Museum of Roma Culture director: Today's anti-Roma sentiment recalls interwar society

In the Czech Senate on 27 January, International Holocaust Remembrance Day, speeches were made by Senate chair Milan Štěch, the vice-chair of the Chamber of Deputies MP Jaroslava Jermanová (ANO movement), Auschwitz survivor Luděk Eliáš, and the director of the Museum of Roma Culture, Jana Horváthová. News server Romea.cz brings you Ms Horváthová’s speech in full translation below.   

Speech by Jana Horváthová to the Senate of the Czech Republic, 27 January 2014

Another year has passed, and we are once again commemorating the victims of racial persecution. The year 2013 has seen a transformation in this area here.

Anti-Romani sentiment has by now reached out to a broad spectrum of the public, including the intelligentsia. Romani people (or Gypsies) keep being discussed as a single prototype with common features.

So far this logical nonsense has not been given weight by any serious figures in society. Permit me, therefore, to engage in a brief historical reminiscence.

I am thinking of the relatively calm years of the First Czechoslovak Republic, when the threat of war was not yet on the horizon. The relationship of Czechoslovak society to Romani people was already crystal-clear at that time. 

The tone was set by the state and its institutions, and the public fused its own deep-seated stereotypes into a general sentiment that was transformed into open hysteria with the rise of Nazism. As we know, technology and times change, but people remain the same. 

Romani people’s mobile lives had bothered their neighbors since time immemorial and created conditions in which it was difficult to monitor the perpetration of crime. Consideration of the so-called "gypsy torment" were very topical immediately after the founding of the Czechoslovak Republic.  

While the level of democracy in the First Czechoslovak Republic remains inspirational in many respects to this day, when it comes to the question of Romani people, I believe we have fortunately made a great deal of qualitative progress since then, even though it is very difficult to maintain it. What happened during the 1920s here was not really about settling Romani people – there were not enough appropriate places for them to settle, as was written at the time, and there was not enough political will for it, as the Roma who were attempting to settle in Moravia discovered for themselves. 

Villages felt threatened by black settlers and did everything they could to prevent them from settling near them. Public opinion then played into the hands of a radical change of course.

In 1927, the Czechoslovak media repeatedly mentioned alleged sprees of violence being committed by "gypsy bands" in South Bohemia. A total of 158 Romani people were rounded up on suspicion of murder.   

Jaroslav Mayer, an attorney in Tábor, demonstrated that 153 of those detained were absolutely innocent of the charges, but it was no longer possible to hold back the antigypsy campaign, which a cascade of other newspapers joined. This offers us a parallel to our own recent past here, namely, the scandal in Břeclav, in which the fabricated story of Romani people attacking a local youth unleashed a wave of demonstrations.  

Two months after the incident with the allegedly murderous Gypsies in South Bohemia was stirred up, a national law about "wandering Gypsies" was approved. The purpose of the law was to protect society from Gypsies as criminal elements.  

The new legislation was intended to cover Romani people who lived itinerantly, but its result was to facilitate discrimination against all Roma. Most Romani people, whether settled or not, had to show they were the owners of a "Gypsy identification card."

The discussion of this law in the Czechoslovak Parliament was rather tempestuous – various arguments were made, such as these by Agrarian Party member Dr Karel Viškovský:  "The Gypsies are an element that negates civilization, an element that brings moral contamination to those around them, so false humanity or sentimentality about them is not in order, as just a handful of such people would threaten the security of an entire population; through this law we are giving the administration a weapon against them, and we do not intend for that weapon to go unused." 

Social Democrat Jaromír Nečas made the following counter-arguments:  "In recent days news has come to us that at the international music celebrations in Frankfurt, a gypsy band from the Myjava Hills won the contest and awakened sympathy for and interest in the Czechoslovak Republic… To call for the creation of disciplinary labor colonies for Gypsies, or to spark pogroms against Gypsies by describing the crimes of individual Gypsies would be irresponsible and unfair. The current state of the Gypsies is a natural consequence of the lives they have lived to date and of society’s contempt for Gypsies. Social outcasts have always lived in their own way."     

The attorney Jaroslav Mayer used the nom de plume of Jaroslav Maria to write several novels about the environment of the Czechoslovak justice system. In 1928 he published the novel Váhy a meč (The Scales and the Sword) which is loosely based on the case of his defending the South Bohemian Romani people.

The main heroine of this novel is named Sefa [Turýnová], a beautiful young Gypsy from a traveling band. When someone rapes her, she kills him in self-defense. 

Sefa, conditioned by her hard life to ignore her own needs, maintains a strict silence during the trial about the comprehensible, human motivations for her actions. She does this in order to keep a promise and to cover up the love affair she is having with a respected lawyer who would be disgraced if his relationship with a Gypsy woman were to be discovered.    

Some passages from the trial, as depicted in the novel, are written in a very realistic way and show us the light in which Romani people were viewed at the time. About the defendant, for example, we can read the following: "Turýnová is person who is rotten through and through, like any gypsy she is incapable of improvement… . The jury convicted her unanimously, and that is why I think those who are a constant threat to human society were shot. This is a real democracy defending the majority from the minority."   

When Sefa is sentenced to be hanged, her request for mercy is rejected by all of those speaking for the highest authorities with the following argumentation:  "The second principle we must follow in questions of clemency is the quality of the convicted person. … there is no health here, and what is most important, her moral decay is inborn, as part of her origins!… I agree now with the opinion of many very serious newspapers, that this is now about who is stronger – the gypsies, or the power of the state…."

The execution is performed, but despite this, the author portrays the Gypsy Sefa as the moral victor of the story. The novel is fiction, but it was inspired by reality. 

In reality the situation did not turn out well. The author of the book, JUDr. Mayer, was of Jewish origin, and just like most of our Romani people, he perished in Auschwitz. 

I am drawing on the press and other sources from that era for this information. After Munich, anti-Romani sentiment in Czechoslovakia continued to spread. 

Newspapers wrote the following headlines:  "Gypsies are next. The gypsies must be classified or disqualified" (Nový Večerník).

The village of Skochovice wrote the following to the district government in Poděbrady:  "Since today the psychological requirements exist to address matters in ways that could not be undertaken before… it is suggested that the solution in the matter of the gypsies be made more stringent." 

A district police commander in the town of Litomyšl said that he considered the Law on Gypsies from 1927 to be "the creation of humanists who know gypsies only from poetry or melancholy ditties and have forgotten that the gypsy is a swindler and an incorrigible criminal." He proposed a total ban on Romani travel, taking Romani children away from their parents, concentrating Roma in such conditions as to render them extinct, and sterilizing Romani women.  

The District Office in Klatovy proposed to the provincial authority that labor camps be created, that Romani children be taken away from their parents, and that Romani people be tattooed instead of issuing them gypsy identification cards. 

In those days my grandfather, Tomáš Holomek, was about to complete his law degree at Charles University in Prague. He was originally from an isolated Romani settlement situated between the village of Svatobořice and the town of Kyjov.    

The citizens of Svatobořice had been bothered by the Romani settlement since time immemorial, and on 5 February 1939 they sent a petition to Prime Minister Beran of the Second Czechoslovak Republic:  "Let the government solve the pressing gypsy question in this state. The effort… to make the gypsies into proper citizens has missed its mark without the slightest positive result… Much is being said on the radio and written in the daily papers about the fact that in our new state we must adapt ourselves to necessity. When it comes to the gypsy question, it is necessary above all to take immediate legal measures, different ones than just registering thumbprints in gypsy identification cards. If until now there has been a bad policy of humanitarianism, we must take another path. We too must not be blamed for wanting to cleanse the our small nation’s tribe of parasites such as the gypsies."     

That petition became a direct motion for the accelerated issuing of an edict to create disciplinary labor camps. The Second Republic government never managed to implement that proposal, however, as we were occupied by the Nazis before that could be accomplished. 

During the Protectorate, the same racially antigypsy edict was implemented here as in the neighboring German Reich, the literal wording of which was often taken up as well. This happened irrespective of whether the Czech public approved of the edict or not.  

However, it was evident that a significant part of the public accepted the removal of Romani people from the population with relief. The internment of entire Romani families in the newly-opened so-called gypsy camps at Lety by Písek and Hodonín by Kunštát in August 1942 was perceived as an effort to teach Gypsies to work, as can be seen in this example from the magazine Venkov (Countryside):  "The Czech south has been rid of an evil scourge by the census and subsequent assignment of gypsies into the labor process."      

In March 1943, when according to Himmler’s orders the mass transports of Romani people left the Protectorate for Auschwitz, the press commented on that as follows:  "Gypsies stopped, villages rid of Jews and gypsies" (Pondělní list); or, "After the Slovácko area was purged of Jews, municipalities are now being rid of the gypsy quarters that so encumbered many a small town and village. This week the gypsies are being relocated out of the region and the gypsy quarters are empty. The region is heaving a sign of relief, as petty theft and other offensiveness in the villages will now decrease." (Venkov) 

It is also necessary to admit that at the start of the 1940s in particular we can also find articles that notice positive aspects of Romani life:  "About civilized gypsies. In Moravian Slovakia they are respected citizens with their own authors, music and theater",  "Gypsies are orderly citizens", "Gypsy broods teaching their parents. Unusual interest among gypsies in reading and writing."  

Since time immemorial, the majority and Romani people have always differentiated themselves from one another – and yes, there are differences among people. Without the aid of their neighbors who successfully hid them, my grandfather, my father, and many other Romani people would never have survived the war.

Forgive me, please, if my words have spoiled the mood for some of you. I just wanted to draw attention to the force of a stereotype which is entrenched here and which might inadvertently create the conditions for other matters that are already consciously well-targeted.

Today’s grudges against Romani people are tremendously reminiscent of the interwar sentiments of this society. Please, let’s not forget about the lessons of the past or about the weak points that exist in any mature democracy.