(From RPP Reporter, June 1999)

When Brecht spoke of 'dark times' he described times in which wisdom and goodness have come fatally apart from each other, social conditions he likened to 'a flood in which we have all gone under'. For the Roma, in 1940s Europe, this flood brought victimization, enslavement, and genocide. For the survivors of the Nazi-orchestrated Holocaust (Baro Porrajmos), there were to be more dark times. The condition of uprootedness, a condition described by Hannah Arendt as one of 'having no place in the world, recognised and guaranteed by others', meant that the Roma became not only the 'forgotten victims' of this most ferocious of historical moments, but continued to be regarded as superfluous, as not belonging to the world at all. As Yehuda Bauer has written, "in sheer demonic cold-blooded brutality the tragedy of the Romanies is one of the most terrible indictments of the Nazis. The fact that their fate is hardly ever mentioned and that the mutilated Romani nation continues to be vilified and persecuted to this day puts all their host nations to shame."

When such catastrophe forces a chasm between the past and future, so that tradition alone cannot sustain a sense of continuity, historical narratives become vital in constituting a sense of cultural identity. The fragility of the histories of diasporic or disenfranchised communities contrasts starkly with the robust and well-resourced official national histories of established states. Challenges to 'official' national histories are confined to the 'semantics of history', to interpretations of key events and disputes about their meanings. In contrast, revisionist attacks on the histories of disenfranchised communities challenge their very legitimacy, cast doubt on the veracity of actual events. Efforts to historically legitimate the Romani Holocaust have often become entangled in a grotesque 'numbers game', as scholars have found themselves frequently compelled to contest the assertions of revisionists committed to downplaying the significance and extent of the Porrajmos. Below is an example of one such encounter. Translated from the Hungarian, the first article is a revisionist broadside by Dr. László Karsai, the second, a rebuttal written by Dr. János Bársony and Ágnes Daróczi. Both articles originally appeared in Népszabadság.

by Dr. László Karsai, Professor of History. Népszabadság, 17. Aug., 1998.

Hundreds in Budapest and Nagykanizsa commemorated the Gypsy victims of Nazism. This was the fourth year that official speakers neglected to mention the fact that there were no Hungarian Gypsies at all in Auschwitz in August 1944.

Aladár Horváth implied that what amounted to a sin of the non-Gypsy society lay in the fact that—according to him—there had been no thorough social historical work done about the Roma holocaust, no soul-searching or collective facing up to the past. János Bársony, on the second of August, in the TV programme A Hét (The Week), bearing the title minority researcher, claimed that in 1944, Gypsies were hated and persecuted in exactly the same manner as the Jews. According to János Bársony, in 1944 in Hungary Gypsies were forbidden to leave their place of abode, a prohibition which was soon followed by their massive deportation, as was the case of Jewish people. Last summer, János Bársony still liked to be known as a historian, and according to his own statement, had been conducting extensive research for decades on the Gypsy holocaust. Thus, he must be aware the fact that there was no order of any sort in Hungary in 1944 which forbade the Gypsies to leave their place of abode. Neither is it true that the Roma holocaust is terra incognita. In 1992 the Cserépfalvi Kiadó published my PhD dissertation under the title Cigánykérdés Magyarországon 1919–1945. Út a cigány holocausthoz (Gypsy Question in Hungary 1919–1945. Way to the Gypsy Holocaust). After nearly a decade of archival research, I assessed that the number of those Gypsies subjected to any form of persecution amounted to five thousand, of whom about one thousand were victims of the Gypsy holocaust. My conclusions were received with scepticism and even open hostility by some Gypsy intellectuals. On one occasion, following a lecture delivered by me at the University of Economics, Ágnes Daróczi went so far as to label me, in front of an audience of hundreds, as someone who finds excuses for the Neo-Nazis and 'Arrow-Crossers'. Since 1992, however, they have never tried to falsify the contents of my book with facts, data or documents. On the other hand, they 'invented' the night of the second and third of August for themselves.

The idea is good. It is possible to countenance that the seventy, or a hundred thousand, or who knows how many, victims of the Roma holocaust in Hungary are entitled to be (collectively) compensated. This year, Aladár Horváth was telling the tale of 'only' thirty thousand Hungarian Gypsy victims in Világgazdaság (World Economy), claiming that he had come across this datum in the works of German historians. Aladár Horváth failed to reveal the fact that the original source of the figure of twenty-eight thousand victims of the Hungarian Gypsy holocaust, which appears in the German and English Holocaust literature, is the Committee of the Persecuted of Nazism. In a private letter, nearly thirty years ago, one of the leaders of the CPN, on the basis of the files of those seeking compensation, which were kept in a safe of the General Valuetrading Bank, assessed the number of Gypsies deported from Hungary in 1944 at thirty-three thousand, and the survivors at five thousand. I spent months searching through these files (there were approximately eighty thousand people who submitted claims for compensation to the West German government between 1957 and 1961), but I found barely three hundred (three hundred, not thirty thousand) submissions from Gypsies.

The most important question, naturally, is not how many Gypsy victims of the holocaust there were in reality. In the second world war, the nazis 'succeeded' in deporting barely two hundred Danish Jews, and the overwhelming majority of them survived Theresienstadt. Despite this, in the international literature of the holocaust, the Danish holocaust is dealt with in a separate, significant chapter. It is, however, unscientific to handle the persecution of Gypsies in the Second World War as if it was the same matter as the Jewish disaster. This is not only because of the difference in scale. As opposed to what Aladár Horváth claimed this August, the Nazis did not deport hundreds of thousands of Gypsies to Auschwitz from the countries of Europe. The overwhelming majority of Gypsies in France, Belgium, etc. survived the world war undisturbed. According to assessments which seem reliable, the Nazis and their satellites killed certainly less than a hundred thousand European Gypsies between 1939 and 1945, whereas there were nearly six million victims of the Jewish holocaust. From Germany the mainly nomadic Gypsies of the rom and sippen tribes were deported to Auschwitz, but those of the sinte and lalleri tribes were not disturbed. SS 'Experts' usually spared the lives of 'pure-blooded' Gypsies, whereas those of mixed Gypsy and German blood were considered criminals and deported. After the 19th of March 1944, Nazis occupying Hungary were unconcerned with Hungarian Gypsies. It was only about a month after the 15th of October, 1944, when the Arrow-Cross people seized power, and exclusively in a few counties of Western Transdanubia, that a somewhat organized persecution of Gypsies began to take place. In these counties, however, there were only a few thousand Gypsies, and therefore it would have been a physical impossibility to deport tens of thousands of them. The crucial difference between the Gypsy and the Jewish holocaust lies exactly in the aim.

The leaders of the Nazi state wanted to kill all the Jewish people, but behind the persecution of Gypsies, at least some sort of mad logic, a lunatic rationality, was operating. Aladár Horváth and his friends refuse to face the fact that Gypsies were far less despised before 1945 than they are now in Hungary. There were no orders concerning Gypsies, no laws defined who counted as a Gypsy. When the Hungarian legislators were discussing the 'III. Race-Protecting Jewish Law' in 1941, Professor Orsós, the President of the medical chamber, suggested in the Upper House, that marriage between Hungarians and Gypsies should be also forbidden. Mr. Orsós was simply laughed at in the Upper House, and one of those who interrupted referred to the Indian, and therefore 'Aryan', origin of Gypsies. Up until the August of 1944, Gypsy men could fight alongside Hungarian soldiers. It was only after this date that separate Gypsy military labour-service companies were organized. Mainly those Gypsies, nomadic or settled, who had no permanent jobs were targeted for conscription into these units.

Using the witty comparison of Miklós Szabó, the Gypsy question was about as important a social, and political problem before 1945, as the Indian question in the United States is today. It became a Negro-question only after 1950. Only those can dare to equate antisemitism and anti-Gypsyism who try to forget the fact that antisemites usually envy Jewish people. I do not think, that there is any racist nowadays who would envy the residents of the Gypsy ghettos of the towns and villages on Borsod or Szabolcs. There is a clear political intention behind the assertion of imaginary Second World War sufferings. The intention is to generate a collective guilty conscience amongst the majority society, by taking advantage of the ignorance of the non-Gypsy media intellectuals, whose stomachs automatically churn when they hear the word 'holocaust'. And, somewhat more quietly, behind the scenes, it is possible to negotiate with the German and the Hungarian governments about which self-appointed Gypsy minority organizations or legal bodies should obtain more money by right of collective compensation.

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