CEE Pray for the Roma
A people misunderstood
Many Czechs know them as dirty thieves and wanderers who can’t be trusted.
“Everyone around me says they are bad people,” said Jiri Randall, a Czech with a heart for Roma.
Yet many who make up this minority people group in the Czech Republic believe their culture is simply misunderstood. Michal Schuster, Czech Historian with the Muzeum Romské Kultury (Museum of Romany Culture) in Brno, Czech Republic, agrees.
“In Czech schoolbooks, there is just one sentence about the Roma in the 20th century, so it’s necessary to make (their history) public,” he said.
Misunderstanding of the Roma began when Europeans dubbed them “Gypsies,” and thought the travelers originated in Egypt (hence the English nickname, “Gypsy”). However, after discovering the Romany language belongs to the Indo-European linguistic family, scholars concluded the Roma began as a lower Indian caste.
The first recorded presence of Roma in Europe comes from 11th century Greece. Today approximately 8.6 million Roma occupy the continent, with 300,000 living in the Czech Republic.
Europeans seemed to tolerate the wanderers until 1427, when a Paris archbishop excommunicated a group of Roma, beginning the general public’s long history of mistreating members of the people group. However, some Roma were able to settle across Central and Eastern Europe, sharing blacksmith and musical skills with their new communities.
Laws passed in the 18th century forced Roma to settle as peasants and assimilate. They obtained full citizenship and provided inexpensive labor as craftsmen (blacksmiths and brick and broom makers) and entertained others with their musical talents. One specific Romany group—the Vlach from Romania—were known as horse traders, smugglers of goods, scrap collectors and palm readers.
The simple peasant life of the Roma took a tragic turn with World War II and the 1935 Nuremberg laws that classified Gypsies—along with Jews and “Negroes”—as a threat to German racial purity. Head of the German Schutzstaffel, Heinrich Himmler, ordered the first transports of Gypsies to concentration camps April 17, 1940.
Hodonín, one of two Gypsy concentration camps in the Czech Republic (the other in Lety), housed nearly 1,400 Roma between August 1942 and January 1943. Although the camp’s maximum capacity stood at 300 people, 600 Gypsies occupied the establishment within the first few weeks, creating conditions that led to a typhoid fever epidemic and approximately 200 Romany deaths.
In December of 1942 all Gypsies were ordered to go to a special section of the concentration camp at Auschwitz in southern Poland. According to the history display at the Museum of Romany Culture, “more than 22,000 European Roma went through this camp” where approximately 19,000 died. On Aug. 2, 1944, 2,897 Gypsy prisoners died in gas chambers and the Gypsy section of the camp was closed. Aug. 2 now stands as Memorial Day of the Romany Holocaust.
Scholars believe more than 300,000 Roma were killed during World War II. Of the people group living in the Czech Republic, 90 percent—approximately 5,700—did not survive.
After the war, Roma who were in eastern Czechoslovakia (now Slovakia) moved to the western part of the country (Czech Republic), where they found free homes and jobs.
Today a majority of Roma is settled throughout Europe, continuing to fight through walls of prejudice created by years of misunderstanding. Approximately 70 percent of the Romany language is the same across the continent, while the remaining 30 percent varies with each geographic grouping. Roma approach spirituality in a similar fashion—they have taken on bits of the dominant religions found in surrounding cultures, while not fully assimilating.
“If you are Gadjo (a white person), you say, ‘… look at them. They are noisy, they are smelly, they are fighting,’” Jiri said. “If you are Roma, you can see the other side of this and you can say, ‘I can't find work, I've got problems with living in my flat (apartment).’ It’s quite difficult.”