from surviving Slovak Roma families with a different WW2 history: being driven out of their homes to starve and live as outcasts, then having any caravans destroyed once a communist government took over.
The Bock family had a unique story to tell, as they were Sinti who travelled with their horses between Germany and Bohemia in the Czech lands. Their deaths are recorded in the Auschwitz Book of the Gypsies, to be found in the Wiener library. Several took part in the Resistance; one uncle was executed in Prague Castle and another was sent from Auschwitz to Natzweiler (the only camp on French soil, and specially built to imprison resisters: from across the Reich: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natzweiler-Struthof_concentration_camp
This uncle may have been among the able-bodied men separated from the ‘Gypsy Family Camp’ at Auschwitz after they successfully fought off the SS’s first attempt to burn everyone in that camp and clear it for the Hungarian Jews to come and be killed in their turn. On 2nd August 1944 the SS returned and exterminated the remaining families, this is now the date of the Roma Genocide Memorial Day.
Vilem Bock had a huge story to tell, as a child of very few suvivors. With the human rights lawyer and Czech-language scholar David Chrico, and the researcher-author Nidhi Trehan https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv18gfz6v
I arranged for the Bock family to be interviewed. I was glad that the Holocaust Memorial Trust did not hold back on showing how terribly the family had also been treated once they had reached the UK and asked for asylum. The family moved to Canada after Brexit. You can read their story here: https://www.hmd.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/the_history_of_the_bock_family.pdf
Thank you for this detailed information; a fitting addition to this personal piece.
My paternal grandfathers family were Spanish Roma and my Maternal fathers family were White Russian. Dads father never spoke of his family neither of them spoke of the families they left behind when they fled. I will never know how many of my collective family died by Hitlers orders