Jasmine Green
Week Seven – The Rise
of National Socialism
In our class discussion
of “degenerate art” and the fabrication of a “Jewish race” by the Nazi party, we
did not have time to discuss in detail the particular brand of persecution
leveled against Roma and Sinti peoples, otherwise known as Gypsies. Along with
members of the LGBTQ+ community, twins, people living with mental illnesses,
and members of the Catholic Church, Roma and Sinti people are among the
“forgotten victims” of the holocaust.[1]
According to Louise Ridley with the Huffington Post, “Romani gypsies were the
second-largest group of people killed on racial grounds... They were considered
outsiders and ‘racially impure’ by the Nazis and up to 1.5 million died in what
is also known as the Porajmos (‘mass
killing’ in Romani).” Ridley explains that this is a particularly important
conversation for our class and community to have today because “only in the 1970s did the West German Federal Parliament classify
their persecution as being racially motivated, and scholars largely ignored
their deaths until the 1980s.”
Photo from the Documentation and Cultural Centre of German
Sinti and Roma[2]
Who are the Roma &
Sinti?
The Modern History Sourcebook on Gypsies in the Holocaust,
produced by Fordham University – the Jesuit University of New York – explains
that “Gypsies, or the Roma [and Sinti] as they prefer to be called, are an
ethnic group which originated in India… which for unknown reasons took to a
wandering life-style in the late middle ages... Because they were strangers to
many of the people they moved among, strong prejudices grew up, and indeed
continue to this day. Although they were indisputably ‘Aryan’ according to the
Nazi racial typology, they were pursued relentlessly.”[3]
According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, estimates of the
number of Roma and Sinti living in Germany and Austria in 1938 range from 30,000–35,000,
with numbers in the surrounding occupied countries estimated at 942,000. “Many
Sinti and Roma traditionally worked as craftsmen (and craftswomen), such as
blacksmiths, cobblers, tinkers, horse dealers, and toolmakers. Others were
performers such as musicians, circus animal trainers, and dancers. By the
1920s, there was also a small, lower-middle class of shopkeepers and some civil
servants, such as Sinti employed in the German postal service. The numbers of
truly nomadic [Roman and Sinti] were on the decline in many places by the early
1900s, although so-called sedentary Gypsies often moved seasonally, depending
on their occupations.” [4]
Video
footage from a Romani Campsite in Slovenia in 1943[5]
The Porajmos & the 10
Stages of Genocide
“Zigeuner, the German
word for Gypsy, derives from a Greek root meaning ‘untouchable.’”[6] Gregory
Stanton is a world-renowned scholar on the history and reality of genocide, a
concept and vocabulary that did not exist in academic or political thought
until the Holocaust became widely visible. Stanton is accredited with coining
the term ‘genocide’ and identifying its eight steps, which he has since updated
to include ten.[7]
1. Classification: us v. them
2. Symbolization: names/symbols to classify ethnicity, race, religion, nationality,
etc.
3. Discrimination: powerless groups not given full civil rights and/or citizenship
4. Dehumanization: second-class citizenship such as through hate speech
5. Organization: troop mobilization on behalf of the state or terrorist group
6. Polarization: broadcasted propaganda
7. Preparation: the “Final Solution” is announced
8. Persecution: victims are identified and separated
9. Extermination: mass killing and the erasure of cultural history
10.
Denial: genocide is not over until it
is acknowledged
Ceija Stojka, Even Death is Afraid of Auschwitz[8]
Resistance
Ceija Stojka is a Porajmos/Holocaust survivor who spent her artistic
career depicting the experiences of Roma and Sinti persecution in Nazi Germany
and beyond. Anthropologist Carol
Silverman from the University of Oregon estimates that there are roughly12-14
million Roma and Sinti people around the world today.[9] Their
survival has forced the world to acknowledge legacies of violence we’ve long
silenced, to give a name to this level of racism and prejudice. The final stage
of genocide is denial: we have to face it.
[1]
Ridley, Louise. The holocaust’s forgotten
victims: The 5 million non-Jewish people killed by the Nazis. The
Huffington Post, 27 January 2015, https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/01/27/holocaust-non-jewish-victims_n_6555604.html.
Accessed 26 February 2019.
[2]
Deutscher Sinit und Roma. http://www.sintiundroma.de/en/centre/about-us.html.
Accessed 26 February 2019.
[3]
Modern History Sourcebook. Gypsies in the
Holocaust. Fordham University, 1997, https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/mod/gypsy-holo.asp.
Accessed 26 February 2019.
[4] United
States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Who
were the “Gypsies”? https://www.ushmm.org/learn/students/learning-materials-and-resources/sinti-and-roma-victims-of-the-nazi-era/who-were-the-gypsies.
Accessed 26 February 2019.
[5]
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. https://www.aol.com/video/view/romani-gypsy-campsite-in-slovenia-in-1943-silent/5533bd18e4b0280be0f225b5/.
Accessed 26 February 2019.
[6] United
States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Who
were the “Gypsies”? *see footnote 4 above*
[7]
Stanton, Gregory. Ten stages of genocide.
The Genocide Education Project, 2013, https://genocideeducation.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/ten_stages_of_genocide.pdf.
Accessed 26 February 2019.
[8] Ceija Stojka, ‘Even Death is
Afraid of Auschwitz,’ https://womensartblog.wordpress.com/2016/08/13/ceija-stojka-painter-of-the-roma-holocaust/.
[9] Silverman,
Carol. Professor confronts the
persecution faced by Roma people. University of Oregon, 16 December 2016, https://around.uoregon.edu/content/professor-confronts-persecution-faced-roma-people.
Accessed 26 February 2019.
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