The Effects of Oppression: The Romani People

When it comes to the Romani people, it is difficult to study ethnographic issues because the Romani people have no one language or culture. This is because the Romani, or Roma, are not settled in any one area, but rather in small communities across Europe and the Americas. Their culture was dispersed as a result of their long history of being oppressed, exploited, and killed because of their heritage. Therefore, this post is intended to explore the way that this history of oppression has influenced the Roma people.

As Trevor discussed in his post, the Romani were victims of genocide under Adolf Hitler's Third Reich. However, the Holocaust was not the first or, unfortunately, the last occurrence of human rights violations committed against this particular indigenous group. The Romani have been rejected from European society from almost the moment they arrived in it 1000 years ago. The historical community more or less agrees that the Romani people began arriving in South and Central Europe between the ninth and fourteenth centuries after emigrating from northwestern India. However, what is not in contention is the reception they received upon arriving in Europe. For the rest of their history, the Romani were enslaved, murdered, exiled, and exploited by every society they attempted to settle into. They were simply expelled from Wester Europe, and Portugal actually shipped its Romani population off to Brazil, resulting in a community of modern day Romani in the country today. By necessity, the Romani settled in Central Europe, where they were less likely to be enslaved or banished. However, under the Hapsburgs, the Romani were forcibly assimilated into Austro-Hungarian society, which was no less damaging to their culture. Under these assimilation laws, the Romani were forbidden to speak their language or ply their traditional trades. They were also forced to settle, prohibited from roaming the countryside in caravans, as had been their way of life for centuries.

After World War II and Hitler's horrific treatment of the Romani, the Soviet Union also tried to assimilate this indigenous group into society, forcing them to abandon their nomadic lifestyle and outlawing most of their traditional livelihoods, things like music performance in taverns and fortune-telling. The Kremlin also enacted an effort to relocate Romani populations from their homes in the backwaters of Central Europe to major cities. This practice led to increased literacy rates among Romani, but it also degraded their culture and caused a lot of tension between the Roma and the people of the Soviet Union, who felt that the Romani were getting special treatment from the government. As a result, when Communism broke down in the late 1980s, newly created Central European governments went right back to ostracizing and abusing the Romani, a practice which has unfortunately continued into today.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Romani have faced an incredible amount of discrimination in Central Europe. In places like Kosovo, where civil war broke out in the 1990s, Romani were the first group to be driven from their homes and the last group to be resettled into society. In cities, job discrimination is rampant, leading to the Romani being the poorest ethnic demographic in Central Europe. In some countries, this discrimination has led to instances of ethnic cleansing, with the most notable example being Romania, where the Romani population was targeted after a breakdown in the country's criminal justice system. In recent years, as globalization knits Europe closer together, the European Union has been fighting discrimination against Romanis by requiring anti-discrimination laws to be in place before a country can join the organization. This has helped the Romani plight, but there is still violence between Romanis and Central European populations, and discrimination against this minority group is far from ended.

Reference:
Joseph Russell Rudolph.
     2008. Central Europe. In Hot Spot: North America and Europe. No Editors Listed. Pp. 131 133. Westport, CT. Greenwood Press.

The Roma in Nazi Germany

     This blog is more of a historical account of how the Romani were treated during World War II than it is about their ethnography.  In order to frame why they were treated differently during WWII, I first need to share a little bit of their history.

     The Roma people, also known as Romani, have had a hard life.  The Romani arrived in Europe from the Middle East and were given the nickname "Gypsies" because they were rumored to be EGYPtianS and moving in order to avoid persecution for being Christian.  The Romani's traditional method for record keeping is to tell their stories and history to their decedents and not record events in texts.  Because of that it's unknown why or when they left their native land (India), but whatever the reason it set up a domino effect of bad news for them.  The Europeans had their doubts about the Romani because they had darker skin and looked a lot different (because they were from India) than everyone else in Europe.  The Roma also just kind of showed up and didn't have any land build a permanent residence or any income.  They tried to make a living by trading goods and services, but because they were nomads (and their skin color probably had something to do with it) nobody trusted them.  In order to eat, some Romani were forced to steal food and that lead to the stereotype that all Roma are thieves.  The biggest of the bad news dominos came from the Austro-Hungarian Emperor Karl VI in 1721.  He put together the first government sponsored plan to relocate and murder the Romani in the region that eventually became Germany.  It wasn't long after that when other European countries followed suit with their own similar laws.  Finally, scholars in the 1800's came to the conclusion that the Roma weren't as culturally advanced as other territorially settled peoples and were considered less evolved because of that (Hajdu 2003).  That ideology made it okay for everyone to treat the Romani as a subhuman beings.

     When Hitler became Chancellor of Germany in 1933, he declared the Roma and the Jews to be second-class citizens.  With that, both groups were stripped of their civil rights and eventually sent to concentration camps for hard labor, experiments, and death.  Not all Roma made it to the concentration camps because an unknown number were killed where they lived or on their way to the camps.  In the concentration camps, the Romani were allowed to live in family camps where as the Jewish families were broken apart.  This was because the Romani went crazy when separated from their families so it was a lot easier for the guards to control them if the families were jailed together.  Life inside the family camps was not easy for anyone.  The Roma were given very little food, which was bread, and that was often withheld as punishment.  They would lick condensation off of the windows or drink their own urine because they were so thirsty (Hajdu 2003).  The Roma have high standards of hygiene and a strict code of cleansing called Mokadi or Mokkadi, (I found it spelled both ways and each spelling had the same meaning) but were unable to keep up their traditional cleanliness because their living conditions dictated otherwise.  Hitler also had the Romani women sterilized as a way to control there population.  The females were usually told they were getting an examination, but instead were given a painful injection that made them unable to have children.  That was a three pronged attack because it not only physically hurt them, but also caused psychological misery and social anguish.  Children are a big part of the Romani culture and are considered the pride and joy of a community.  A person's social status is also influenced by the amount of children they have.  The more kids a person has, the higher their status so if a woman is unable to reproduce she is considered lower than others with kids and lower than women who could still have children.  While in the concentration camp, the Romani were recipients of cruel medical experiments.  Some twins were stitched back to back in an attempt to form conjoined (Siamese) twins, and other sets of twins were killed for the sole purpose of performing an autopsy on them.  The Roma were also exposed to mustard gas (in order to study who survived with an antidote) and a cyanide based pesticide to test the side effects (the pesticide became the standard gas that was used in the gas chamber to kill the prisoners.)  Unfortunately this is only a small picture of what happened in Nazi Germany.  To make this a little bit more real, here is a clip from the HBO series Band of Brothers where the Americans find a concentration camp during WWII.

Reference:
Hajdu, Julia
  2003 The Roma and the Holocaust of World War II:  Victims, Then and Now. Electronic document
          http://www.history.ucsb.edu/projects/holocaust/Research/Proseminar/romaholocast.htm,
          accessed June 1.