Former Czech Foreign Minister Karel Schwarzenberg does not believe his father was involved at all in the establishment of the WWII-era camp at Lety by Písek. Radio Wave reports that Schwarzenberg made the statement in response to claims by Paul Polansky that Schwarzenberg’s father needed a cheap labor force in 1939 to clean up after a large blizzard and asked authorities to build a labor camp for that purpose.
„In December 1939, that entire region was affected by the biggest blizzard that locals had ever experienced. Karel Schwarzenberg, not the current one, but his father, owned 10 000 hectares of forest and a large portion of it was destroyed. It was a catastrophe for him. He needed a cheap labor force to process the wood as quickly as possible, otherwise he would have gone bankrupt. He asked the authorites to build the labor camp. However, he was far from the only person to take advantage of slave labor. In the archives, and in my interviews with survivors, I have discovered that Schwarzenberg also brought Jews from Mirovice, where the biggest Jewish community was, as slaves to Lety and did his best to save them by doing so. That was at the beginning of 1940. However, all of those people were professors, business people, lawyers, teachers, they didn’t know how to do manual labor. Schwarzenberg saw that it wasn’t going to work. They were all sent to Terezín and replaced with Gypsies, who knew how to do manual labor. They did not work for him only in the forest, but also in a nearby quarry, so from 1940 to December 1942, he exploited first a Jewish and then a Gypsy labor force on his land as slaves,“ Polansky said in an interview with Radio Wave on 30 December 2014.
Polansky referred to personal interviews he claims to have conducted with many forest workers or local farmers who allegedly saw the Jewish workers and spoke with them in the forest at the time. „Look, I was two years old then. I’d have to look at the documentation like anyone else. However, I do not believe it’s true,“ Radio Wave reports that Karel Schwarzenberg has now said in response to Polansky’s claims. „He claims to have spoken with my father’s former employees, but please, they had all long been in heaven by the time Polansky came to Bohemia. I would really like to know who pitched this to him,“ Schwarzenberg said, emphasizing that, „When I returned to the Czech Republic, I attempted to find all of the former employees. One gamekeeper was already bedridden and otherwise everyone else was dead. I would like to know who he actually spoke with, who this responsible employee was.“ Continue reading Former Czech Foreign Minister does not believe his father was involved with the Lety camp
Category Archives: Geschichte des Antiziganismus
Workshop „Antiziganismus – alltäglicher Rassismus Geschichte und Gegenwart in Deutschland und Europa
Rassismus gegenüber Sinti und Roma: Die Rückkehr der Feindbilder
Zuwandernde Sinti und Roma sind in Deutschland nicht willkommen. Der Berliner Historiker Wolfgang Benz erläutert in einem Artikel für den Tagesspiegel, was hinter den anhaltenden Ressentiments steckt.
Den Sinti und Roma, der größten Minderheit in Europa, begegnet die Mehrheit der Deutschen öffentlich mit unreflektierter Ablehnung – und privat mit Hass. Wie kürzlich eine Studie der Antidiskriminierungsstelle des Bundes gezeigt hat, geht die Ablehnung der Sinti und Roma zudem mit stereotypen Vorstellungen über „die Zigeuner“ einher. Traditionell sind das die Klischees vom Nomadenleben, dem Freiheitsdurst, der unbändigen Musikalität und dem Drang, zu stehlen.
Aktuell werden zuwandernden Roma Ängste vor Armutszuwanderung entgegengebracht, mit der eine Ausplünderung der Sozialsysteme verbunden sei. Continue reading Rassismus gegenüber Sinti und Roma: Die Rückkehr der Feindbilder
Czech Roma Under the Swastika
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.” Continue reading Czech Roma Under the Swastika
Vienna names square after Romani celebrity
Earlier this month a square in the Viennese quarter of Neubau was named after one of its celebrated, recently deceased residents, Ceija Stojka. A Romani woman, Ms Stojka survived three concentration camps, lived a travelling lifestyle for years after the war, and made her living as a carpet seller.
At the end of the 1980s she published her autobiography, called We Live in Seclusion – Memories of a Romni, which was published in Czech translation 20 years later by the Romano daniben association in collaboration with the Argo publishing house. In time she became a famous author and painter and was eventually granted an honorary professorship by a government minister.
As part of the „ordination“ of the square, a celebration was held in front of the chruch where Ms Stojka had regularly attended mass. Her relatives read from her books and played Romani songs, while the children in attendance were able to make masks if they felt like it. Continue reading Vienna names square after Romani celebrity
Roma woman flees racial attacks in Czech Republic, becomes UK police officer
In Czech society, stereotypes usually put ethnic Roma on the wrong side of the law. In Great Britain, Romani people are offered unsuspected opportunities, and so it is that Dana Ghosh, a Romani woman from the Czech Republic, is in her police uniform for the first time today.
In the English town of Peterborough, Ghosh is expected to mainly serve the large Romani community. Czech Radio reports that her ethnic origin was not important at all when she applied for the prestigious job.
„I liked the idea. I thought about it a lot and ultimately I decided to go for it. The whole process lasted about five months. I learned I got the job a couple of weeks ago. I’m enthusiastic about it,“ says Ghosh, who is originally from the town of Opava.
Ghosh, who is now a mother of two, left the Czech Republic with her parents and siblings because of racial attacks in 1998 and relocated to Britain. Now the delicate, elegant young woman in her third year of college has become a community police officer.
„I didn’t say I was a Romani woman during the interview, but I remembered that I speak Romani fluently,“ Ghosh says. Reportedly no one even asked about her ethnic origin.
„I can imagine being useful in that field. I definitely will do my best to help the community and people here as much as possible. Probably the most troubled area, in my opinion, will be Pakistani and Romani relations,“ she says.
Another Peterborough police officer of Romani origin from the Czech Republic, a man, is already working in that area. „I am looking forward to having a colleague here who will be able to shoulder part of my obligations and my work. I will support her however I can so that everyone in the community knows who she is. I believe she really has great potential to change the way the community runs, for people to trust her,“ says officer Petr Torák (pictured above).
„For Dana this is really a chance to become a role model, not just for the Romani community, but generally for the members of all national minorities. When a police officer is directly a member of the community she serves, there’s no language barrier, that’s a big victory,“ says experienced police officer Jim Davies, who also chairs the Gypsy Roma Traveller Police Association.
Source: Romea.cz
Date: 29.09.2014
Roma Holocaust Survivor attacked by French National Police
In the afternoon of 23 September 2014, the local French Police of Arpajon, a little municipality of 10.000 habitants in the region of Ile de France, decided to have a search in the property of Raymond Gureme, a French Roma Holocaust Survivor 89 years old. When the police started the search in the house, Raymond asked the police to show the search warrant, but the police answered “… we are not in the USA here, we don’t need it!”, according to a testimony present during the search. Afterwards, the police forced to enter the house but Raymond opposed it and he was badly beaten by a policeman who is about 30 years old. Two of Raymond Gureme’s sons tried to defend him and were arrested by the police for „rebellion“ and „death threats“. Raymond has marks all over his legs and arms and he was visited by a doctor in order to make a formal complaint. When Raymond’s relatives asked in the Police stations the reasons behind the search, they didn’t received any clear answers. At the moment Raymond has to face his aggressors in a tribunal were his sons are judged. Continue reading Roma Holocaust Survivor attacked by French National Police
Ian Hancock: 500 000 Romani Holocaust victims? There could have been twice that
The repeated number of 500 000 Romani deaths in the Porrajmos is becoming the conventional, accepted total. But we do not know this for a fact. The documentation has not been completely located nor analyzed. We must guard against this figure becoming the accepted total, appearing in the (small number of) books that even acknowledge the genocide of our people. Is it a move to diminish the extent of the mass murder, the samudaripen, in the eyes of the world? If this low estimate can be shown to be true, this is surely a cause for gladness. But the number, in reality, was in fact much higher.
Nobel prize-winner Günther Grass asked: “Were the fates of the Jews and of the Roma and Sinti identical? We can only estimate the number, many more than one million Roma and Sinti were annihilated. But that is not the point. For me the decisive issue is the will to destroy, which was practiced in different ways.”
The question of the numbers of Romanies who were killed in the Holocaust is a vexed one. Given the nature of their mode of life, no reliable estimate of the pre-war European Romani population exists. Similarly, the circumstances of their dispatch at the hands of the Nazis make this a question which can never be fully answered. This was dealt with in some detail in Hancock (1988b) [„Uniqueness, Gypsies and Jews“, in Yehuda Bauer et al., Remembering for the future: Jews and Christians during and after the Holocaust], but relies here on König’s statement that Continue reading Ian Hancock: 500 000 Romani Holocaust victims? There could have been twice that
Ian Hancock: 500 000 Romani Holocaust victims? There could have been twice that
The repeated number of 500 000 Romani deaths in the Porrajmos is becoming the conventional, accepted total. But we do not know this for a fact. The documentation has not been completely located nor analyzed. We must guard against this figure becoming the accepted total, appearing in the (small number of) books that even acknowledge the genocide of our people. Is it a move to diminish the extent of the mass murder, the samudaripen, in the eyes of the world? If this low estimate can be shown to be true, this is surely a cause for gladness. But the number, in reality, was in fact much higher.
Nobel prize-winner Günther Grass asked: “Were the fates of the Jews and of the Roma and Sinti identical? We can only estimate the number, many more than one million Roma and Sinti were annihilated. But that is not the point. For me the decisive issue is the will to destroy, which was practiced in different ways.”
The question of the numbers of Romanies who were killed in the Holocaust is a vexed one. Given the nature of their mode of life, no reliable estimate of the pre-war European Romani population exists. Similarly, the circumstances of their dispatch at the hands of the Nazis make this a question which can never be fully answered. This was dealt with in some detail in Hancock (1988b) [„Uniqueness, Gypsies and Jews“, in Yehuda Bauer et al., Remembering for the future: Jews and Christians during and after the Holocaust], but relies here on König’s statement that Continue reading Ian Hancock: 500 000 Romani Holocaust victims? There could have been twice that
Roma in Ungarn: Kein Interesse für die Opfer
Fünf Jahre nach der rechtsextremistischen Mordserie
Im August 2009 wurden in Ungarn mehrere Rechtsterroristen gefasst: Sie hatten sechs willkürlich ausgewählte Roma erschossen und 55 Menschen verletzt, ebenfalls fast alle Roma. Die Mordserie ist bis heute nur ansatzweise aufgearbeitet.
„Schlaft, es ist nur der Wind!“, sagt die Mutter zu ihren Kindern. Doch der Junge hört sie kommen.
„Sie sind da“, schreit der Junge. „Raus, raus!“ Sie laufen aus dem Haus, direkt vor die Schrotflinten der heimtückischen Mörder, die im Dunkel der Nacht lauern.
So passiert es in der vorletzten Szene des Filmes „Nur der Wind“ des ungarischen Regisseurs Bence Fliegauf. Der international preisgekrönte Spielfilm erzählt die fiktive Geschichte einer Roma-Familie, die von rassistischen Mördern erschossen wird. Sie basiert auf wahren Ereignissen. In den Jahren 2008/2009 ermordeten rechtsextreme Terroristen in Ungarn bei Anschlägen sechs Roma, darunter einen vierjährigen Jungen, und verletzten 55 Menschen, ebenfalls fast alle Roma, zum Teil lebensgefährlich. Den letzten Mordanschlag verübten sie am 3. August 2009, drei Wochen später wurden sie gefasst: vier Männer mittleren Alters mit einschlägiger rechtsextremer Vergangenheit.
Heute, fünf Jahre später, ist die Geschichte dieser Mordserie in Ungarn nur ansatzweise aufgearbeitet: Zwar wurden drei Täter vergangenes Jahr zu lebenslänglichen Haftstrafen verurteilt, ein Komplize zu 13 Jahren, jedoch steht ein langes Berufungsverfahren bevor. Zum anderen spielten ungarische Geheimdienste während der Romamordserie, ähnlich wie bei den NSU-Morden, eine zwiespältige Rolle: So etwa gaben sie während der Mordserie wichtige Erkenntnisse über die Täter nicht an die Ermittler weiter. Die genauen Umstände werden derzeit untersucht. Außerdem fahnden Ermittler noch nach mutmaßlichen Mittätern und Helfershelfern. Vor allem aber: Die meisten überlebenden Opfer und Angehörigen der Mordserie leben in tiefster Armut – eine Folge der Anschläge, aber auch des öffentlichen Desinteresses an den Opfern.
Erinnerungen eines Anschlagopfers
Krisztián Rontó schaut aus dem Fenster seines Wohnzimmers. Der junge Mann zeigt auf den Tatort. Da drüben, auf der anderen Seite des Flusses, stand der Schütze, 70 Meter entfernt, versteckt zwischen Büschen:
„Der Anschlag war am 15. Dezember 2008, es regnete und war schon dunkel, es passierte so gegen vier, halb fünf. Ich ging nach draußen, um Holz zu zersägen. Da kam der erste Schuss. Das Projektil schlug in die Mauer ein. Ich dachte, jemand spielt mit Böllern. Ich ging auf die Straße, um nachzuschauen, sah aber nichts. Dann nahm ich das Holz auf den Arm und wollte ins Haus gehen. Als ich vor der Tür stand, kam der zweite Schuss. Auch da dachte ich, es ist ein Böller, diesmal, dass ich auf ihn getreten sei, denn ich hatte ein Gefühl im linken Bein, als ob ich einen Stromschlag bekommen hätte. Plötzlich spürte ich etwas Heißes in der Beckengegend. Blut floss an mir herunter. Dann verlor ich das Bewusstsein und brach zusammen. Ich wachte erst wieder auf der Intensivstation auf.“
Krisztián Rontó, 25 Jahre alt, schmal, hoch aufgeschossen, dunkelblondes Haar, wohnt in dem nordostungarischen Dorf Alsózsolca. Er wirkt völlig arglos und noch fast jungenhaft. Rontó hat die 8. Klasse abgeschlossen und ein paar Jahre lang auf Baustellen gejobbt. Drei Monate vor dem Mordanschlag hatte er eine spezielle Berufsschulausbildung für Roma-Jugendliche in der nahegelegenen Großstadt Miskolc begonnen – er träumte davon, die neunte und zehnte Klasse zu schaffen und Malermeister zu werden. Doch die Mörder zerstörten seinen Traum: Nach dem Anschlag kämpften die Ärzte tagelang um sein Leben, es dauerte Monate, bis er wieder normal essen und laufen konnte.
Länger andauernde körperliche Arbeit kann Krisztián Rontó nicht mehr verrichten und konnte deshalb auch die Berufsausbildung nicht beenden.
„Meine Harnblase, mehrere Adern und inneres Gewebe waren verletzt, mein Steißbein war zersplittert. Das Projektil war durch mich hindurchgegangen und hatte ein vier Zentimeter großes Loch hinterlassen. Innen war alles zerfetzt. Mein linkes Bein spüre ich nicht mehr, weil durch die Schussverletzung mehrere Nervenstränge zerstört wurden. Im Oberschenkel spüre ich noch etwas, aber an der Wade und Fußsohle nichts mehr. Als ich aus dem Krankenhaus kam, sagte der Arzt, dass der Zustand meines Beines sich in fünf bis zehn Jahren verschlechtern werde, ich würde Schmerzen haben, schwerer gehen und vielleicht in einen Rollstuhl kommen. Gott sei Dank ist es noch nicht so schlimm. Aber wenn ich länger laufe, dann schwillt das Bein an, im Oberschenkel spüre ich Stiche, und manchmal bekomme ich Krämpfe. Continue reading Roma in Ungarn: Kein Interesse für die Opfer