Bury Me Standing

by Isabel Fonseca

  After the first visit of the miners to Bucharest (they were to return in September of the next year, 1991), a rural Roma camp in Cuza Voda, near the Black Sea resort of Constanta, was ransacked and destroyed by a mob. The next month a Gypsy quarter was razed in Huedin, Transylvania. In October 1990, in Mihail Kogalniceanu, thirty-two Gypsy houses were destroyed by a mob of more than five hundred people: Tartars, Macedonians, and Romanians, groups who see themselves as ethnically distinct but united in their hatred of Gypsies, who here constituted a relatively small population that lived apart, in rude shacks on an open field with a dirt road drawn in a ring around it.

  In the spring of 1991, fire swept through several towns near Bucharest and farther south, down by the Bulgarian border. In June Transylvania was again ablaze when, in a town called Plaiesii de Sus, twenty-seven houses were razed by a crowd of three hundred people attacking the Romany quarter. Nearby, villagers lynched an innocent man in retaliation for a murder believed to have been committed by another Gypsy. The more attacks there were, the less people seemed to mind—and, worse, the less coverage they attracted, even in the newly freed Romanian press. This wasn’t just “compassion fatigue.” Arson and murder became an “understandable,” and acceptable, trend in a period of painful social transition. Doina Doru, until recently a reporter for România Libera—a newspaper that had been a brave voice in the time of revolution but which had since been subverted by more tenacious nationalist political forces—dismissed the endlessly unfolding “Gypsy story.” “How can we worry about the minority,” Doina asked me, “when the fate of the majority is so uncertain?” Doina was frustrated about the bowdlerization of her paper, about the shrinking role for people like herself in a Romania that had yet to realize the high hopes, the total belief, of 1989. This was a common riff and plea throughout the former communist bloc. But the cynicism, and the hypocrisy, in Romania seemed acute. While “dissident” journalists balked and whined about the fate of “the majority,” the state acted to keep the minority, including the Roma, alive in the public imagination.

  Gypsies were a useful distraction from other conflicts. And so the state-owned television explained each attack on settlements as the result of “the provocation of Gypsy thieves,” even where the Gypsies played no part in the tensions that cost them their houses, and sometimes their lives. Local authorities took their cue from Bucharest. In Transylvanian Tîrgu Mures, for example, the fighting between Hungarians and Romanians resulted mainly in the prosecution of Gypsies. The March 1990 attempt by local Hungarians to restore a four-hundred-year-old Magyar high school to its pre-Ceausescu Hungarian status was met with concerted opposition. Ethnic Romanians were bused into town, where they joined in an attack on the headquarters of the Hungarian Democratic Alliance, besieging some seventy members. When they were finally helped out of the building by the Romanian police, they were severely beaten—by “the entire delirious mob,” according to one of the trapped Hungarians, the playwright András Süto, who was permanently blinded in the attack.

  Of the thirty-one people who were investigated in Tîrgu Mures, five were Hungarians, two were Romanians, and twenty-four were Gypsies. (One of the Gypsies arrested, a man by the name of Arpad Toth, died in captivity. A day after he had spoken to a human-rights monitor from Geneva he was beaten in his cell, though the Romanian authorities claimed that the twenty-four-year-old had died of “natural causes.”) In addition, sixteen other Gypsies were convicted of offenses such as possession of weapons and disturbing the peace. They were tried under Decree 153, which does not allow appeal to a higher court, and which, when it was first published in 1970, was directed against “parasites of the socialist order.”

  The bulibasha, or traditional local leader, of the Roma of Tîrgu Mures, Transylvania, with his grandson and probable successor, 1992 (photo credits 4.1)

  Romania was inducted into the Council of Europe in 1993, a stepping-stone to full membership in the European Community, and one for which a sound human-rights record is supposedly the ticket of admission. The same year a government report stated that the attacks on Roma had “no ethnic connotations”; and a Romanian police report explained the violence as a response to “the horrible situation created by this ethnic minority.” There were no prosecutions. Investigations were grudging, and grindingly slow—except when the criminals were Gypsies, or when there was a chance that they might be.

  For a while things quietened down in Romania; but the torch moved on to Hungary and Bulgaria and even to Poland, with its tiny postwar Gypsy population. In Czechoslovakia, twenty-eight Gypsies had been killed in racial attacks since the Velvet Revolution which returned that country to democracy. The attitude of the whole region towards the Roma was expressed by Magdalena Babicka, a contestant in a 1993 Czech beauty pageant from the industrial city of Ústí nad Labem. Asked what she’d like to be when she grew up, Magdalena won an ovation for sharing her dream of becoming a public prosecutor—“so that I might cleanse our town of all the dark-skinned people.”

  But the painful transition from life under communism could not account for all the violence. Nor was it always spontaneous or the handiwork of mobs. In Italy in 1995 several Gypsy children were maimed in driveby bomb attacks. And in Oberwart, a town seventy-five miles south of Vienna, four Gypsy men were murdered. A pipe bomb had been concealed behind a sign that said, in Gothic tombstone lettering, “Gypsies go back to India”; the bomb exploded in their faces when they tried to take the sign down. The first response of the Austrian police was to search the victims’ own settlement for weapons; “Gypsies killed by own bomb,” the papers reported.

  Yet these incidents, however brutal, rarely roused the large numbers of eager participants at hand in Romania, where the momentum was soon to be regained. If only it could all be laid at the door of violent, blood-soaked Transylvania. But since the Romanian Revolution it was happening all over the country.

  You didn’t have to be Romanian to wonder: was there something about the Gypsies themselves that made them so wildly and universally unpopular? Apart from their shared identity as Gypsies, the victims of these attacks had little in common: they were from rich families and from poor ones; they were country folk and city-dwellers, criminals as well as obvious scapegoats; they were children, adults, and old people. None of the victims was a “traditional” nomadic Gypsy; most had been sedentary for centuries, and some were assimilated to the degree that they no longer knew Romani. Was it their reputation as thieves and cheats? But even an ethnic breakdown recently undertaken by the Ministry of the Interior attributed only 11 percent of crime in Romania—all of it petty crime—to the Gypsies, who constitute 11 percent of the population. So what was it about the Gypsies? And what was it about the Romanians?

  Romanians have, as the Romanian writer Norman Manea put it, a “sprightly latinity”; Bucharest is “a metropolis glittering with irony and elegance, where misery is disguised as paradox and sarcasm as bantering cordiality.” I recognized this among the witty, well-read Romanians I knew. (And “average” Romanians were literate, even literary, at least in the capital. In Bucharest, people routinely bought and sold the books of Emil Cioran, Mircea Eliade, and Eugene Ionesco from the same street tables that traded in the newly available newsprint pornography; it wasn’t unusual for one vendor to hawk tube socks, lighter fluid, salami, porn, and the collected works of Jean-Paul Sartre.) In 1946 Ionesco, the Romanian playwright, offered another still apposite description: “In Legionnaire, bourgeois, nationalist Romania I saw the demon of sadism and stubborn stupidity incarnate before me.” In 1951 the Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz published The Captive Mind, a truly seminal work; one critic called it “the most penetrating account of the temptations of total belief.” Milosz tells us what happens to people who attempt to adapt to a totalitarian regime—the corrosions and implosions of forced hypocrisy. He writes about a man of the Eastern bloc—an intellectual, as it happens: “All about him in the city streets he sees the frightening shadows of internal exiles, irreconcilable, n
on-participating, eroded by hatred.” This was the certain fate of the majority. “The Sacred Fire has not gone out,” Milosz wrote. “… [It represents] a rebirth of an already once-deceived hope.” After visits to village upon riven village, it struck me that the attacks represented, above all, continued life for a stillborn revolution (now referred to by many Romanians as “the coup”) in which, with the whole world watching, Bucharest had gone up in flames.

  But the frustration began long before 1989. Romanians themselves had been under foreign occupation for sixteen centuries—a fact which has been obscured by the brutality of the Ceausescus. Such a legacy put me inescapably (if portentously) in mind of a message that Primo Levi, as a prisoner at Auschwitz, hoped would “seep out” to free men: “Take care not to suffer in your own homes what is inflicted on us here.” This was the spectacle of the region in the still-early postcommunist days: the violence of violated men.

  Emilian of Bolintin Deal

  IN APRIL 1991, in Bolintin Deal, an unremarkable rural town about forty miles northwest of Bucharest, a twenty-three-year-old music student was murdered and, in retaliation, eighteen houses were burned to the ground in a single night. Three years later, apart from the murderer, a Gypsy, none of the assailants had been prosecuted. On the contrary, the mayor of this small town had become a local hero: he was un democrat nou, eloquent on the principle of majority rule, “the will of the people” and his duty to protect it, and the (ethnic) Romanians’ “right to self-determination,” by which he meant their right to decide the ethnic composition of their town.

  The villagers were unrepentant when I visited Bolintin Deal a few months after the attack. On the contrary, they were proud that their efforts had made the evening news and, better still, that the report had clearly inspired similar events across the country. The only people who were unhappy were the Gypsies, and even they sometimes tried to distance themselves from the Gypsy victims.

  Homeless after the event, Emilian Nicholae, an intense young Rom from Bolintin Deal, now stayed in Bucharest, sleeping every night on a different floor. I kept missing him, but I persisted: he alone had been working to revive press interest and to provoke some legal response to the Bolintin purge, which in the glare of fresh and more violent attacks had been more or less forgotten. But he’d heard that an American journalist had been sniffing around his hometown, and he found me. From then on Emilian would appear now and again, without warning, in my borrowed Bucharest apartment; I’d hear his huffing as he thumped up the stairs, hoisting himself along the banister (one of his legs was several inches shorter than the other). If we were lucky, Igor Antip, a common friend, would be there to translate from Romanian, a safer bet than my fledgling Romani. Emilian would come in, so somber that he looked rather menacing, and begin talking where he had left off last time, as I scrabbled for a pen that worked.

  Hugging his torso, he would lean against the wall and disgorge the catalogue of injustices that he had been filing away inside himself since his last visit. But he wasn’t self-pitying; he was furious. And he was too tense ever to sit or even to unfold his arms, though occasionally he’d pause to recover his breath. Not only lame but vaguely tubercular, Emilian always sounded winded; his voice was muffled by a rasp, and it came over as an expression of persecution rather than respiratory malfunction. His disabilities seemed to leave him no energy for anything but the grave essentials; perhaps they also made him especially sensitive to pain.

  He had worked until recently as a junk remover, but what really occupied him was the collecting of memories. Scores of old people had told him their experiences of the war, when some thirty-six thousand Romanian Gypsies—predominantly nomads—were deported to labor camps in Transdnistria, or over the Dniester River above Odessa in what is now Moldova.

  Bolintin Deal, Romania, 1992. These sisters from a wealthy Rom family had been living with cousins in the town for the year since their own house was destroyed by a mob. They didn’t go to school because they and their parents were afraid the girls would be attacked. (photo credits 4.2)

  Their stories were as vivid to Emilian as the sight of his family house in flames; and in his intelligent eyes they were firmly related. He had transcribed the accounts in longhand, on loose sheets. But that one night in Bolintin Deal, along with the twenty-six houses, ten years’ worth of testimonies had gone up in smoke. Some of these stories had come from members of his own family. They were nomadic Gypsies who had been forced to settle as a condition of their return from the camps—first in another, northern town, and then again in the 1950s in Bolintin Deal.

  Under Ceausescu and Gheorghiu-Dej before him, as under most communist regimes across the region, it was somehow imagined that the very existence of the Gypsy minority could be “solved” by dispersing them among reluctant white communities. From the official point of view, the practice seemed to work tolerably well, at least so long as people were afraid to show their resentment.

  Most foreign reporters have described the post-1989 purges of Gypsies as the expression of ancient ethnic hatred between ordinary people which had been temporarily suppressed by the communists. Wrong: in Bolintin, as in most other such villages, the purge may be seen as the inevitable consequence of communist policy. These were fake communities. Like all attempts to assimilate the Gypsies by force, resettlement had backfired.

  Emilian despaired at the loss of his files. As far as he knew, no one else had attempted this sort of documentation, and the old people were dying off. Worst of all, he was positive that many of the survivors he had coaxed into recounting painful memories would not again be willing to talk, not even his own grandparents. Some wouldn’t speak to him, after the burning of Bolintin, out of fear. Others wouldn’t speak to him because these crimes remained unrecognized and unredressed; they were silenced not by fear but by bitterness. It was hardly surprising that most Romanian Gypsies I met mourned Ceausescu, whom some even called Papa.

  Unusually for a Gypsy, and unusually for a Romanian, Emilian believed that even if they might never be heard, amid all the lies that were still common fare here, the testimonies of survivors had an intrinsic value, and that if only they could be preserved their version would prevail. As if he was interviewing himself, he brought an impressive documentary tone to his own account of the murder. And he brought detail: he might have been a crow on a telephone line, watching over the crime.

  “April 1991. It was nearly midnight: Mass was held late on Easter. When the service was over, the villagers walked home in the moonless night by lantern light. Some of the young people lingered in the square. Leaning on bikes, a few on the hoods of cars—Dacia sedans and Trabants. They stood around smoking and joking before following their parents home. By one o’clock the small piazza was cleared. Cristian Melinte, the music student, was the last to leave. He had trouble starting his car. When he finally pulled out onto the main road, the Bucharest-to-Bulgaria road, another young man flagged him down.

  “In the dark Cristian Melinte could not make out the three figures behind the shaded man. They were two boys and a girl. All but the girl were Gypsies. The young man who had stopped him stuck his head in the passenger window and smiled.” Emilian demonstrated. His theatrical power came from being able to talk about “the Gypsy” as a force, an abstraction, and one convincingly mysterious to himself as a storyteller. “The Gypsy greeted Cristian Melinte, who, he reminded him, had been in his brother’s class in grade school. Although the music student recognized the Gypsy, he became tense: he could smell the plum brandy on the Gypsy’s breath.” Emilian paused to raise his hands and elbows and then he lowered his fingers and wrists in a strange three-part modern-dance move that I couldn’t read. And then he explained: “The Gypsy held on to the half-open car window—with both hands, all ten fingers on the glass.” Of course Emilian cannot have known this; he was inventing a gesture which conveyed both menace and fear of falling down.

  “He was drunk. He asked for a ride. Cristian Melinte said no. He said the car wasn’t reliab
le that night, that he didn’t have enough gas, that he was already late getting home.” Emilian paused again, now speaking and posing meaningly, in the manner of a court lawyer presenting his final summation to the jury.

  “The girl, who began by saying she had been elsewhere, changed her story several times during the brief, unjuried trial. The testimony of the other two boys was rejected out of hand: they would, it was understood, defend another Gypsy, one of their own, whatever he might have done. All that was certain was that Cristian Melinte had been murdered, stabbed four times with a long, handmade knife.” Emilian carved an arc in the air with his fingers wrapped around an imaginary handle, and then he looked at his hand as if he could see the knife. “The handle and the blade were fashioned from the same piece of iron. One of the Gypsies is now in prison, beginning a sentence as long as he was old: twenty years.”

  Days after the murder of the music student, twenty-six houses in Bolintin Deal were destroyed or badly damaged, beginning the ripple of retaliation which was to gain momentum, rolling through neighboring villages and eventually to distant parts of the country. A month later in next-door Bolintin Vale, eleven houses were destroyed, and later the same week, just down the road in Ogrezeni, another fourteen. All the houses belonged to Gypsies. In each case, the Romanian attackers were described as having moved through the village in a single swath, a creature soon so familiar as to seem organic: a low life-form, the mob—but one carrying burning sticks, and chanting.

  In Bolintin Deal the mob had been methodical: the group had stopped and stood in a cluster like Christmas carolers outside each house, while the town electrician climbed the chimney and neatly clipped the roof cables so that an electrical fire would not catch and spread. Here, the Gypsies singled out were those who lived among the Romanians, as opposed to the greater number who kept to their own quarter, just outside the town line. This was an unspontaneous sort of purge, as if the murder of the music student had been a long-awaited spur.