The Last Exile

I’ve been walking forty miles of bad road
If the bible is right, the world will explode
I’ve been trying to get as far away from myself as I can
Some things are too hot to touch
The human mind can only stand so much
You can’t win with a losing hand
- Bob Dylan

This is the hardest post I have ever tried to write. I have started it over and over again. I thought if I did some research I would find a way to begin. So I took a trip down memory lane and went where I rarely go – into the Porajmos. The time of the devouring which raped the soul of the Roma and I realized, the Porajmos never really ends. It ebbs and recedes for a time but mostly it just goes on and on until it explodes into a day of endless night. Its legacy passes from one generation until the next. And it broke my heart. All I could do last night was lay my head down on my desk and cry.

Today is the day in which the world is to remember the victims of the holocaust. Representatives and leaders from countries all over the world are converging in to meet in Auschwitz for remembrance ceremonies. There will be hushed tones and pious words spoken in this place of carnage and all will pledge never again.

They will sit there in this place of torment and the starkest death possible and wonder what strange manner brought the Germans to perform these acts of carnage and shake their heads. Some will sit and be smug and safe in the knowledge they are superior to the Germans of 65 yesterday all the while completely oblivious to the kinship their share with the Nazi Overlords of Auschwitz. But the Rom remember, they always do, its a curse really. Taken from the Holocaust Remembrance Project, I survived.

Markus Pape is spokesperson for the Prague-based Committee for the Redress of the Romani Holocaust (VPORH). He has done extensive research on Czech-run labour camps and his organization has been gathering testimony from Romani survivors for some time now. The vast majority of Romani people living in what is today the Czech Republic are descended from Slovak Roma; their ancestors transferred here to the Czech lands in communist-era resettlement programmes.

Mr Pape says most Romani survivors agree to speak about their experiences only if they are not shown or identified on Czech media, so painful is the memory and so great their fear, even today, of persecution by skinheads and repercussions from other racist groups active in Czech society. Czech officials have been slow to acknowledge the wartime persecution of the Roma. Not only do precious few memorials exist to honour the memory of those killed in the war, but the site of the largest Czech labour camp, near the town of southern Bohemian town of Lety, where over 1300 Roma were interned at a time, is today home to … a pig farm.

Markus Pape again:

“Even though the Czechoslovak authorities made a major investigation into what happened at the Lety camp ? and found most of the perpetrators who caused the death of at least 241 children ? none of the guilty persons was ever punished. This is one fact which is to this day very difficult to explain to the Roma.” “The other fact is that in the 1970s, a huge pig farm was built on the former camp site ? and is being run until today. In spite of protests by Roma and annual memorial vigils held right next to the former camp site. The [Czech] government has not managed to explain why this is the way it is.”

A law establishing Lety as a work camp for “nomads” ? read the Roma ? was passed in March 1939 by Czechoslovakia’s proto-fascist Second Republic. In 1942, the Nazis designated the Lety facility as a concentration camp for Roma. Nearly all of the Roma who survived the torture, malnourishment and typhoid rampant in the Czech-run camps of Lety and Hodonin, met their death in a special “Gypsy family camp” at Auschwitz-Birkenau, but not without a fight, says Mr Pape.

“In May 1994, thousands of Sinti and Roma barricaded themselves in, ready to fight the SS men. They had found out that on that same day all of them were to be killed, by gas, at once. The SS decided not to attack, or try to kill these people. Unfortunately, later on, the ones who were still healthy enough to work were sent on to other concentration camps and only a few of them survived; and the children and old people were killed in a massacre in Auschwitz.”

The liberation of the Auschwitz ? sixty years ago this Thursday (January 27) ? came too late for the Roma, as it did for over a million Jews, and tens of thousands of Poles, and political prisoners, homosexuals and “asocials” of all nationalities. Months before the liberation, camp authorities closed the “Gypsy family camp,” gassing some 3,000 Roma in the first days of August, 1944. Over 20,000 Roma had already died there from starvation and disease, or in the gas chambers.

The interned Roma had been allowed to stay together as families only because the Nazis had learned from past experience that separating Romani parents from their children made them impossible to control as a group and exploit for forced labour. Far more Roma people died outside the camps than in them, especially in Eastern Europe, where pogroms and summary executions were a daily occurrence.

In Auschwitz, the Rom children were a special favourite among Dr. Mengele to experiment on.

He seemed particularly keen on working with Romani children. He would bring them sweets and toys, and would personally take them to the gas chamber. They would call him “Onkel Mengele”. Vera Alexander was a Jewish inmate at Auschwitz who looked after 50 sets of Romani twins:

“ I remember one set of twins in particular: Guido and Ina, aged about four. One day, Mengele took them away. When they returned, they were in a terrible state: they had been sewn together, back to back, like Siamese twins. Their wounds were infected and oozing pus. They screamed day and night. Then their parents– I remember the mother’s name was Stella– managed to get some morphine and they killed the children in order to end their suffering. -Berenbaum, Michael (1993). The world must know: The history of the Holocaust as told in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Boston: Little, Brown. pp. 194–5.

But I am not done quoting yet. Let me quoted from “Auschwitz: A Report on the Proceedings Against Robert Karl, Ludwig Mulka and Others Before the Court at Frankfurt”, By Bernd Naumann, 1966, published by Frederick A. Praeger, NY. This book recounts the events which occurred in the trial of 22 SS men who served in the death camp Auschwitz-Birkenau. This trial was conducted by the German legal system, under the German penal code of 1871. From the testimony of Maximilian Sternol (p. 114):

…It was the liquidation of the Gypsy compound. Terrible scenes took
place. Women and children were on their knees in front of Mengele and
Boger crying, ‘Take pity, take pity on us’. Nothing helped. They were
beaten down brutally, trampled on, and pushed on the trucks. It was a
terrible, gruesome night”.

“Did Boger also hit them?”.

“Yes, he killed them. They collapsed and died and were thrown on the
trucks. The entire political section was there. Yes, I saw Baretzki
and Broad”.

From the testimony of Josef Piwko (p. 123):

“It happened about three to four weeks after the events in the Czech
compound [Theresienstat]. The children frequently came to the barbed
wire and we would give them little things. Then one day the trucks
came, and there was great excitement in the camp, because the Gypsies
now knew they that they were to be gassed. They had a good intelligence
network because the SS men had pretty Gypsy girls and they told them
a lot of things”.

The witness tells how he hid in the bushes and saw that the Gypsies
were beaten as they were herded onto the trucks and driven off to the
gas chambers. Then the SS men searched the barracks and dragged out
about six children between the ages of four and seven.

“They were brought before Boger, who first trampled on them, then
grabbed their little legs and smashed their heads against the wall”.

In this very place, Canada will be counted among the smugly pious. The Minister of Immigration, Jason Kenney will represent us. As he sits there he will no doubt take comfort in the fact that Canada was on the side of the angels and had no hand in this carnage of this place where literally thousands and thousands of souls begged for mercy. And yet, who is this man who stands to represent us among the shades of literally 21,000 Roma souls who met their death begging for mercy there? He is the man, who last summer decided there was a dangerous influx of Roma refugee claimants from the Czech Republic and Hungary and sought to put an end to it. There would be no safe harbour in Canada for a few hundred Roma who were simply seeking a respite from persecution in order to simply live a better life, a human life.

It didn’t matter that the vast majority of Roma claimants from the Czech Republic or Hungary met the Immigration and Refugee Board’s litmus test for being persecuted and in need of safe harbour. Why let facts get in the way of keeping Canada safe from the surge of the ‘asocials’? And my countrymen, I heard you loud and clear last summer when you cheered Kenney’s actions. And today, who protests Kenney’s presence at this event where the souls of 21, 000 were slaughtered for simply being different other than me and mine? Look in the mirror, and tell me how different you are.