Overlooked victims of Holocaust deserve to be remembered

In the ugly history of human evil, there are few if any events to compare with the Holocaust perpetrated by the Third Reich.

At least 6 million Jews were murdered, not counting the numbers of political dissidents, Jehovah’s Witnesses, communists, priests, homosexuals and those with physical disabilities. Yet one of the groups targeted for death is often ignored, and they deserve a memory, and that is the Romani people. The Roma refer to this event in their history as the Porjamos, or “the devouring.”

There is a great deal of misunderstanding about the Roma. Evidence suggests they may have originally been called the “Dom” which over time evolved into “Rom,” although it has been suggested that the Roma and the Dom peoples may represent two distinct migrations. The Roma people have their roots in northern India in the territory today known as Punjab. For political reasons, the Roma fled their homeland and took up a migratory lifestyle around A.D. 1000.

From India, the Roma people migrated to eastern Europe and to parts of the Mideast and North Africa. Their lifestyle was and to some degree still is one of setting up a camp in an area, staying for a while, doing business, and then moving on. Their darker skin color made their identity obvious to the lighter skinned Europeans, which prevented assimilation. The result is that wherever they went to, the Roma were seen as outsiders, thieves and troublemakers. This unfortunate prejudice would pay horrible dividends in modern times.

In regards to religion, the Roma are a bit eclectic, normally Eastern Orthodox with a large minority of Roman Catholics, but they often adapt to the religion of wherever they live. As a result, there are many who practice the Baptist, Anglican and Protestant faiths. There is even a large Muslim population in the Roma, from the days when they traveled in the Holy Land. Scholars have identified many Hindu customs in the Roma people’s religious practice which must date back to their original home. They have a number of rules about ritual uncleanness. The upper half of the body is regarded as clean whole, the lower half is unclean, which leads them to reject baths and prefer showers. They wash their hands frequently and childbirth is so unclean that it must occur outside the home. The subject of ritual purity is a long and complicated one.

Fear of the Roma has abounded for centuries. A Franciscan friar in the 14th century referred to the Roma as the “children of Cain.” In England, King Charles II issued a decree in 1695 restricting the Roma to living in only a handful of cities. In 1749, the Spanish crown ordered all Roma to be rounded up, arrested and put in prison. Until 1856, it was legal to enslave the Roma in some Eastern European states. In France, the Roma men were ordered to be branded, and in Bohemia the women were required to have one of their ears chopped off. The 17th-century Dutch simply had them killed whenever possible. However, in Poland and Russia, they found greater tolerance as long as they were willing to pay taxes to the rulers.

The rise of Nazism in the 20th century would change the fate of Europe and the Roma were included. The Nazis believed in the significance of race, with some races being more important than others. But racial mixture, peoples marrying and producing offspring with two heritages, was particularly odious to the Nazis. The Jews, as is well known, were consigned to destruction, but the Roma were condemned at the same time. In the German conquest of the east, the Einsatzgruppen, or death squads, were ordered to kill the Roma on sight. In the west, they were herded into the concentration camps and massacred there.

How many Roma were killed? Herein we find a common problem in studying history. The Roma have their own language with many variant dialects, but they historically have not been a people used to written records. The Roma culture has been passed on through oral mythology, social customs and a variety of traditions, but there is not much record keeping until very recent times. Historians know what people said about the Roma and how they were treated as they appear in other people’s chronicles many times. The result is that for numbering, we must rely on estimates, which in the case of the Nazi atrocities run between 220,000 and 1.5 million. The Polish-born Zbigniew Brzezinski, the national security adviser to President Jimmy Carter, stated that the most accurate number is around 800,000.

The Nazis were coldly efficient in their efforts to eliminate the Jews. Oddly, although the Nazis despised the Roma, they were less organized about their destruction, and often left it to local governors to enforce Nazi policy. In Vichy, France, several thousand Roma were deported to the camps but most others were not. Administrators of many concentration camps were sufficiently bigoted against the Roma that they refused to accept them. The Greeks and Bulgarians simply ignored the orders. In late 1942, Heinrich Himmler issued a decree ordering all Roma to be sent to the camps immediately.

The camp complex at Auschwitz-birkenau set aside a special section for the Roma. There, many of them came into contact with the notorious doctor Josef Mengele, whose pseudo-scientific experiments led to horrible deaths. According to eyewitnesses, the famous Jewish diarist Anne

Frank, while in Auschwitz, saw a troop of naked Roma girls being herded through the camp to the death chambers. All she could do was sob.

Near the end of the war, in August 1942, the German governor in Serbia, Harald Turner, reported back to his masters, “Serbia is the only country in which the Jewish question and the (Roma) Question have been solved.” Readers may imagine what the Nazi meant by “solved.” Gregory Elder, a Redlands resident, is a professor emeritus of history and humanities at Moreno Valley College and a Roman Catholic priest. Write to him at Professing Faith, P.O. Box 8102, Redlands, CA 92375-1302, email him at gnyssa@ verizon.net or follow him on Twitter @Fatherelder.