On Romany Holocaust Memorial Day – 2nd August
JVL Introduction
In this moving article Romany journalist Jake Bowers places the story of the Romany Holocaust in today’s context.
He reminds us of the resistance at Auschwitz on 16th May 1944, the only recorded uprising in the camp, when Romany prisoners stood up against their Nazi guards armed with only hammers, pickaxes and shovels.
As a result of their defiance, no Roma died in the gas chambers on that day.
It is now commemorated as Romani Resistance Day
But on 2 August the Nazis took their revenge. 4,300 Romanies were murdered at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp.
Estimates of how many Romani were murdered overall range from 500,000 to 1.5 million people.
And for very many of those who survived, there was no happy ending, as prejudice and discrimination have followed them to the present day.
So this account of the dreadful history is also a call for resistance against the hostile environment historically suffered by Britain’s Gypsy, Roma and Traveller community, now being cranked up in Priti Patel’s Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill.
This article was originally published by the Morning Star on Mon 2 Aug 2021. Read the original here.
We will not go quietly into the history books
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While I knew Gypsies were one of the groups selected for the death camps, I hadn’t realised what a high percentage of the population died in them. I knew nothing about the Romany Holocaust Memorial event.
The Police Bill is so explicitly contrary to the provisions of the Equality Act 2010 (and earlier legislation) that it mystifies me how Patel and Johnson expect to get it through. However, the Police Bill isn’t “just” an attack on one community.
I suspect part of the Bill’s appeal to Tories is the assistance it would give to criminalising volunteers’ and animal welfare organisations’ anti-hunting and badger protection activities. Supporters and participants in blood sports and badger culls tend to be Tory and increasingly – where their activities are criminal – they’re being punished in the courts. If there aren’t any observers of wrongdoing, that lets the criminals off the hook doesn’t it?
Excellent article by Jake Bowers. Well done JVL for republishing it.
Three years ago I visited the Mémorial de la Shoah in Paris. A well-researched temporary exhibition traced the fate of French Romani and Gitans during the Occupation. Romani were rounded up by both Vichy and the Germans, to be sent to German and Polish camps along with French Jews.
Not all, though. Vichy imprisoned many Romani on French soil, in their own enclosed and guarded camps. The last camp was closed and its inmates released, one year and two months after the end of the war.
In other words, the pervasive anti-Gypsy attitude which keeps resurfacing across Europe, is helping to drive our proposed legislation.
It is no longer fashionable to be antisemitic; it not yet unfashionable to be anti-Gypsy.
We all know six million Jews were slaughtered in the Holocaust. Too many forget that at least six million non-Jews were slaughtered as well.
We must remember ALL those who died, not just those whose descendants speak in the loudest voice.
I suspect that the Police Bill has been carefully drafted to get round the Equality Act, using the excuse that not all Travellers are members of a single ethnic group. In fact, this is similar to the approach of the French government, starting in 1912, who had a traveller classification system based on occupation, so – according to Shannon L Fogg* – Gypsies/Roma were not strictly rounded up because of their ethnicity, but on the basis of their occupations and how they pursued them. Gypsies fell mainly into two categories: “nomades” who were not necessarily French nationals and had no fixed abode and “forains”, French nationals with no fixed abode who sold stuff at markets and fairs. The former had to carry identity cards containing “name, date and place of birth, height, chest measurement,
size of head, length of right ear, length of left middle and little fingers,
length of left arm from elbow to middle fingertip, eye color, all ten
fingerprints, and two photographs (full face and profile).”
This approach, saturated in racism, but hiding it behind legalisms, is common to all governments, but seems to present particular problems in France, as they have an aversion to collecting data about racial discrimination. When the Sarkozy government deported around 20,000 Roma to Eastern Europe in 2009-11, they used alleged criminality (i.e. “illegal settlements”) as the excuse and Sarkozy distanced himself from one of the deportation directives when the press showed that it mentioned Roma. I expect Johnson’s government will do the same thing.
Shannon L Fogg says the French Roma deported to Auschwitz were from “a camp in Belgium, rather than one on French soil” while this** article on the Roma Genocide in France say the Roma were in a camp in “Belgian occupied northern France”. They also differ in their estimates of the numbers deported. Fogg inconclusively looks at some arguments as to why more French Gypsies were not deported to German and Polish concentration camps.
*https://read.dukeupress.edu/french-historical-studies/article/31/2/327/9590/They-Are-Undesirables-Local-and-National-Responses
**https://www.coe.int/en/web/roma-genocide/france
@Philip
I think there’s absolutely no way the government COULD get around the Equality Act 2010 as travelling is central to Romany, Gipsy and Traveller cultures.