Bury Me Standing

by Isabel Fonseca

  The first Gypsies in the West always traveled with safe-conducts, the ur-passports which were common in the Middle Ages and which, miraculously, were issued to the Gypsies by Sigismund, King of Hungary (1368–1437). It was the official seal that allowed the Gypsies to pass, and, as the story played for fifty years, to pass themselves off as pilgrims (alms-seeking pilgrims, of course) on a seven-year penitential sojourn out of Little Egypt.

  They didn’t actually dip themselves in tea, but they were performers by vocation and by necessity, and of course the act had continually to be revised and updated. A few decades after their arrival in Western Europe—perhaps the only honeymoon the Gypsies have ever had—pilgrimages went out of fashion. By the late sixteenth century, papal briefs had the wallpaper appeal of deutschemarks in the late 1920s; Luther’s “Reformed” church was attracting hordes of Catholics and Greek Orthodox; and (bad luck for beggars) the Franciscan idealization of poverty was now a gilded memory. It was the Protestant and especially the Calvinist churches that lobbied hard, not only against alms-giving but against Gypsies themselves. Martin Luther, in the preface to a 1528 edition of the Liber Vagatorum, warned against the knavery of such vagrants and gave the nod to institutionalized repression. For a while in the postpilgrim era, traveling Gypsies were more likely to appear as themselves, as itinerant performers, craftsmen, and traders. This did not endear them to local people, and especially not to local craftsmen and traders, whose guilds, or unions, were more effective than any police in moving the competition along.

  A German placard warning off Gypsies, circa 1715. The inscription reads: “Punishment for … rogues and Gypsies …” (photo credits 6.3)

  The more exotic Gypsies appear to be, the more “genuine” they are considered and, paradoxically, the more acceptable they become (in the local imagination, if not in the local pub). Whoever best fits the stereotype wins. Gypsies wearing their traditional clothes—or costumes—are “safely” in the realm of folklore, and it is the business of folklore to domesticate, or defang, the strange. Gypsies who have abandoned their traditional dress are no longer so good to look at; accordingly, they are not recognized as a tribe but as a nuisance. At the same time, fashion has prettily appropriated the stereotypes: from the grand nineteenth-century costume balls of England and France, where ladies turned out as Italian contadinas, Turkish concubines, and Gypsies, to “the Gypsy look” as introduced by Yves Saint Laurent in the sixties. Once you can wear them, the strangers at the edge of town cease to seem so scary.

  From the Gypsy point of view, exoticism has had its uses. At least until the age of mass travel, people paid more for performances by strangely dressed people from some faraway place. And it was their Indian origin which formed the basis of their successful demand for special ethnic status within the United Nations. Above all, foreignness keeps people at an acceptable distance. Even John Nickels, the American and relatively rich Gypsy who runs the amusement arcade in Wildwood, New Jersey, kept his sons out of school for this reason: he was afraid they’d mix with what he called “American girls,” maybe even marry out, a threat, over time, to the survival of Gypsies.

  Foreignness has of course more often boded expulsion, though authorities have not always felt that they needed such a pretext. When it became clear in sixteenth-century England that many of these Egyptians were in fact native born, a new order “for avoiding all Doubts and Ambiguities” was introduced; and the death penalty (which remained in place from 1562 until 1783) was extended not only to those “in any company or Fellowship of Vagabonds, commonly called or calling themselves Egyptians” but now also to those “counterfeiting, transforming or disguising themselves by their Apparel, Speech or other Behaviour.” The lucky ones were counted among the rogues and “Sturdy Beggars,” who were “to be grievously whipped, burnt through the gristle of the right Ear with a hot Iron of the compass of an Inch about.” And soon the death penalty expanded again, to cover “those who are or shall become of the fellowship or company of Egyptians” (my emphasis).

  The conundrum is that their survival has always required adaptation (inconveniently for their advocates, this does involve deception) and the continuous rejigging of their “ethnic” identity. Most Roma will have several, and often simultaneous, professions in the course of their lives; from the Gypsy point of view, it is neither odd nor inconsistent to be both an MP and a used-car dealer. If they have been partly responsible for their ambiguous and sometimes frightening image, it is because they have not wished to be merely the victims of that image. I think it was with admiration (albeit with regrettable timing—the year was 1943) that the Gypsiologist R. A. S. Macfie wrote in the Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society: “Ready as Gypsies are to change their religion and folklore and add new words to their vocabulary, the tricks by which they live have never altered.”

  Since the war, in the former Eastern bloc, the forced assimilation of Gypsies has been more insidious, such as the practice (particularly prevalent in eastern Slovakia) of sterilizing women during hospital births and very often without their knowledge. Less underhand measures also continued, including the confiscation of Travelers’ children by Christian charities; this was common in Switzerland until 1973.

  And, always, there is no mercy for those Roma who protest. As recently as the 1980s in Poland, for example, Gypsies who had failed to capitulate to the settlement laws instigated in 1964 were finally expelled from the country and stripped of their citizenship. A similar demotion befell Gypsies who were deported from Germany in the late 1970s and then rejected by their native Yugoslavia. Busloads of such people have zigzagged around Europe for a decade. The postwar designation of “stateless person” (given to displaced Gypsies who had survived the camps) was at the time a convenient way of disowning them; they were shunted from office to office and from country to country. Nowadays, statelessness brings guaranteed protection under the Geneva Convention. And Gypsies no longer qualify: they are called Romanians, Bulgarians, etc., even though they are not recognized as such in those countries.

  Every state in Europe has engaged in grandiloquent crusades against the Gypsies. But in sheer volume of anti-Gypsy legislation, the Holy Roman Empire—the complex of European territories founded by Charlemagne but always symbolized by and identified with the German crown—matched the rest of Europe taken together. Germany has always been in the van.

  SEVEN

  The Devouring

  EVERY PERSON IS part Judas, part Christ,” a tall, bearded Rom from Estonia told a Polish television crew, glowing in their bright flare lights. “Only luck decides him.” He was answering a question about why he thought the Nazis had attempted to annihilate the Gypsies.

  It was past midnight, and the crew was filming inside the death camp of Birkenau, fifty years to the night after the last of some twenty-one thousand Gypsies at Auschwitz were murdered. For the first time ever, Gypsies had gathered from all over Europe—dozens of busloads mainly from the Eastern bloc countries—to commemorate their murdered kin. Hundreds of people were staying up in an all-night vigil inside the camp, and apart from a few impromptu, single-voiced dirges they neither sang nor played music; they just sat unceremoniously together, comfortable in tracksuits and shorts and casual print shirts.

  The next day, in no-degree heat, there were hours of formal tributes; these were also unprecedented. The Polish prime minister, Waldemar Pawlak, spoke, as did the Israeli and German ambassadors. Letters from Václav Havel and Lech Walesa and the Pope were read out. Rajko Djuric, the Rom poet and president of the International Romani Union, made a passionate call for recognition. The Shero Rom, or head Gypsy of the Polish Roma, gave a lyrical speech in a typically Rom ululation. One can state unironically that his appearance alone attested to the significance of the occasion: he was decked out in a shiny black shirt, purple leather shoes, straw Stetson, and, resting on his enormous belly like the glistening catch of the day, a fat tie of woven pearls. Later, in the modern cathedral of the town of Auschwitz (which inescapably resembl
es a vast brick-and-concrete crematorium), the red-robed cardinal of Kraków conducted a full incense-swinging, three-hour Mass in honor of the Gypsy victims. A Rom priest read the liturgy in Romani and an angelic choir of Roma children sang down from the gallery. Amazingly for a scorching Wednesday afternoon, and for a Mass with a Gypsy theme, the place was packed, mainly with Poles.

  At around two in the morning on the night of the camp vigil, I began the long trek into Oswiecim, or Auschwitz town, to the hotel. I walked and walked along the seemingly endless perimeter of the camp towards the main road. Coming up at fifteen-foot intervals, the concrete stanchions marked the boundaries; they were still joined by barbed wire, their crooked tips like periscopes turned on the camp. Suddenly I was beyond the light of the candles, the torches, and television crews. But it probably wasn’t the dark that sent me jogging back to the Gypsies and their buses. It was the barking dogs; it was Auschwitz—Auschwitz by night. Back at the scene of the vigil, I found a friend in Karpio, a large and somber Polish Rom who gave me a lift to my hotel. He told me that his grandmother and grandfather were killed in the camp and shrugged in convincing indifference when I asked him how he felt about such a commemoration. Karpio’s vehemence was reserved for the Sinti—the German Gypsies—who had refused to join the others in the camp and had haughtily arranged for their own mini-ceremony, by invitation only, inside the German consulate in Kraków. “Fascists,” Karpio called them.

  That night I held my own involuntary vigil. The Hotel Glob was built over the main train station and all through the night the building shook to the rattled screams and vibrating honks of the night trains. Even the timetable never lets you forget that you are in Auschwitz. I lay on top of the scratchy narrow bed in my wagon-lit, wondering about the Estonian Rom’s words: “Only luck decides.”

  Baxt, or luck, could also be translated as destiny, or fate. By chance, two days later, I flew across Poland with the Rom poet Rajko Djuric, who was living in Berlin, in exile from his native Belgrade. As the LOT stewardess passed out chocolate bars at six in the morning, we talked about the Old Testament and the Jewish sense of history, and I asked him about Romany baxt.

  “Baxt,” Rajko said, raising his eyebrows and lowering his eyes, “is the occupying idea among Roma on this earth.”

  It means more than devel, or God, and more than beng, the devil. The idea of baxt among Roma could be low—literally gambling in casinos. Or it could be a woman. Certainly one’s children could “be” one’s baxt, Rajko said; indeed, it was influenced by many things: how well one kept traditions such as respecting the mule, or spirits of the dead, and avoided uncleanness of all kinds. (“If I am unclean I have no possibility for baxt.”) Baxt was against social cohesion, Rajko thought, for it wasn’t measured collectively. In its lowest form baxt was no different from fatalism, and encouraged passivity among the Roma.

  Rajko had been an eloquent speaker at the Gypsy Holocaust memorial. While he spoke, people waved little banners bearing the slogan (the words above a broken wheel, the numbers below) na bister / 500,000, “Don’t forget the 500,000”—the 500,000 murdered Gypsies. Now, as we landed in Warsaw, he said, “Above all, baxt is concerned with the present and the near future.”

  Gypsies have no myths about the beginning of the world, or about their own origins; they have no sense of a great historical past. Very often their memories do not extend beyond three or four generations—that is, to those experiences and ancestors who are remembered by the oldest living person among them. The rest, as it were, is not history. Such a feeling is perhaps a legacy from the days of travel, when the dead were literally left behind; but it continues to serve a people who even when settled are hard-pressed to survive.

  The Second World War and its traumas are certainly within memory; but there is no tradition of commemoration, or even of discussion. Some thought that such talk might actually be dangerous: “Why give them ideas?” a young Hungarian Rom asked, fifty years after the event. Under the Nazis, the Gypsies were the only group apart from the Jews who were slated for extermination on grounds of race. It is a story that remains almost unknown—even to many Gypsies who survived it.

  In Balteni, about forty kilometers northwest of Bucharest, I met a survivor of the deportations of Gypsies to Transdnistria, the area of the Ukraine occupied by Romania during the war. Here, according to the Romanian War Crimes Commission, between 1942 and 1944 thirty-six thousand Gypsies lost their lives.

  “There were many, many people,” Drina said, her eyes narrowing as if she was trying to see back through fifty years to the winter when her family was packed with hundreds of others onto trains that dumped them somewhere north of Odessa and east of the Bug River. I knew about the long trips in cattle cars. It could take weeks to get from Bucharest to camps located in the occupied territories; and when Drina’s thin frame shivered in the hot sun I learned it had been very cold. She seemed eager to tell me something. She paused for a while—hand on brow, looking at the ground—as if she hadn’t visited these particular memories in a very long time and was trying to find them. It seemed that no one had ever asked her this question. And then she spoke, clearly and without emotion, in the voice of a courtroom testimonial. When she told of the perilous crossing of the Dniester River, over which lay the occupied territory and, somewhere, the field that would be her home for two years, her children and grandchildren all gathered to listen, as if they also had never heard this fascinating story. Some of the assembled women shooed the children away.

  “Everyone rushed to go in the first trip.” I glanced up at Igor, my Romanian friend who was translating. “Yes, yes,” Drina said, seeing my doubt: “You see, the boats were made of paper.” She paused to look for a sample, and picked up a scrap of cardboard lying in the dust at our feet. “Yes, the boats were like this. They’d go down after three or four trips. You tried to go in the first crossing.” I guessed that Drina—about ten years old at the time—had seen a boat sink, probably one overloaded with deportees.

  Not long before I met Drina, the Romanian Parliament stood for a minute in silence, honoring Marshal Ion Antonescu, the fascist wartime leader who was responsible for the death of 270,000 Jews and the deportation of the Gypsies (it was the forty-fifth anniversary of his execution for war crimes). The deportations to Transdnistria are now being explained as an effort by the marshal to “save” the Gypsies from the death camps in Poland. (At his trial, Antonescu himself offered a different justification: “Thefts and murders that occurred in Bucharest and other cities were being covered up [and] the public appealed to me to protect them.”) The Romanian King Michael, with his own hopes of rehabilitation, gave another, more convincing version in 1991: “The Roma people were singled out for particular repression mainly because they had no defense or protectors outside Romania. The nomads who were persecuted were especially easy targets due to their lack of papers and documentation.”

  Drina did not speak in any detail about the family of her childhood, but she let us understand that many of them had died in Transdnistria. It seemed that in her family death was never far away. Four days before she spoke to me, Luciano, her seven-year-old grandson, had died. That was how we met: because I could drive, and because my friend Igor had a car that would serve as the hearse.

  These still mainly nomadic Kalderash Gypsies kept close to the old way of life. The men banged out copper kazans—small domestic distillers—and the women moved purposefully around the camp carrying wood and buckets of water, with long, flowery skirts and two long braids tied together at the bottom and woven with “coins” (having lost their gold, they used numbered industrial aluminum tags to the same effect). There were a few dogs with pruned tails, and horses scrounging for sustenance in the dry grass. The children looked shy and wild; the women, clearly wary of prying eyes, seldom dropped their fierce expressions, even though we were their invited guests. It was hard to believe that they lived so near the capital, and not in some dense faraway forest, or in some modern Gypsy’s memory.


  One night a month or so later Igor and I paid another visit to the camp of Drina’s family. It was about half a mile from the highway and easy to miss: there was no road, only a lumpy field you had to bounce over. The Radus had a half-built brick house near the entrance to the camp, but in the summer they abandoned it in favor of a tent, constructed with three poles and great swaths of thick smoke-streaked canvas, and taller than two men at the apex. Inside it smelled of burning wood.

  The men lounged against the bales of hay that comprised the tent’s furniture, or lay on their sides propped on an elbow; the women knelt or crouched. Igor and I sat cross-legged and shared their scorched dinner of roasted corn on the cob and tomatoes and onions with rosemary, all of us picking with our fingers from a couple of dented tin trays. The fire brought out the flavor of the food—or the flavor of the fire: everything tasted the same and very good.

  During this period of mourning there was a ban on alcohol and all the talk seemed to be about lost or missing things, but the mood was almost festive. Florica, one of the fierce-faced women, gave me her favorite recipe. “The best chicken cannot be bought,” she said. “It is not the same. You have to find one, see it move, the fastest are the best.” After “finding” a racing chicken, you wrapped it, feathers and all, in clay and roasted it—slowly, she emphasized rather severely—“inside” a fire: flame on top and flame underneath, until all the wood has burned. Next, you let it sit for a long time in the embers, until they’re nearly gone too. And then the clay comes off, she demonstrated, sitting regally upright and gesturing as if she was opening an enormous atlas. The feathers are stuck in the clay, and you have your chicken, smooth and tender “as an egg.” During the mourning for Drina’s grandson, meats were also forbidden, and in Florica’s mime show the chicken had grown to the size of a sheep.

  We heard how, around twenty years before, Ceausescu’s police, the Securitate, had come and searched these tents and the daughters and stolen all the gold from their necks and hair—an experience shared by many Romanian Kalderash, who keep all their valuables in (wearable) gold form. Gold was the dowry that ensured prestige for the family and decent marriages for their daughters. The bright coins—with their mottoes and dates and bearded monarchs—reflected the presence of an ancestor, alive, prosperous, and at large in those realms. They didn’t store them in velvet boxes or in binders of clear plastic sheets; no, they were drilled through and showily displayed on the throat or the hair as proof of membership of this high-class Gypsy tribe (deracinated, settled, and other despised Gypsies had no gold). Many proud Kalderash had let me inspect the coins they wore: thin and thick yellow gold, often a hundred years old.