Porajmos

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Romani arrivals in the Belzec extermination camp await instructions

The Porajmos (also Porrajmos, literally, Devouring in some dialects of the Romani language) is a Romani term introduced by Romani scholar and activist Ian Hancock to describe attempts by the regime in Nazi Germany to exterminate most of the Romani people of Europe as part of the Holocaust.

The phenomenon has been little studied and largely overshadowed by the Shoah (the Hebrew term for the Nazi campaign to exterminate Jews). Other aspects of the Holocaust included the Nazi campaign against people with disabilities (see Action T4), and the slavery of Polish people in concentration camps.

Because the Romani communities of Eastern Europe were less organized than the Jewish communities, it is more difficult to assess the actual number of victims, though it is believed to range from 220,000 to 1,500,000.^[1] Only in recent years has the Romani community begun to demand acceptance among the victims of the Nazi regime. The response so far has been mixed.

[edit] Using the term

The term porajmos was introduced into the literature by Hancock, in the early 1990s. According to Hancock, the term was not coined by him but rather was invented by a Kalderash Rom whose name he doesn't remember during an informal conversation in 1993, where several people were discussing what to call the Holocaust in Romani. Of the several suggestions, Hancock found this one particularly appropriate.^[2]Hancock's recollection of 1993 as the date of this exchange must be mistaken as the term was used by Prof. Henry R. Huttenbach as early as 1991.^[3][4]

Some Russian and Balkan Romani activists protest against using the word porajmos.^[5] In various dialects this word is a synonym for the word poravipe, which has the meanings "violation" and "rape", so these activists consider the word to be offensive. Balkan Romani activists express a preference for the term Samudaripen,^[6], coined by linguist Marcel Courthiade. It has been dismissed by Hancock, who argues that it doesn't conform to Romani language morphology.^[2] Some Ruska Roma activists offer the emotive term Kali Traš ('Black Fear').^[7]

Another alternative that has been used is Berša Bibahtale ('The Unhappy Years').^[2]

[edit] History

[edit] Aryan racial purity

In the thousand years that Romani tribes lived in Europe, they were subject to antiziganist persecution and humiliation^[8]; they were stigmatized as habitual criminals, social misfits, and vagabonds^[8]. Given the Nazi predilection for “racial purity,” it would seem inevitable that the Romanies would be among their first victims. Nevertheless, in the earliest days of the Third Reich, the Romanies posed a problem for Hitler’s racial ideologues. The (Romani language) is one of the Indo-Aryan languages, originating in northern India. Nazi anthropologists realized that Romanies migrated into Europe from India and were thus descendants of the Aryan occupants of the subcontinent, thought at the time to have invaded India from Europe. In other words, the Romanies are native speakers of an Aryan language.

Nazi racialist Hans F. K. Günther added a socioeconomic component to the theory of racial purity. While he conceded that the Romanies were, in fact, descended from Aryans, they were of poorer classes that had mingled with the various “inferior” races they encountered during their wanderings. This, he explained, accounted for their extreme poverty and nomadic lifestyle. While he conceded that there were some groups that were "purely Aryan", most Romanies posed a threat to Aryan homogeneity because of their racial mingling.

Romani woman with German police officer and Nazi psychologist Dr Robert Ritter

To study the problem further, the Nazis established the Racial Hygiene and Demographic Biology Research Unit (Rassenhygienische und Bevölkerungsbiologische Forschungsstelle, Department L3 of the Reich Department of Health) in 1936. Headed by Dr. Robert Ritter and his assistant Eva Justin, the body was mandated to conduct an in-depth study of the "Gypsy question (Zigeunerfrage)" and to provide data required for formulating a new Reich "Gypsy law". After extensive fieldwork in the spring of 1936, consisting of interviews and medical examinations to investigate genealogical and genetic data, it was determined that most Romanies posed a danger to German racial purity and should be eliminated. No decision was made regarding the remainder (about 10 percent of the total Romani population of Europe), primarily Sinti and Lalleri tribes living in Germany, though several suggestions were made. At one point Heinrich Himmler even suggested the establishment of a remote reservation, where "pure Gypsies" could continue their nomadic lifestyle unhindered. According to him:

...The aim of measures taken by the State to defend the homogeneity of the German nation must be the physical separation of Gypsydom from the German nation, the prevention of miscegenation, and finally, the regulation of the way of life of pure and part-Gypsies.

[edit] Loss of citizenship

On November 14, 1935, The Law for the "Protection of Blood and Honor", colloquially known as the Nuremberg laws, was passed. This law forbade Aryans to marry non-Aryans. Criteria defining who is Romani were exactly twice as strict as those defining any other group. The second Nuremberg law, The Reich Citizenship Law, stripped citizenship from "non-Aryans". Blacks^[9] and Romanies, like Jews, lost their right to vote on March 7, 1936.

[edit] Extermination

The Brown Triangle. Romani prisoners in German concentration camps such as Auschwitz were forced to wear the inverted triangle on their prison uniforms to distinguish them from other inmates.^[10]‎

The sterilization of Romanies was started as early as 1933 while camps were being established by the Nazis to contain Romanies at Dachau, Dieselstrasse, Mahrzan and Vennhausen.

The vast majority of Romanies were to suffer the same indignities as the Jews.

The Society for Threatened Peoples estimates the casualties at 277,100.^[11] Martin Gilbert estimates a total of more than 220,000 of the 700,000 Romani in Europe, including 15,000 (mainly from the Soviet Union) in Mauthausen in January-May 1945.^[12] The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum cite schoolars that estimate the number of Sinti and Roma killed in betwin 220,000 and 500,000.^[13] Dr. Sybil Milton, a historian at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Research Institute, estimated the number of Romani lives lost to be up to 1,500,000.^[1]

They were herded into ghettos, including the Warsaw Ghetto (April–June, 1942), where they formed a distinct subclass.^{[citation needed]} Ghetto diarist Emmanuel Ringelblum speculated that Romanies were sent to the Warsaw Ghetto because the Germans wanted:

...to toss into the Ghetto everything that is characteristically dirty, shabby, bizarre, of which one ought to be frightened, and which anyway has to be destroyed.^[14]

Further east, teams of Einsatzgruppen tracked down Romani encampments and murdered the inhabitants on the spot, leaving no records of the victims.

Romanies were also victims of the puppet regimes that cooperated with the Third Reich during the war, especially the notorious Ustaše regime in Croatia. In Jasenovac concentration camp, along with Serbs and Jews, tens of thousands of Romanies were killed. Serbian Romanies are parties to the pending Class action suit against the Vatican Bank and others currently pending in US Federal Court seeking return of wartime loot.^[15]

On December 16, 1942, Himmler ordered that the Romani candidates for extermination should be deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau. To the Romani people of Europe, this order was equivalent to the January 20 decision of that same year, made at the Wannsee Conference, at which Nazi bureaucrats decided on the “Final Solution” to the “Jewish problem.” Himmler then ordered, on November 15, 1943, that Romanies and "part-Romanies" were to be put “on the same level as Jews and placed in concentration camps.”^[16]

The governments of some Nazi German allies, namely Slovakia, Hungary, and Romania, also contributed to the Nazi plan of Romani extermination, but this was implemented on a smaller scale and most Romani in these countries survived, unlike those in Ustashe Croatia or in areas directly ruled by Nazi Germany (such as Poland). The Hungarian Arrow Cross government deported between 28,000 and 33,000 Romanies out of a population estimated between 70,000 and 100,000^[17].

The Croatian government deported or interred 26,000,^[18] and of the Romanies killed, about half were murdered at the Jasenovac concentration camp. Similarly, the Romanian government of Ion Antonescu had its own concentration camps in Transnistria to which 25,000 Romani people were deported, of whom 11,000 died.^[19] At least one notable Jewish Holocaust victim appears to have seen Romanies at Auschwitz - Anne Frank ^[20].

In the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, Romani internees were sent to the Lety and Hodonín concentration camps before being transferred to Auschwitz-Birkenau for gassing. What makes the Lety camp unique is that it was staffed by Czech guards, who could be even more brutal than the Germans, as testified in Paul Polansky’s book Black Silence. The genocide was so thorough that the vast majority of Romani in the Czech Republic today are actually descended from migrants from Slovakia who moved there during the post-war years in Czechoslovakia.

[edit] Recognition

The first memorial commemorating victims of the Romani Holocaust was erected on May 8, 1956, in the Polish village of Szczurowa commemorating the Szczurowa massacre.

On October 23, 2007, Romanian President Traian Băsescu publicly apologized for his nation's role in the Porajmos, the first time a Romanian leader has done so. He called for the Porajmos to be taught in schools, stating that, "We must tell our children that six decades ago children like them were sent by the Romanian state to die of hunger and cold". Part of his apology was in the Romani language. Băsescu also awarded three Porajmos survivors with an Order for Faithful Services.^[21]

Prior to recognizing Romania's role in the Porajmos, Traian Băsescu was widely quoted after an incident on May 19, 2007, in which he insulted a journalist by calling her a "stinky gypsy." The president subsequently apologized.^[22]

[edit] References

[edit] See also

• Antiziganism
• Johann Wilhelm Trollmann
• Szczurowa massacre

[edit] Further reading

• Guenter Lewy, The Nazi Persecution of the Gypsies, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2000 ISBN 0-19-512556-8
• Fonseca, Isabel: Bury Me Standing: The Gypsies And Their Journey, London, Vintage, 1996. Chapter 7, The Devouring
• ""Gypsies" as Social Outsiders in Nazi Germany" by Sybil H. Milton in Social Outsiders in Nazi Germany, edited by Robert Gellately and Nathan Stoltzfus (2001, hardcover, ISBN 0-691-00748-9; paperback, ISBN 0-691-08684-2).
• Paul Polansky, Black Silence: The Lety Survivors Speak ISBN 0-89304-241-2
• Ramati, Alexander And the Violins Stopped Playing: A Story of the Gypsy Holocaust : 1986. War time biography of Roman (Dymitr) Mirga, on which film of the same name is based.
• Romani Rose, The Nazi Genocide of the Sinti and Roma (Heidelberg: Documentary and Cultural Centre of German Sinti and Roma, 1995)
• State Museum of Auschwitz-Birkenau, Memorial Book: The Gypsies at Auschwitz-Birkenau (New York: K.G. Saur, 1993)
• Klamper, Elisabeth. Persecution and Annihilation of Roma and Sinti in Austria, 1938-1945, Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society 5, Vol. 3, No. 2 (1993)
• Milton, Sybil. The Holocaust: The Gypsies, in William S. Parsons, Israel Chamy, and Samuel Totten, eds., Genocide in the Twentieth Century: An Anthology of Critical Essays and Oral History (New York, 1995), pp. 209-64.
• Tyrnauer, Gabrielle, Gypsies and the Holocaust: A Bibliography and Introductory Essay, Montreal, 1989
• Christian Bernadac (ed.), L'Holocauste oublié. Le martyre des Tsiganes, éd. France-Empire, 1979
• Heuss, H., Sparing, F., Fings, K. & Asséo, H. (Translated by Donald Kenrick). 1997. From "Race Science" to the Camps. Volume 1 of The Gypsies during the Second World War Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press
• Kenrick, D. (ed. and translator). 1999. In the Shadow of the Swastika. Volume 2 of The Gypsies during the Second World War Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press
• Kenrick, D. (ed.). 2006 The Final Chapter. Volume 3 of The Gypsies during the Second World War Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press
• Sonneman, T. 2002. Shared Sorrows. A Gypsy family remembers the Holocaust Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press
• Winter, W. (Translated and annotated by Struan Robertson) Winter Time. Memoirs of a German Sinto who survived Auschwitz Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press
• Gilbert, Martin (2002). The Routledge Atlas of the Holocaust. Routledge, London & New York. ISBN 0 415 28145 8.  See Map 182 p 141 (with deaths by country) & Map 301 p 232. Note: formerly The Dent Atlas of the Holocaust; 1982, 1993.

[edit] External links

• Historical Amnesia: The Romani Holocaust - Desicritics
• Extensive online resource on the Holocaust of the Romanies from Holocaust Survivors and Remembrance Project -- iSurvived.org
• Histories, Narratives and Documents of the Roma and Sinti (Gypsies), Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, University of Minnesota
• sintiundroma.de (German) (English)
• A Brief Romani Holocaust Chronology
• Roma-Sinti Genocide (Parajmos) Resources, Prevent Genocide International
• Memorial of Poraimos (Romani)
• Roma and Sinti Under-Studied Victims of Nazism (Symposium Proceedings), PDF, 98 р.
• Persecution and resistance of Gypsies under Nationalsocialism (in German)
• Gypsies: A Persecuted Race