To better address the question of how the Holocaust affected the Romani, it is important to establish context. This context includes but isn’t limited to: Who the Romani are, how they have been persecuted prior to the Holocaust, their persecution during the Holocaust, and how it affected the survivors and their families. The Romani as an ethnic group began as a nomadic group of people who immigrated from the region that would become India around the 10th century, having settled in the Balkans in the 14th century, and by the 15th century they could have been observed in communities all around Europe. At this time, they would take on professions such as carpentry, masonry, smithing, and pretty much whatever occupation that a member of society would hold, save for a few traditions where they would express themselves in ways that departed from the teachings of the church. In response to this, in the 16th century, the Catholic Church would begin to pass propaganda against them, and in combination with the rise of capitalism (which would render the majority of Roma homeless) and the passing of anti-vagabond laws, the Roma would find themselves subjected to widespread homelessness, and in the eyes of the law, criminals. Very similar to the Jewish community, the Roma would find themselves forced to play their role in society, with said role being what would in turn birth and perpetrate harmful stereotypes that would culminate in sentiment that would contribute to the environment that allowed for the Nazis to gain popularity.
What would follow would be centuries of persecution around Europe, though this was not the case initially. The widespread opinion on the Romani for a time did not stem from common people, but rather from governments and religious bodies. This would change over time, with persecution becoming the norm in many countries. In England, even being Romani was outlawed. In the Netherlands, the act of hunting Romani became fashionable, similar to American “witch hunts.” A possible progenitor of the stereotype that Romani steal children, Romani children were kidnapped from their parents around the ages of 2 to 4 in an attempt to eliminate their way of life through depriving them of their children, thereby ending their culture. These children would then be given to other families, to raise them to assimilate with non-Romani culture. In response to this, the parents would attempt to reclaim their children, possibly giving rise to this stereotype.
Spain would be where most of the pre-Enlightenment discrimination would unfold, for instance in response to Pope Pius V’s attempted excommunication of the Romani from the Catholic Church. Spain and Portugal deported their Romani populations into slavery, being sent to Africa, America, and eastern Europe. Spain also sent all of the Romani men either to prison, or to work and live in mercury mines for 16 years, by the end of which there were very few remaining. While kidnapping would continue until the 1970s, a new attitude would be adopted by European nations with the coming of the Enlightenment. Coming with this radical shift in ideals was the notion that the Romani were a group of “Noble Savages,” similar to how White European settlers in the Americas viewed Indigenous people. In fact, several parallels can be drawn between how the Romani had been treated and how White Americans treated the people native to the land they settled in. Finally, a facility was opened in Munich, Germany in 1899 called “The Central Office for fighting the Gypsy Nuisance,” which was according to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum “to coordinate police action against Roma in the city of Munich. This office compiled a central registry of Roma that grew to include data on Roma and Sinti from other German states.” This office would be closed in 1970, demonstrating an interesting contradiction in the narrative of Germany’s post-war sentiment towards the Holocaust.
The Holocaust, known in Romani as “Bara Porrajmos” or “The Great Devouring,” would begin for the Romani before the Nazi party would even take office. Their story would begin in 1926 in Bavaria, with the passing of a law to “Combat the Gypsy nuisance,” which would see every Romani documented, forcing them to show proof of regular employment, and restricting them from moving about from place to place. Those who didn’t comply would risk being forced into forced labor camps for up to 2 years at a time. Once the Nazis took power in 1933, this did not change. With the passing of the Nuremburg laws, just as had been the case for Jewish people, the Romani and Sinti found themselves subject to laws based on the false science of eugenics, classified and forced into societal roles and locations that were designed to strip them of individuality, humanity, and eventually prepare them to be relocated into concentration camps. The primary camp for the Romani and Sinti, outside of specific holding camps for Roma, was Auschwitz. Here, between 250,000 and 500,000 Romani would be murdered. This includes more than half of the Romani populations from Germany, Czechoslovakia, Austria, Poland, and Latvia, with the populations from Belgium, Holland, Croatia, Estonia, and Lithuania being all but eradicated. With a death toll this catastrophic, and having endured this horror, why then are their stories just now being heard, nearly 80 years after the end of World War II?
Following the end of the war, the survivors would return to a world that had already forgotten them. In an interview, Angela Kóczé, chair of the Romani Studies program at Central European University in Budapest, stated that “The Roma voice is very much missing from the mainstream historical narrative. Their testimony has been denied, or deflated, and their credibility is questioned. These people aren’t counted, they don’t matter, no one cares about them, even to merely remember them as humans” (Kóczé). This struck a chord with me in my research, and I hope has struck a chord with you as well. It is hard to even explain the feeling that this quote evokes, but it is powerful. Many consider their experience a “Forgotten Holocaust.” In response, Romani identity would regress into obscurity to assimilate with the rest of Europe as persecution continued.
In the time since the end of the Second World War, persecution would continue, particularly in eastern Europe. In what was once known as Czechoslovakia, treatment of the Romani is noticeably more horrific, with hate crimes regularly targeting the Romani populations (predominantly by a group known as “Skinheads”), and in most cases the perpetrators are not held responsible, and if they are, they are only subject to light and lenient sentencing. In response to this and as a response to life under the Soviet bloc, the Roma and Sinti identities would be driven into obscurity. This is the answer that I have come across when researching how the Holocaust affected the Romani: The Holocaust portended the end of Romani culture, and while it still continues in spite of international persecution and hatred, the culture is much more scarce and much more repressed than ever as a direct consequence of the Bara Porrajmos. In response to this however, more light is being shed on the Romani, with the first database of testimonies from Romani persecution, particularly pertaining to victims of the Holocaust, being created in 2015. The link to that database will be included among the works cited section of this post. Memorials have also been erected in Berlin and Budapest, and legislation has begun to be signed into law to combat antiziganism.
Works Cited/Sources:
BREARLEY, MARGARET. 2001. “The Persecution of Gypsies in Europe.” The American Behavioral Scientist 45 (4): 588–99. https://doi.org/10.1177/00027640121957367.
Herki, Norina. 2020. “Anti-Roma Discourses: The Struggle for Roma Holocaust Recognition, Collective Memory and Identity.” Studia Universitatis Babes-Bolyai. Studia Europaea 65 (2): 283–302. https://doi.org/10.24193/subbeuropaea.2020.2.13.
Siegal, Nina. 2023. “An Effort to Focus on Long Overlooked Roma Suffering in the Holocaust.” New York Times (Online), 2023. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/29/arts/roma-database-holocaust.html
Stewart, Michael. 2010. “An invisible catastrophe: the holocaust of the Gypsies.” Terrain 54: 100–121. https://journals.openedition.org/terrain/13989
United States holocaust memorial museum. Accessed May 8, 2024. https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/persecution-of-roma-gypsies-in-prewar-germany-1933-1939.