Seventy years ago Czech and Slovak Roma embarked on a grim path to nearly complete annihilation. In the spring and summer of 1943, 4,500 Roma were shipped off to the so-called Gypsy camp in Auschwitz: one-third were from camps in Lety and Hodonin, in the south and southwest of the country, and two-thirds were taken from their homes. The fates of local Roma remain one of the least investigated chapters of the war, and one part of this story is completely unknown – that some Roma survived the Nazi attempt at extermination thanks to the help of “white people.”

THE TRAIN THAT LEFT

Even after decades 87-year-old Emilie Machalkova’s voice shakes and tears fill her eyes when she recalls those scenes. The spring sun was not yet very warm when one Monday afternoon she stood, a 16-year-old girl, at the railway station in Nesovice, a village 40 kilometers (25 miles) east of Brno. She, her parents, two brothers, grandmother, and 3-year-old cousin were waiting for a train to take them to the stables of the protectorate police in Masna Street in Brno, where they had been told to report. Nearly all their neighbors accompanied them to the station, Machalkova recalls: all her childhood friends and family friends came. Someone brought a traditional Czech pork dish, others bread. “All of us were crying a lot because we thought that we wouldn’t come back.”

They were right to be afraid. A few weeks earlier much of Machalkova’s extended family in Moravia had been summoned to Masna Street. Lugging a suitcase, her grandfather Pavel had left, along with three of her uncles, some cousins, and other relatives – all together 33 members of the large Holomek family, a known clan of Moravian Roma. Even though it was not until after the war that they found out the whole truth, at the time everyone suspected that Roma, just like Jews, were being sent to their deaths. “In ’42 they took away the entire Jewish Fischer family, who had an estate and a restaurant in Nesovice. We knew our time was coming too,” Machalkova says.

Last year Machalkova and her husband, Jan, celebrated their 50th anniversary in a comfortable apartment in Brno. On the walls and shelves is a flood of smiling photographs of their three daughters, son, grandchildren, and great grandchildren – reminders that thanks to the bravery of some, they were among the few protectorate Roma who escaped the extermination machine.

In March 1943 during the farewells at the Nesovice station, suddenly Josef Kilian, the town’s mayor, appeared. Pale and exhausted, he had just returned from Brno, where, he told the terrified family, he had vouched for them in the office of the Gestapo and had them “exempted from the transport,” – a status later inscribed on their protectorate identification cards. “Apparently for three days he negotiated at the Gestapo. He probably didn’t just negotiate, since he told us afterward that even Germans can be bribed,” Machalkova says. “When we asked him why he did it, he said, ‘I have to protect my citizens.’ ”

Although the mayor could not save the Fischer family, for the only Roma family in his city he took advantage of the existing legal instruments. According to documents of the Central Office of Reich Security, members of the police could exempt people from many categories from the list, including “Gypsy individuals who are socially adjusted.” Kilian convinced the Brno officials to do it in the case of the Holomeks, even though he put the whole city at risk in doing so, as afterward the Gestapo regularly checked on the family.

There are other stories like Machalkova’s, but first a little history is in order.

AGAINST ROAMING GYPSIES

Special laws against Gypsies started to spread across Europe as early as the Middle Ages (the first Czech one was promulgated in 1549). In the first third of the 20th century the “fight against the Gypsy tide,” as it was commonly called, was a firm part of the law of many states. “When Nazis came to power in Germany in 1933, they inherited a number of already existing anti-Gypsy laws,” historians Donald Kenrick and Grattan Puxon write in their 1995 book Gypsies under the Swastika.

In 1927 the parliament of Czechoslovakia passed the “law on roaming Gypsies,” requiring them to register and be fingerprinted and prohibiting them from entering certain areas. “This statutory regulation was among the most restrictive in Europe and in the 1930s it was given as a model at international criminal conferences,” historian Petr Lhotka says. Later, Czechoslovak officials would cite the law when returning Austrian and German Roma who fled to Czechoslovakia back to those countries. Furthermore, the decision to establish disciplinary labor camps for men who did not have “a proper way of life,” into which later entire Roma families would be herded, was made even before the German occupation in March 1939. Although this measure did not lead to the mass murder of Roma, it did prepare the ground for it.

Later, first in Germany and then in other countries, the Nazis broadened and toughened the existing laws. Along with Jews, in 1935 Roma were included in the Nuremberg Racial Laws, which later established so-called preventive detention, into which anyone considered “anti-social” or “whose conduct, even if not criminal, … makes clear a lack of desire to conform to society” could be put indefinitely.

People were sent from preventive detention for an indefinite time to concentration camps.

From the end of 1939 Roma could not migrate within the protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. Those who did so were sent to the disciplinary labor camps that had been established in Lety and Hodonin.

At the same time the Nazi persecution of the Roma was contrary to their ideology celebrating the Aryan race, to which Gypsies – with their Indian origins – belonged. Robert Ritter, the head of the Research Institute for Racial Hygiene, helped to fudge this issue. “Ritter claimed that he found only one-tenth of Roma, if not less, were pureblooded. The rest were mixed,” writes historian Guenter Lewy in The Nazi Persecution of the Gypsies.

HIMMLER’S DECISIONS

Until 1942 Roma were dying in concentration camps; Jewish ghettos in Poland, where the Nazis had moved them until the beginning of the war (Austrian Roma were put into the Lodz ghetto); or in the East, where the SS Einsatzgruppen murdered them along with Jews. Only in the fall of 1942 – half a year after the Wannsee Conference, where the decision was made to exterminate Europe’s Jews – did the Nazis reach a decision on “the final solution” to the “Gypsy question” as well.

“Who decided about the extermination of the gypsies along with the Jews has not been confirmed with certainty,” Kenrick and Puxon write. “The available evidence suggests that it was the personal decision of Himmler.” Gypsies did not interest Hitler, although he knew about the policy change and authorized it. There is not a single word about Roma in Mein Kampf and in all the 12 years of his rule he mentioned them publicly only twice. However, Himmler stood behind most of the steps concerning Roma, including the first plan to move them to the East, or to expand the murderous work of the Einsatzgruppen to the Roma.

In 1942, 250 Roma were sent to Auschwitz in 10 trainloads that carried mostly whites whom authorities deemed “anti-social.”

The first exclusively Roma mass transport to Auschwitz left Germany at the end of February 1943. Because a large Roma community lived on the territory of the protectorate, the protectorate offices were under pressure to get the transports running as soon as possible. As early as 8 March, more than 1,000 Roma had been sent to Auschwitz from Brno and its surroundings. Another 2,000 followed from Prague and Olomouc.

A shift had occurred. While in 1941, only individual Roma who had violated some law were sent to concentration camps, a year later it was the turn of whole families, even the law-abiding, “assimilated” ones.

That could be why some “whites” helped Roma when things started to get rough – they were their neighbors, classmates, and friends.

UNSUNG HEROES

We know little about those who helped Jews. One hundred and fourteen Czechs have been recognized as Righteous Among Nations, an honor bestowed by the Yad Vashem remembrance organization in Jerusalem to those who saved or helped Jews during the Holocaust. “I dare to say that there are tens, maybe hundreds of cases where those who helped Jews didn’t get any prize or recognition,” says historian Miroslava Ludvikova, author of Darovane Zivoty: Pribehy Ceskych a Moravskych Spravedlivych Mezi Narody (The Gift of Life: Stories of Czech and Moravian Righteous Among Nations).

Of course, Roma have no state to represent their interests as the Jews now have, but in the decades following the war, their situations in communist Czechoslovakia were similar: no one talked about their fate.

During this time the victims died out, as did their potential rescuers – and with them, their stories. “We won’t find it in the archives. The majority of Roma eyewitnesses didn’t survive and non-Roma eyewitnesses are dead,” says historian Michal Schuster of Brno’s Museum of Romani Culture.

Some stories were saved thanks to Ctibor Necas, a historian who found eyewitnesses and recorded their stories in the late 1980s. Among them was Vincenc Daniel, who fled from the Auschwitz transport and survived in the forests around Brno until the end of the war thanks solely to residents of surrounding villages who gave him sustenance and did not expose him. Many Roma musicians, among them Jozka Kubik, a legendary bandleader from the southeastern Hornacko region, managed to avoid the transport thanks to the persuasion of the little-known Moravia Ethnographic Association. The Brno Gestapo chief, an inspector Boda, saved other members of the Holomek family. First, he warned Tomas Holomek, the first of the local Roma with a university education, who hid with one of his university friends. Later, he saved six of the children of Tomas’ brother Stanislav from the transport. They survived the war hidden with friends and acquaintances.

Bozena Danielova, an 8-year-old prisoner of the Hodonin camp, escaped from the Auschwitz transport and was hidden until the end of the war by a non-Roma family in Olesnice, a town north of Brno. In their book, Kenrick and Puxon mention Barbara Richterova, who fled from the camp in Lety to Prague, where she got help from a “transport inspector who gave her a dress and a hat so she could hide her shaved head.” After a re-arrest she went through Auschwitz and other camps, one from which she managed to escape again and to hide with a man in Prague whom she later married.

Many secret heroes did not manage to change the unhappy fate of their Roma compatriots, but at least they tried to help them. For example, Bozena Valdova’s family hid for months with the knowledge and aid of unknown residents of the village of Lidecko in eastern Moravia but in the end someone exposed them.

HOUSES, HORSES, EQUIPMENT

Although we don’t know how often the persecuted Roma got such help, the numbers suggest it was rare. Of more than 6,000 protectorate Roma only one-tenth survived. In many places, Nazi plans were welcomed as a way to get rid of the Roma. For example, the municipal council of Svatoborice at Kyjova, a town southeast of Brno, addressed a letter to the government even before the German occupation calling for the need to “clean the roots of the nation from such parasites as the Roma.” (It is no surprise that it was from here that the ill-fated members of the Holomek family disappeared before someone could stand up for them, as happened later for their relatives.)

“It was the same as with the Jews; it was about property,” Schuster says. “People say they didn’t leave much behind, but that isn’t true – they had houses, crafts, or workshops. Horse traders had horses.” Archives show that the Roma’s neighbors either took their property directly or attained it through public auctions. For example, in March 1943 one city council announced the auction of belongings of “the Gypsy Tomas Daniel.” Six beehives with the bees were up for grabs along with a goat, a rabbit, a blacksmith’s anvil, and “home furnishings.” The owner was in Auschwitz at the time.

Some Roma witnessed the theft of their homes and belongings. “They hadn’t even taken us away yet and already they were robbing us,” recalls Antonia Angrova from Straznice, a town southeast of Brno.

Roma property, which unlike Jewish property was not reserved for Germans, was plundered mercilessly. Many Roma who survived the war were shocked to find that even their houses, inherited from their parents, had disappeared, stick by stick.

An overwhelming majority, around 5,500, of Czech and Moravian Roma ended up in Auschwitz. Most were transferred to the so-called Gypsy camp, which was special in allowing families to stay together. In that respect it was similar to the family camp of the Czech Jews. Historians are still investigating why the Nazis, in the middle of mass murder, decided to have a milder model in these two camps.

Kenrick and Puxon suggest it was an “experiment in how to handle other unclean races in the continuation of German expansion.” This experiment lost its point as the war’s end – and Soviet troops – drew near, and the inmates of these camps were quickly murdered.

Twenty thousand of the 23,000 European Roma who went through the Gypsy camp did not survive. Czech and Moravian Roma, after German and Austrian Roma, made up the second-largest group and on them the Nazi persecution fell with the most terrifying strength. “The majority of adults were killed along with entire families and clans, and with them their family traditions, customs, music, songs, and stories were lost,” notes Vlasta Kladivova in the book, The Last Stop: Auschwitz-Birkenau. “There was no one left to pass them on to.”

To the Stables and the Slaughterhouses

In March 1943 the officials of the German police and the protectorate gendarmes gathered more than 1,000 Roma from Brno and other places around Moravia in the stables of the gendarme in Brno’s Masna Street. The stables were located near the city slaughterhouses, to which the railroad led, and transports did not elicit much attention here. All the Roma had their hair cut off, which caused the women, who were proud of their long hair, to cry. Some eyewitnesses also spoke of the tearing out of gold teeth. Their documents and valuables were confiscated; because people suspected they may not return home, they had taken with them their jewelry, savings, cash, and checkbooks. They slept on piles of hay on the ground, freezing in unheated spaces with only minimal rations of food. For the overwhelming majority, who had lived in their own homes, this was a shock.

Later, they were moved to the Brno slaughterhouses, from where 1,038 Moravian Roma in 23 cattle cars were taken to Auschwitz. Czech-Moravian railroad, a protectorate railroad company, organized the transport, so we can assume that some Czech or Moravian drove the train as well as threw coal in the furnace of the train. Whoever he was, he left a chilling and terse report, unearthed in the archives by historian Michal Schuster, that the “transport and conferral of the Gypsies was carried out without a single fault.”

Source: TOL
Date: 01.10.2014