The Forgotten Holocaust

I haven't read anything very noteworthy (or blogworthy) of late, except some of my favorite mystery writers (I might blog about them some day). Instead, I will discuss two books - both quite remarkable, which I read some time ago. They  chronicle the experiences (one current, the other from a bygone era) of two communities in diaspora, with vastly disparate fortunes. The first one deals with the sad plight of European Gypsies (I am using the term Gypsy as it has been used in the book; the preferred term is Roma or Romani) and the other, the obscure but idyllic history of Indian Jews.  Black and white photographs lend quaint appeal to both books. This is Book I of a two part book review.

Bury Me Standing - The Gypsies and Their Journey  by Isabel Fonseca

Consider the title of the book and some of the chapter headings: The Least Obedient People in The World, Slavery, A Social Problem, The Devouring, The Temptation to Exist etc. and you can tell that this is a harrowing tale. The book opens with the words of a Gypsy poet from Poland and what follows is an elegy.

Numerous fables obscure the origin of Gypsies, many of them fabricated by the Gypsies themselves - expert fabulists, as the author discovered. Language being the longest memory of man, there is evidence - accepted by most historians and philologists, that Gypsies (or the Roma) migrated to Europe from India through Iran. The Gypsy language Romani, closely resembles Farsi and north Indian dialects in its syntax and vocabulary. Why a large group of Gypsies left India more than a thousand years ago is not certain. Speculation ranges from 1) to become musicians at the court of the Persian emperor 2) as blacksmiths hired by a returning Greek / Persian army  3) being nomads, they just went looking for new pastures. Since the Gypsies were (and still are) mostly illiterate, did not own land and kept to themselves, there is no accurate record of the migration.  Another intriguing practice which points to a Hindu/Indian past, has to do with a Christian ritual. There are hints in Persian court history of the era that the Indian Gypsies were devotees of the formidable black Hindu goddess, Kali.  The festival of the Black Madonna of Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer in Lyon , France, is devoutly celebrated by European Gypsies. Could it be a Christian substitute for the Hindu worship of Kali? The Black Madonna's origins may lie in Celtic - Egyptian (some think Indian) myths, but the embrace of a dark Christian goddess figure by new converts may have been an acceptable way to keep alive part of an ancient heritage which had to be abandoned upon conversion to Christianity.

"Bury Me Standing" is a remarkable account of Gypsy life in Europe. Isabel Fonseca writes with  informed passion and level headed compassion. She does not yield to the temptation of dwelling on the lurid and exotic aspects of Gypsy life - caravans, magic, fortune telling and the like. Instead her dignified curiosity is about their lot as a scattered, neglected and marginalized ethnic minority in the heart of "civilized" Mittel Europa.

Fonseca lived and traveled among the Roma communities between the years of 1991-1995 - in Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovenia, Romania and Albania among others. The focus of her investigation were the human and civil rights issues affecting Gypsies in post communist societies of eastern bloc countries. What she discovered was a poor, uneducated, mistreated, vilified, suspect and often abused minority group, whose trials and tribulation through centuries had culminated during WWII in tragedy and horror in the prison camps of Auschwitz, Treblinka, Bergen-Belsen and Dachau. Despite their terrible sufferings at the hands of the murderous Nazi regime, Gypsies subsequently garnered little sympathy from the white Christian majority in the countries of their domicile. Unlike the Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, who had a clear concept of Jewish identity and the promise of a homeland embedded in history, religious liturgy and in the ideals of Zionism, the uneducated, peripatetic Gypsies had no idea of what constitutes a "home land" or an ethnic identity. While most Jews, after WWII left Europe for Israel or the USA, the Gypsies returned to their former "homelands" mostly in Soviet dominated eastern Europe.  There, they pretty much went back to their miserable existence of living as perpetual outsiders and undesirables.

There are several reasons why I use the word Holocaust in the title.  For one, there indeed was a holocaust - an estimated two million Gypsies perished in Nazi death camps. Lacking eloquent and organized spokespersons, the plight of the Gypsies has been slow to penetrate the world's consciousness.  One bit of information that surprised and disappointed me was that some of the opposition to recognizing the Gypsy genocide as a second holocaust, came from a few Jewish Holocaust survivors, on the grounds that Hitler did not mean to kill ALL Gypsies ! Most prominent among the objectors was Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel.  The induction of Gypsies into the Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C. happened only after Wiesel stepped down as the chairperson in 1986. Among the millions of prisoners who suffered and died in Hitler's concentration camps, only Jews and Gypsies were singled out for special humiliation based on racial, religious and cultural identities. Gypsy adults and children, like Jews, were subjected to pseudo Nazi science of racial Eugenics, including the notorious "twins" studies of Josef Mengele. Although the "Jewish Question" was of greater urgency to the Nazis, a fair amount of attention was paid to answering the question, "Who is a Gypsy?" determined by blood and ancestry. Both groups were suspect and objects of contempt. Historically, both had been accused of "poisoning the well", "causing the plague" and "killing Christian children". In the twentieth century, the reckless Teutonic slanders that made the two Holocausts possible, were 1) the Jew was given to hatching  "international conspiracies" and 2) the Gypsy was a "congenital criminal".

With the help of advocates like the author, progressive leaders like Lech Walesa of Poland and Vaclav Havel of the Czech Republic and the emergence of educated, politically savvy Gypsy leaders and spokespersons, the last two decades have seen some improvement in the lives of Gypsies in parts of Europe. But it is still a dismal life for them in the less prosperous/progressive countries such as Romania, Bulgaria and Albania, where social and economic inequities, along with casual violence, contribute towards a precarious existence.

Isabel Fonseca says in her book, "When I began my research I had it in mind that the Gypsies were 'the new Jews' of Eastern Europe. But they are not the new Jews: the Gypsies, alongside the Jews, are ancient scapegoats [in Europe]". 

And what about the title of the book?  Though it sounds like a line from a folk song or a tragic ancient verse, it actually was a telling remark made by a modern day Gypsy activist friend of the author:

" Manush Romanov always had something memorable to say, especially, and sweetly, in farewell. Once at the end of a visit in Sophia in which he was practically in tears for his Gypsies, he dramatically called after me, "Prohasar man opre pirende - sa muro djiben semas opre chengende" _ "Bury me standing. I've been on my knees all my life." "

Comments

[Aku]

A well researched book on the conditions of Gypsies in Eastern Europe. Recently, I had a discussion on this with a friend Dr. Shyamala Devi Rathod who is gypsy and is currently a professor of Economics in a University in Andhra Pradesh. She is an activist for her community and a recognised chronicler of history of the Roma people. She had very positive things to say about the book but said that there had been a lot of criticism of the book from some sections of Roma scholars because the author's theory about the Roma origins and language were not very accurate.
Thanks for the review.

[Ruchira Paul]

Can you ask your friend for a recommendation of a more acceptable (to the Romas) source about the theory of the Roma /Gypsy origin?

[susette]

'Bury Me Standing' is not that great of a source on 'Roma' people's history. Please refer to the below

The below was extracted from:
www.indiastar.com/wallia2.htm

IndiaStar Review of Books


Bury Me Standing--
The Gypsies and Their Journey
by Isabel Fonseca
(New York: Vintage, 1996)
322 pages, $13

Reviewed by C. J. S. Wallia

Gypsies, the long-lost children of India, number about 12 million worldwide. In Europe, the 8 million Gypsies constitute its largest minority. Recent films like Tony Gatlif's Latcho Drom: A Musical History of the Gypsies from India to Spain (1994) and books like Isabel Fonseca's Bury Me Standing: The Gypsies and their Journey (1996) will help ensure that the Gypsies do not again disappear -- outside the world's consciousness.
Bury Me Standing -- the title comes from the Gypsy saying, "Bury me standing, I've been on my knees all my life"-- is a compassionate book about a marginalized and much-maligned people. Nonetheless, over the past seven centuries, the Gypsies have made many contributions to European folk music, dance, and lore. An outstanding example of these contribitions --Flameno-- highlights the Cannes award-winning Latcho Drom .
When Isabel Fonseca, an American journalist and former assistant editor of the Times Literary Supplement, set out to write this book in 1991, she "had in mind that the Gypsies were 'the New Jews of Eastern Europe.'" After four years of field work that included living with Gypsy families in many European countries and researching library documents, she concluded that the Gypsies "alongside with the Jews are ancient scapegoats."
Traditionally, Gypsies never kept any written records nor sustained an oral history. The research on their origin began with a systematic philological analysis of their language, Romani, which has been firmly established as a Sanskritic language. Words like dand, (tooth), mun, (mouth), lon, (salt), akha (eyes), khel (play) are identical with those in Punjabi spoken in northwest India. Fonseca does not comment on the obvious resemblance with Punjabi, presumably because of her unfamiliarity with it or any other modern Indian language. She is also puzzled by the Gypsy habit of shaking head side-to-side to signify yes. This distinctive gesture alone suffices to pinpoint their India origin -- rendering all linguistic evidence redundant! If confirmation were needed, it would be readily provided by the Gypsy music's use of the Indian ragas such as Bairavi, Mulkausa, and Kalyani as well as the bol (the rhythmic syllables -- tak, dhin, dha -- imitating drum beats).
Fonseca seems to think that the current scholarly consensus is that the Gypsies are from the Dom group of tribes, still extant in India, making their living as wandering musicians, smiths, metalworkers, scavengers, and basketmakers. They migrated first from northwest India to Persia in 950 A.D. at the invitation of Shah Behram Gur. As recorded by the contemporary Persian historian Hamza, the Shah "out of solicitude for his subjects, imported 12,000 musicians for their listening pleasure."
Fonseca errs in stating that the Gypsy designation for themsleves as Roma is derived from Dom, one of the outcaste tirbes in India. Roma is a variation of "ramante," a Punjabi word meaning moving, wandering. This etymology is cogently discussed in W.R. Rishi's book "ROMA: The Panjabi Emigrants in Europe, second edition" published in 1996 by Punjabi University, Patiala, Punjab, India. Rishi traces the origin of the Roma to the 500, 000 prisoners of war taken by Muhamad Ghaznvi in 1001 from the Punjab to Afghanistan and subjected to Islamic conversion by the sword. Many of them resisted by escaping westward to the Christian lands of Armenia and Greece. To this day, the Roma use the word Gajo, derived from Ghazi-- the Koranic title of infidel-killing Muslims-- as a disparaging term. The Roma are from the warrior castes of the Punjab.
The Roma appeared in Europe first in 1300 A.D., fleeing from forcible Islamic conversions by the Turks. In Europe, ironically, they were accused of being advance spies for the Turks, and persecuted again. They were also mistaken as Egyptians, whence the folklore origin of the term Gypsy. Fonseca apparently is unaware of yet another etymology: Punjab-say -- from Punjab, which was what the earliest immigrants to Persia replied when asked where they have come from. By the time, they reached Byzantium, the locals heard Punjab-say as Jabsay, Gypsy. The locals took Gypsy to mean from Egypt, a country they had heard of.
The history of the Roma in Europe, gleaned, for the most part, from court- and church-records and from rare academic publications, is a horror--Europe's heart of darkness. One of the examples Fonseca cites is the 1783 dissertation published by Heinrich Grellman of Gottingen University. In his book, Grellman describes an event of the previous year in Hont county, Hungary: "The case involved more than 150 Gypsies, forty-one of whom were tortured into confessions of cannibalism. Fifteen men were hanged, six broken on the wheel, two quartered, and eighteen women beheaded -- before an investigation ordered by the Hapsburg monarch Joseph II revealed that all of the supposed victims were still alive."
During World War II, the Nazis exterminated 1.5 million Gypsies. At the Nuremberg trials, the Nazis' lawyers argued that the killing of the Gypsies was justified since they had been punished as criminals, not as a race. There was no one to speak for the Gypsies, and the international tribunal accepted this as exonerating defense! Ah, humanity.
Although tyrants, bigots, and the misinformed have often stereotyped the Gypsies as congenital criminals, sociological studies show that the Gypsies commit crimes no more than others. A large-scale study cited by Fonseca: In Romania, which has the largest Gypsy population of any country, out of all criminal convictions that of the Gypsies total 11 percent. Their population in the country? Exactly 11 percent. (The Gypsies in Romania do not have equal access to the justice system. Their situation is worse than that of the Blacks and Hispanics in the U.S.A.)
In recent decades, a Gypsy intelligentsia has begun to emerge. Fonseca presents detailed profiles of several. Dr. Ian Hancock, an American Gypsy, and the author of The Pariah Syndrome, was instrumental in bringing about, in April 1994, the first-ever Congressional hearing in Washington, D.C., on the human-rights abuses of the Gypsies. After prolonged efforts, Hancock also succeeded in the Gypsy inclusion in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Gypsy inclusion had long been opposed by Elie Wiesel, the Nobel Peace Prize winner! It was only after Wiesel's resignation, writes Fonseca, herself an American Jew, that one Gypsy was allowed onto the museum's 65-member council. (The council comprised more than thirty Jews as well as Poles, Ukranians, and Russians among others but not a single Gypsy.)
Saip Jusuf is the author of one of the first Romani grammars and a principal leader in Skopje, Macedonia, which has the largest Gypsy settlement anywhere. Jusuf helped organize the first world Romany Congress in 1971 in London. The conference was financed in part by the Government of India, and at its urging the U.N. agreed first to recognize the Rom as a distinct ethnic group and several years later accorded voting rights to the International Romani Union.
In an interview with the author, Jusuf, having converted from Islam to his ancestral Hinduism, joyously displayed his new icon collection of Ganesha, Parvati, and Durga . Ramche Mustupha, a poet, showed his passport. Under "citizenship" it recorded Yugoslav; under "nationality," Hindu. The lost children of India, having found their ancestral land, are very proud of its ancient civilization -- the oldest continuous civilization in the world -- "Amaro Baro Thanh" (Romani for "our big land"). Fonseca observes: "Many of the young women, fed up with the baggy-bottomed Turkish trousers they were supposed to wear, have begun to wear saris."
Unlike other beleaguered and marginalized minorities, the Rom are not seeking a homeland of their own, a Romanistan, in or outside India. The Rom are resisting, as they always have, to maintain the freedom for a life-style of their choosing. "To allow this to the Gypsies," Vaclav Havel, in Prague, said, "is the litmus test of a civil society." However, Havel's is a lonely voice. All over Central and East Europe "Death to the Gypsies" graffiti can be observed. Since the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslavakia, twenty-eight Gypsies have been murdered.
Fonseca cites several specific cases of terrorism against the Gypsies during the 90's. "In February 1995, in Oberwart, Austria, a town seventy-five miles south of Vienna, four Gypsy men were murdered. A pipe bomb had been concealed behind a sign that said, in Gothic tombstone lettering, 'Gypsies go back to India'; the bomb exploded in their faces when they tried to take it down. The first response of the Austrian police was to search the victims' own settlement for weapons; 'Gypsies killed by own bomb,' the papers reported." Oberwart, Austria, is in Burgenland, where the Gypsies have been settled for three centuries.
The resurging repression of the Gypsies is Europe's continuing crime against humanity. At the Nazi trials in Nuremberg, there was no one to speak on behalf of the Gypsies. Now, the Gypsies have at least this eloquent book exposing Europe's recrudescing genocidal threats to them.

[Ruchira Paul]

Susette, thank you for another review of the book.

I notice that the errors in Fonseca's description of Gypsy origin are minor in the details of caste etc. not in the broad sense, in as much as Fonseca unequivocally places the Gypsies as travelers from North India - drawing linguistic similarities with present day dialects in Haryana.

It is also interesting that the Indian government did not want the "origin" issue played up too prominently for fear that mistreatement and discrimination against the Gypsies in Europe might some day result in a mass reverse exodus of European Gypsies back to India, a la the European Jews to Israel.

[Elatia Harris]

What a great discussion. I've had real trouble finding people who actually read this wonderful book -- making me think that the distaste for Gypsies among even intelligent people is so great that finding out about them by reading is as undesired as getting to know them personally. It's interesting to read a deeper account here than Fonseca was able to provide of Gypsy origins, but where her book excels is in her study of their will to maintain their otherness, of their longing to be included, too, and their feelings about those who will not include them -- even within the pale of fellow human beings. While clinging to their folkways, they live outside history with no clear sense of their own history -- Europe's eternal unlettered Others. One man Fonseca grew friendly with did not know what country he and the others in his camp lived in, only the name of the nearest-by city. It's not possible to read it without thinking hard about how you conceive of others who are and are not like you, how your least charitable and coldest-hearted assessments of them feed into the very behavior you most detest in them. This book is a deep contribution to literature about the meaning of tolerance -- but wonderfully written, and anything but preachy.

[Amit]

This reminded me of an excellent movie on gypsies that I saw many years ago - Latcho Drom by Tony Gatlif.

[Prasad]

Bury me standing, seems like a good read.

I would also recommend, "Witch of Portobello" by Paulo Coelho which is also a light read into gypsie life. I would call that fictional tale a 'gypsie-101' for beginners.

[Malashri Lal]

Thanks for pointing me in the direction of Ruchira's review of the book "Bury me Standing". The Kali link may be important, but let us also remember that many ancient cults use dark stone for godheads, and annoint them accordingly. Hence the Siladevata is dark in many traditional families, Jagannath in Puri is another dark god, and the dark Shiva ling has attributes of special power. Rajasthan often has statues of black, not blue, Krishna in marble. What I am suggesting is that the Roma and the Hindu groups, and many other people too may have naturally turned to pantheistic expressions in which the shining dark stone with a streak of colour makes for a prominent figure of "worship".
The connection between Roma and the Indian gypsies is also cultural and linguistic, so the area of enquiry will be fairly large. I recently read Kamala Markandaya's posthumous novel Bombay Tiger (2008). Look out for the gypsy woman there who bravely takes on a business tycoon in Bombay! Wonderful vignettes of woman power.

[Harish Thakur]

The work of Fonseca is yet another addition to the dismal history of Gypsies, a word so hated and spurned in Europe. However, it would be wrong to turn its importance down so far as it brings to light the current phase of Gyposide and inhuman treatment, a racial mettle, indeed....

[Eiluned Mathias]

I've almost finished this book and it has been a revelation to me. I had never really thought terribly hard about Gypsies, only managing to muster human to human compassion for the hundreds of thousands of refugees from the east of Europe. Fonseca explains so much, particularly with regard to the invisibility of Roma as an ethnic group and whilst it is important to understand where they may have come from originally, I'm not sure of that relevance to the rest of us. The history of an enslaved people under Vlad the Impaler in Romania may explain why some Gypsies behave in a stock predictable way in their dealings with Gadjoes just as American negroes did in the deep south of USA before the protest movements grew in the 50s and 60s.

The Gadjo majority do not seem to see Gypsies as human beings at all, at best only as some sort of romantic colour, or at worst a social nuisance. The only protest letter I have ever bothered to write to the BBC about a TV program involved a thoroughly improbable plot of 'Allo allo from the early 80s where, in a setting of Nazi occupied France in WW2, a group of colourful traveling Gypsies arrive in the village and the usual farce ensues. Rene says at one point "you mean I married a Gypo!". i could hardly believe my ears - wrote to protest that it was unlikely that the Nazi regime would have tolerated the Gypsy encampment, the Gypsies themselves would have probably been deported to Belsen for extermination and what would have been the public outcry if Rene had had caused instead to exclaim "you mean I married a Yid" or something equally obnoxious.

Needless to say, I did not even receive an acknowledgement for my letter from the BBC.

I'm quite sad to see that this thread was last visited nearly three years ago.

[edi winarto]

I really liked the short stories and novels. When did - when I will make a synopsis of Indonesian short stories by famous authors. please visit my web site at www.edi.winarto.com or url http:/edwin-blogspotnews.blogspot.com there talking about Indonesian culture and tourism