On a visit to Yad Vashem, the consequences of continuing to demonise the ancient scapegoats of Europe were all too clear to me
There is a document, dated 9 January 1938 in the archive at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem. I sat there two weeks ago pondering how printed words segue into mass murder. These particular words, written by a Nazi bureaucrat, suggest "solutions" to the Gypsy "problem", which are necessary, "for reasons of national hygiene, because the Gypsies are known to be suffering from hereditary diseases". They are "habitual criminals and parasites" who do "untold damage to our national organism". So what to do? He sucks his pencil, writes: "Sterilise and intern in labour camps."
This is just an opening position, of course; the eventual Nazi "solution" to the Roma "problem" ("Gypsy" is derived from the misconception that they came from Egypt, when in fact their origins are in India) went much further. The Nazis confounded themselves with their ludicrous pseudo-intellectual racial purity laws, which eventually became so complex that you have to laugh at the bureaucrats who tried to codify and enforce them; so they sometimes pardoned "pure" Roma.
But by 1945 at least 200,000 were dead, perhaps many more; that we do not know the exact figure is part of the obscenity. There are 1,500 items relating to the Roma at Yad Vashem; the Roma tradition is an oral one, and the Nazis did not count their victims accurately in this case, so the rest is lost. We know that some starved in ghettos alongside Jews; that some were gassed in death camps; that Anne Frank saw some Gypsy girls being herded to the gas chambers, and cried; that more, including very young children, were murdered in Josef Mengele's grotesque "experiments" in Auschwitz, the details of which are too repulsive to detail here. The Roma call it Porajmos – the devouring.
Why mention this now? Because the legal restrictions on migration from Romania and Bulgaria to Britain are being lifted, and the tidal wave of filth – to use a phrase I think the Nazis would have liked – washing through the European media in respect (I joke) of Roma is an affront to the discipline of history. Sometimes I think the memorials to the dead (I will not call them Hitler's victims, because the perpetrators were in the millions) are counter-productive, at least to those of us who are not related to the dead. In any case, the German memorial to the Roma was erected only last year. For us, they are a comfort blanket of stone; they reassure us that we have changed. We have buried the dead, we have expiated it, we have learned the lessons, and will not sin again. Except we have not: we listen, and by our silence, collaborate in a resurgence of anti-Roma rhetoric, fuelled by austerity (what's new?) and migration – and who speaks out?
Here are a few examples, from newspapers whose editors, I suspect, do not know about the old practice of Roma hunts in Saxony, the judicial murders of Roma in Prussia in the 18th century, enabled by the psychotic king Frederick William, the forced sterilisation of Roma by the Swedes, or the removal of Roma children from their parents in Switzerland, even as recently as the 1970s. When a people is persistently nomadic and suspicious of the settled majority, and tends to cling to its status of outsider, it is always worth asking why.
And now, here, headlines echo loathing, snobbery and paranoia: "Villagers' 10 days of Gypsy hell"; "Parents and children returned from the half-term break to find gypsies had taken over their school's CAR PARK" (the capital letters are not mine); or, worse, on the cover of a Swiss magazine in 2012, a young Roma boy with a gun and the caption, "They come, they steal, they go." This kind of negative press coverage brings forth violence – there is always employment for a scapegoat in Europe, when hatred is stirred up.
This is the demonisation of an ancient, marginalised underclass. They are the fastest-growing, and most persecuted, minority in Europe, and our response to them is a slur from the past. It is fuelled by politicians, who are happy to vent, but unhappy to plan – the government has axed its Migration Impacts fund, which existed to ease pressure on local services, and there is no Roma member of the UK Ethnic Minority Employment Stakeholder Group. Nick Clegg called them "sometimes intimidating, sometimes offensive", David Blunkett predicted anti-Roma riots if they did not amend their behaviour.
It is so much easier, of course, to flounder into violence than to think – so we have a Roma family chased out of their home by a mob whipped up by a local mayor in Hungary, who then threatened to burn it down so they could not return, two blond children removed from her dark-haired parents in Ireland, an abduction that would surely make the author of the document in Yad Vashem smile. It is always worth remembering, even if you forget everything else, that before murder is committed, dehumanisation must occur.
Twitter: @TanyaGold1 Reported by guardian.co.uk 13 hours ago.
There is a document, dated 9 January 1938 in the archive at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem. I sat there two weeks ago pondering how printed words segue into mass murder. These particular words, written by a Nazi bureaucrat, suggest "solutions" to the Gypsy "problem", which are necessary, "for reasons of national hygiene, because the Gypsies are known to be suffering from hereditary diseases". They are "habitual criminals and parasites" who do "untold damage to our national organism". So what to do? He sucks his pencil, writes: "Sterilise and intern in labour camps."
This is just an opening position, of course; the eventual Nazi "solution" to the Roma "problem" ("Gypsy" is derived from the misconception that they came from Egypt, when in fact their origins are in India) went much further. The Nazis confounded themselves with their ludicrous pseudo-intellectual racial purity laws, which eventually became so complex that you have to laugh at the bureaucrats who tried to codify and enforce them; so they sometimes pardoned "pure" Roma.
But by 1945 at least 200,000 were dead, perhaps many more; that we do not know the exact figure is part of the obscenity. There are 1,500 items relating to the Roma at Yad Vashem; the Roma tradition is an oral one, and the Nazis did not count their victims accurately in this case, so the rest is lost. We know that some starved in ghettos alongside Jews; that some were gassed in death camps; that Anne Frank saw some Gypsy girls being herded to the gas chambers, and cried; that more, including very young children, were murdered in Josef Mengele's grotesque "experiments" in Auschwitz, the details of which are too repulsive to detail here. The Roma call it Porajmos – the devouring.
Why mention this now? Because the legal restrictions on migration from Romania and Bulgaria to Britain are being lifted, and the tidal wave of filth – to use a phrase I think the Nazis would have liked – washing through the European media in respect (I joke) of Roma is an affront to the discipline of history. Sometimes I think the memorials to the dead (I will not call them Hitler's victims, because the perpetrators were in the millions) are counter-productive, at least to those of us who are not related to the dead. In any case, the German memorial to the Roma was erected only last year. For us, they are a comfort blanket of stone; they reassure us that we have changed. We have buried the dead, we have expiated it, we have learned the lessons, and will not sin again. Except we have not: we listen, and by our silence, collaborate in a resurgence of anti-Roma rhetoric, fuelled by austerity (what's new?) and migration – and who speaks out?
Here are a few examples, from newspapers whose editors, I suspect, do not know about the old practice of Roma hunts in Saxony, the judicial murders of Roma in Prussia in the 18th century, enabled by the psychotic king Frederick William, the forced sterilisation of Roma by the Swedes, or the removal of Roma children from their parents in Switzerland, even as recently as the 1970s. When a people is persistently nomadic and suspicious of the settled majority, and tends to cling to its status of outsider, it is always worth asking why.
And now, here, headlines echo loathing, snobbery and paranoia: "Villagers' 10 days of Gypsy hell"; "Parents and children returned from the half-term break to find gypsies had taken over their school's CAR PARK" (the capital letters are not mine); or, worse, on the cover of a Swiss magazine in 2012, a young Roma boy with a gun and the caption, "They come, they steal, they go." This kind of negative press coverage brings forth violence – there is always employment for a scapegoat in Europe, when hatred is stirred up.
This is the demonisation of an ancient, marginalised underclass. They are the fastest-growing, and most persecuted, minority in Europe, and our response to them is a slur from the past. It is fuelled by politicians, who are happy to vent, but unhappy to plan – the government has axed its Migration Impacts fund, which existed to ease pressure on local services, and there is no Roma member of the UK Ethnic Minority Employment Stakeholder Group. Nick Clegg called them "sometimes intimidating, sometimes offensive", David Blunkett predicted anti-Roma riots if they did not amend their behaviour.
It is so much easier, of course, to flounder into violence than to think – so we have a Roma family chased out of their home by a mob whipped up by a local mayor in Hungary, who then threatened to burn it down so they could not return, two blond children removed from her dark-haired parents in Ireland, an abduction that would surely make the author of the document in Yad Vashem smile. It is always worth remembering, even if you forget everything else, that before murder is committed, dehumanisation must occur.
Twitter: @TanyaGold1 Reported by guardian.co.uk 13 hours ago.