Bury Me Standing

by Isabel Fonseca

  The site of the Zigeunerlager, or Gypsy camp, is marked on the wall map in the arched entrance to the vast pitch of Birkenau. It was in the row of barracks farthest from the main gates, which meant that the Gypsies had a good view of both the gas chambers and the crematoria. Apart from a few crumbling brick chimneys, there is nothing left of the thirty-eight-barrack Gypsy camp.

  Three and a half kilometers down the road, at the main camp of Auschwitz, prison blocks have been converted into national pavilions, each describing the particular losses of one or two countries: U.S.S.R.; Poland; Czechoslovakia; Yugoslavia and Austria; Hungary; France and Belgium; Italy and Holland. A separate exhibit called “The Suffering and Struggle of the Jews” is housed in Block 27. Other blocks (4, 5, and 6) contain, along with photographs and documents and technical explanations of the killing machinery, the things that the murdered left behind. Here in a glass case was some of the seven tons of women’s hair found on liberation, packed in parcels of twenty-five kilos apiece and ready to be sold, at fifty pfennigs a kilo, for suit linings. (I asked the Polish docent why the hair was all one color—mousy brown. The gas, she said. Zyklon B made all hair and skin tone the same.) And here was a wall of mainly wire-rimmed eyeglasses; another of toothbrushes and hairbrushes; of portrait photographs of loved ones; of children’s shoes with straps and buttons; of little dresses and coats.

  Standing in front of the display of brown leather suitcases, I tilted my head to read the familiar Jewish names, each one carefully painted, with an address, in large thickish white letters. Confronted by all these possessions—the ordinary appurtenances of bourgeois life in civilized, settled prewar Europe—it struck me that one reason the Gypsies do not have a presence here at Auschwitz, or in our private, mental archives of the Holocaust, is that none of these things was theirs. They seem to have disappeared, without a trace.

  It takes no work of the imagination to be struck by the absence of the Gypsies from the even more obvious places: the vast literature of the Holocaust. The Gypsies’ oral and itinerant traditions, along with widespread illiteracy, have not thrown up great numbers of Gypsy scholars. And there are few in-depth histories of the porraimos by non-Gypsies; the Roma are equally absent from both the popular and the general scholarly histories. Even in the primary sources—the legal enactments that the Reich contrived to control and, eventually, to kill them—the Gypsies are obscured.

  Under the name “social deviants” they were included in laws designed primarily for the institutionalized handicapped (the first victims of mass killings). In July of 1933 there was the Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring, in November of the same year, the Regulations for the Security and Reform of Habitual Criminals and Social Deviants. Under these “measures,” Sinti and Roma were involuntarily sterilized. Two laws of 1935 banned marriage and sex between Germans and non-Europeans, including Gypsies. Although again they were not mentioned by name, semiofficial commentary on the Nuremberg Laws stated that: “In Europe generally only Jews and Gypsies are carriers of alien blood.”

  Nazi policy towards Gypsies was continually sharpening and, as it did so, it redefined them. So whereas in the 1937 Laws Against Crime they are counted among “those who by antisocial behavior even if they have committed no crime have shown that they do not wish to fit into society: beggars, tramps (Gypsies), prostitutes, persons with infectious diseases who do not follow treatment, etc.,” in later legislation they appear in a new troupe: “Jews, Gypsies, and Poles.” As with the Jews, debate about whether they should be defined culturally or racially has always dogged the Gypsies. The Nazis used both categories; and eventually, as biological explanations were supplied for every aspect of culture and behavior (criminality among Gypsies and, along with other attributes, sexual deviance, venality, and power hunger among Jews), the two categories became one. When the deportations of German Gypsies began, shortly after the outbreak of the war in 1939, the rules governing inclusions and exemptions paralleled the later regulations used in the transports of Jews to the East.

  The Zigeunerlager occupied the two rows of barracks identified as BIIe, beyond which lay the prisoners’ hospital, the crematoria, and the gas chambers. Between February 1943 and August 1944, twenty-one thousand Gypsies were killed at Auschwitz. (photo credits 7.3)

  From the start, crime prevention was the main pretext for the incarceration of Gypsies—and later for their extermination. The German police confined them to Zigeunerlager as early as 1934—that is, before the regime had even decided who was a Gypsy. In June of 1936, the chief of police of Berlin was authorized by a circular (i.e., not by a law) to arrest all Gypsies in Prussia, and immediately six hundred Sinti and Roma, with their wagons, were corralled under police guard into a sewage dump next to a cemetery at Marzahn, a suburb of Berlin. The location of this Zigeunerlager, the largest created so far, was doubly punitive for the Gypsies, with their elaborate codes of hygiene and their superstition about graveyards. But the goal of the city authorities was accomplished: to clear the streets of Berlin before the start of the Olympic Games. (Gypsies were also sent to Dachau from 1936—that is, three years before the outbreak of war.) With only three water pumps and two toilets, the six hundred Gypsies on the sewage dump quickly succumbed to disease; the official response was: “Massive loss of life in the restricted area only interests us insofar as it represents a threat to the non-Gypsy population.” Inmates were assigned to forced labor, and those who survived until 1943 were then sent to Auschwitz.

  The experience of the Gypsies had some striking peculiarities. Long before the rise of the Nazis to power, there were Citizens’ Committees which successfully lobbied for the clearing and internment of Gypsies in proto-ghettos which eventually became streamlined and regularized as the municipally administered Zigeunerlager, such as the one created at Marzahn. Indeed, when the Nazis came to power they did not need to invent the legislation used to “Combat the Gypsy Plague.” Despite Article 104 of the Weimar Constitution, which guaranteed equality before the law, from 1899 the security police kept a central Zigeuner register. By 1911 these files included fingerprints and photo IDs, not just for criminals but for all Gypsies over six (clearly regarded as the same thing), and in 1926 the Bavarian Law for the Combating of Gypsies, Travelers, and the Work-shy empowered the Bavarian police to send Roma and Sinti to workhouses for two years. They were thus already punished simply for being Zigeuner. The Bavarian law was adopted everywhere and expanded to meet the local needs of other states. Those registered in the twenties automatically became subject to the racial legislation of the thirties. The fact that they were already widely recognized as “a problem”—to be dealt with, significantly, by local police and not just by the SS—made it easier to disown them later, in scholarship, in trials, in calculations about compensation.

  The Holocaust historian Lucy Davidowicz states a view shared by many of her colleagues when she writes that “only in the last year of the war did the Nazi ideologues begin to regard the Gypsies not only as an undesirable social element, but also as an undesirable racial element.” Nazi policy towards Gypsies was indeed full of contradictions, but this is plainly untrue. The deportations to Auschwitz were not the beginning of a racial assessment of Gypsies (though in most cases they represented its conclusion).

  During their time in Marzahn, and soon in many other camps, inmates were forced to submit to detailed examination by the anthropologists, psychiatrists, and other “scientists” employed by the Office for Research on Race Hygiene and Population Biology in the Reich Department of Health. In 1937, health officers could produce “a table several meters in length on which in tiny, millimeter size letters and numbers the genealogical tree of all Gypsies living in Germany for the last ten generations had been charted”; it would, they said, be used to research “the future development of all peoples, especially the German.” Nazi interest in the racial characteristics of Gypsies may be documented from the year they were elected to power, and it grew and grew—even though Gypsies re
presented a tiny fraction of the population. These “special camps” became the prewar laboratories for the research team headed by the child psychologist, and now “race hygienist,” Dr. Robert Ritter, who ultimately gathered thirty thousand genealogies. His aim was to establish the hereditary character of criminal and asocial behavior.

  Ritter and his team, including his assistant Eva Justin, made their rounds, equipped with syringes, calipers, eye-color charts, and pots of wax to take masks of Gypsy faces, which, in photographs taken by the team, are invariably terrified and bewildered. (To ensure efficient work, the doctors had the police at their disposal.) When the personal histories that the Gypsy subjects spluttered out failed to add up, the team completed classification according to such categories as “appearance” and “way of life.”

  Eva Justin originally gained access to Gypsies still living free by posing as a missionary. In her influential reports she recommended that full and part-Gypsies, including the educated and assimilated, be sterilized; education of Gypsies was fruitless and should be stopped. Often after one of her visits, the interviewee and sometimes the entire family would be removed to a camp. Such experiences—however mutated within the collective imagination—offer an explanation for the universal wariness, indeed the hostility, that Gypsies still evince about being interviewed, particularly on questions of kinship.

  The racial classifications of these pseudo-scientists determined lives. For some reason—for example, romantic fantasies about noble savages—“pure” Gypsies were deemed less dangerous (and of course a great deal rarer) than those with some German blood: the opposite of the Jewish case.

  Such findings in a Gypsy’s chart could result in loss of citizenship, in sterilization, and in eventual deportation. Among the victims of the new classification were highly decorated army officers who had no inkling about distant Gypsy relatives before being plucked from service to the Reich. According to the memoirs of Rudolf Hoess, the commandant of Auschwitz (not to be confused with Deputy Party Leader Rudolf Hess), one such casualty was “one of the earliest members of the Party, a part-Gypsy who had a large business concern in Leipzig and who had participated in the war and had been decorated many times”; another was the leader of the Organization of German Girls in Berlin. The fact that some Gypsies joined the Nazi Party has troubled a number of Jewish historians, who see it as proof that Gypsies were not and cannot have been seen as the “mortal enemy.” But it would seem more likely that, as with Jewish collaborators, these were mainly individuals making cynical calculations for their immediate survival.

  Ritter’s definition of a part-Gypsy was more inclusive than that of a part-Jew. If two out of sixteen of a person’s great-great-grandparents were Gypsies, that person was classified as part Gypsy, and so later would qualify for admission to Auschwitz. (By contrast, a person with one Jewish grandparent—four great-great-grandparents—was not usually affected by Nazi anti-Jewish legislation.) Ritter was de-Nazified in 1950. In February of 1964, Dr. Justin was acquitted of any wrongdoing by a Frankfurt magistrate.

  In an extreme example of a common view (and one which echoes those very classifications), the Holocaust historian Yehuda Bauer asserts that, for Nazis, the killing of a Gypsy was qualitatively different from the killing of a Jew: “Roma were not Jews, therefore there was no need to murder all of them.” Certainly there was talk of saving some Gypsies. Himmler—who famously remarked that “everyone has his special Jew” (that is, one he would argue should be saved)—had fantasies of maintaining a kind of live diorama of “pure” Gypsies, a living museum in which each of the major tribes would be represented. However, it is probably safer to look at what the Nazis did than at what they said. Local authorities routinely ignored instructions to exempt “pure” Gypsies, which in any case they would have been hard-pressed to find.

  Dr. Robert Ritter draws blood while a colleague and the woman’s husband look on. In the course of trying to establish a racial basis for Gypsy deviance, Ritter’s team collected blood and hair samples, face masks, body measurements of all kinds, and more than thirty thousand Gypsy genealogies. (photo credits 7.4)

  Dr. Sophie Ehrhardt, a member of Ritter’s team, and an assistant making a mask with soft wax

  Although Gypsies were not mentioned by name in any of the regime’s major racial laws, the policy towards them was clear enough, and increasingly it was spelled out. Measures adopted in 1939 on Himmler’s orders explicitly state:

  Experiences gained in the struggle against the Gypsy plague and knowledge derived from race-biological research have shown that … the final solution of the Gypsy question … must be approached with the basic nature of this race in mind.

  Contrary to the provision for exempting “pure” Gypsies, but in line with the general radicalization of racial policies, the fate of Gypsies became linked with that of Poles and Jews after the Nazi conquest of Poland. Adolf Eichmann, like several other high-ranking Nazis, including Reinhard Heydrich, subsequently made the recommendation that the “Gypsy Question” be “solved” simultaneously with the “Jewish Question”—for example, by appending “three or four trucks” of Sinti and Roma to the trains transporting Viennese Jews in 1940 to the Generalgouvernement (of German-occupied central and southern Poland).

  The invasion of the Soviet Union in June of 1941 marked the transition from persecution to mass extermination for both Jews and Gypsies. Units of the regular army and the police, but particularly of the SS Einsatzgruppen, began the mass shootings of Gypsies (and Jews and Russians and hospital patients) in Russia, Poland, and the Balkans. The killings were justified by the old claim that the Gypsies were spies—numbering perhaps as many as 250,000. No one knows with any certainty how many were killed by the roving murder squads. These still-unresearched episodes—along with great gaps in knowledge concerning the occupied territories—make it impossible to give a precise figure for Gypsy victims.

  German soldiers were said to have been demoralized by these killings, and methods described as “more humane” were sought. In early 1940 the first large-scale experiments in Sonderbehandlung (special treatment—that is, death by gas) included those first judged to have “lives unworthy of life”: the chronically ill, the mentally and physically handicapped, and Gypsies. The use of gas as a method of mass murder, and thus the beginning of the Final Solution, began at the death camp near the remote Polish village of Chelmno, on the Ner River, on December 7, 1941: the same day that the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor.

  It was the ghetto at Lódz, home to 160,000 Jews and only fifty miles down the Ner, that soon became the main source of lives unworthy of life for the death machinery at Chelmno. Gypsies were incarcerated with Jews in the ghettos of Bialystok, Kraków, Lódz, L’viv, Radom, and Warsaw. Detailed accounts of Gypsy life in the ghettos are hardly ever included in chronicles of these places, where many more Jews lived and died. It may therefore be useful to give some details here (taken largely from Ficowski’s Ciganie na polskich drogach, “Gypsies on Polish Roads”).

  In October 1941 a section of the Jewish ghetto was hemmed in with twelve thousand meters of barbed wire especially ordered from Poznan, and wrapped around the area twice. This double fence, along with a water-filled ditch and a series of security posts, separated off the future Gypsy ghetto. We are familiar with the Nazi love of categories and subgroupings, however meaningless; it remains unclear why in each ghetto (and in the death camps) the Gypsies, who invariably formed a relatively small contingent, were isolated from the Jews and from other prisoners.

  Although German Gypsies had been put into German concentration camps as early as 1934, in November of 1941 Lódz became the first place in Poland where Gypsies were gathered for extermination in a camp setting. Here they were completely sealed off, and were out of sight: only the few Jewish doctors who treated a typhus epidemic, and then Jewish gravediggers, witnessed their end.

  At Lódz, Nazis took a broad view of who qualified as a Gypsy. The inmates—within four days they numbered five thousand—in
cluded circus workers and vagabonds, “people roving like Gypsies” (nach Zigeunerart umherziehende Personen), German Sinti, Romanian Kalderash in their flowing flowery skirts, many Hungarian Gypsies, as well as some rich Viennese ones—for example, a family by the name of Weinrich. A list of their confiscated belongings includes gold watches, gold brooches, diamond earrings, amber earrings, earrings made of Hungarian gold coins and gold francs, coral and emerald rings, gold chains, and so on. Why bother to copy out that inventory? Perhaps because it seems a way of placing them, via their heirlooms and baubles, among the rest of the victims, with their relics in glass cases.

  Between November 5 and November 9, according to the personal and precise instructions of Adolf Eichmann, five transports were sent to Lódz from transit camps in occupied Austria. If in some places Gypsies were picked off, shot at, or lynched haphazardly and their deaths not even recorded, at Lódz there was elaborate and meticulous preparation. Each transport carried exactly one thousand prisoners (the last held 1,007, though the surplus did not compensate for the number that died in transit). And all trains were supposed to arrive in Lódz at 11 a.m. Any deviation from this schedule was duly noted, and an attempt was made to recover the timetable on the following day. So, for example, in the second transport, from a camp in Furstenfeld, 186 men, 218 women, and 596 children arrived at 5:50 p.m., or nearly seven hours late. They were therefore made to spend the night in their sealed trains, in a siding; the unloading (accomplished in the prescribed thirty minutes) took place the next day. The total number of Gypsies brought into the ghetto was eleven dead and 4,996 living. Of those, 2,686 were children.

  “Dr. Vogl from Prague”—a prisoner doctor (and survivor) from the Lódz ghetto—was made to sign death certificates with the cause of Herzschwächenheit, or heart trouble, for scores of Gypsies who were hanged or suffocated. Kalman Wolkowicz, who worked as a prisoner orderly at the Jewish hospital (Gypsies were not treated there or anywhere else), remembers a moment when the music coming from the Gypsy camp stopped. After playing was declared verboten, the silence was interrupted only by yells and screams of the SS and of their victims. Wolkowicz also noted extreme malnutrition in the Gypsy ghetto, and that the job of doctors sent in there was only to separate out the sick.