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.

Apparently, when it is a Conservative MP.

If you saw this Canwest News article picked up by the Ottawa Citizen it reads like this:

A sudden wave of refugee claimants has helped make Hungary Canada’s top source of asylum-seekers, prompting the federal government to call on Budapest to take action — possibly against organized crime elements, Canwest News Service has learned.

The government hasn’t yet moved to impose visa restrictions on Hungary, as it did over the summer to deal with a flood of questionable claimants from Mexico and the Czech Republic. But the federal government also hasn’t ruled out that option after the number of asylum-seekers skyrocketed during the April-to-June period, making Hungary the third-highest source of claimants after Mexico and the Czech Republic in that period.

Now, with claims from those two countries falling to a trickle as a result of the summer decision, Citizenship and Immigration Canada figures show that Hungary has emerged as Canada’s top refugee source country — even though it is a member of the 27-nation European Union that champions itself as a bastion of human rights in the world.

“There are currently no plans to impose a visa on Hungary,” said Alykhan Velshi, spokesman for Immigration Minister Jason Kenney, in an e-mail. “Visa-exempt countries are aware that if they do not satisfy the conditions of Canada’s visa exemption, the requirement for a visa may be re-imposed.”

He said Kenney has already flown to Budapest to raise his concerns and discuss strategies “to ensure that individuals who benefit from our visitor visa exemption to come to Canada are, in fact, genuine visitors. “Kenney has previously questioned whether Czech claimants, the vast majority from the Roma minority that has endured a history of discrimination in Europe, were genuine refugees facing persecution and fearing for their safety.

Alykhan said the Canadian government, which has provoked anger and threats of retaliation by Prague and the EU as a result of the Czech visa decision, is looking for alternatives in the case of Hungary. “We’re working with (senior government officials) to see if there are others ways to resolve this issue — whether crackdowns on organized crime networks encouraging unfounded asylum claims, or addressing the issue of unregistered immigration consultants misleading people into coming to Canada and making asylum claims.”

So just who are these Hungarians seeking asylum? Turns out, once again, it’s the Roma. Unlike the Ottawa Citizen, Dose carried a fuller account from the same Canwest News reproter. Let me quote part of what the Ottawa Citizen deliberately chose to omit.

“Under current international law standards Hungarian Roma should not qualify as political refugees, even though Hungary should be much more stringent in providing protection to its minorities,” he said in an e-mail Wednesday. “Such claims can legitimately be dismissed by Canadian authorities.” But he said the re-imposition of a visa requirement would be both “unfriendly” and would do nothing to get Budapest to meet its domestic and international legal obligations to protect the Roma from discrimination and far-right violence, which is on the upswing. (Andras Paps quoted)

Now you can argue to the cows come home whether this omission clearly identifying the Roma refugee claimants from Hungary as the ‘spike’ from the upsurge in claims is legitimate or not; but what you cannot argue away is – how a Canadian daily newspaper just provided cover to the Stephen Harper’s Conservative government’s ‘none is too many’ policy towards the Roma.

Last weekend I finally got around to watching Emir Kusturica’s Time of the Gypsies. I really didn’t know what to expect. I heard it describes as a cinematic masterpiece and thought either another vilification or a sappy romanitization of the Rom. I wasn’t prepared for what Kusturica has done which is tell a story completely in the way of the Rom.

There are two essential qualities to understanding Romani life. First there is one’s bax (loosely translated as one’s fate and luck) and a question of balance. The question of balance is paramount, for without balance, one’s bax is completely corrupted and the ripples of one’s bax touches and echoes down through generations of the family. What puzzles me is how Kusturica, a Serb, gets this without being Rom, and can only wonder if he has sojourned among the Rom.

Kusturica employs a technique which he calls magical realism throughout the film and it works well to understand how the Rom perceive everything which surrounds their life and their place in the world. The Rom call the non-Rom ‘gagjov’ meaning literally; ones who are easily fooled. The Rom do not use the term to suggest a lack of mental cognizance but because the gagjov way of looking at the world is to look without seeing what lies just beneath the surface – hidden but always in plain sight. The irony is, even among the Rom, there resides an inner streak of gagjov, but then again, perhaps it is nothing more than a legacy of our shared humanity.

Part 1 can be found here with English subtitles.

Madonna gave a concert in Romania at the end of August and got sounded boo’d for making what should be a rather life-affirming declaration which had nothing to do with her musical inclinations:

“It has been brought to my attention … that there is a lot of discrimination against Romanies and Gypsies in general in Eastern Europe,” she said. “It made me feel very sad.”
Thousands booed and jeered her. A few cheered when she added: “We don’t believe in discrimination … we believe in freedom and equal rights for everyone.” But she got more boos when she mentioned discrimination against homosexuals and others. “I jeered her because it seemed false what she was telling us. What business does she have telling us these things?” said Ionut Dinu, 23. (Yahoo News)

That about sums up Romania so let us turn to the Toronto Star’s Rosie DiManno has a two-part column on what it means to be Roma in today’s bright shining star of modern liberalism which characterizes the Czech Republic.

KLADNO—It is the first day of school. The children are well-scrubbed and neatly dressed. Some, the littlest and most excited, have their mothers in tow as they wait at the bus stop.
The bus pulls in. The doors fold open. The driver glares.

And forbids them from boarding.

“I don’t take gypsies.”

Moms, incensed, start to yell. Kids, confused and frightened, begin to cry. The driver, unmoved, slams shut the door and the bus rumbles off, leaving youngsters stricken and adults seared with shame.
Many of these children have just had their introductory lesson in what it means to be Roma – reviled and excluded – in this so-civilized country.

Ask the question: Why did 2,869 Czech Roma wash up at Toronto’s Pearson airport between Oct. 2007 and June 2009, seeking asylum as alleged political refugees? Here is an answer: Rust-belt Kladno – birthplace of NHL star Jaromir Jagr – a mining eyesore 25 kilometres northwest of cosmopolitan Prague, where gypsy children are unwelcome in public schools and on buses, where families live upwards of 10 to a single room in a dilapidated tenement building on the hardscrabble edge of town. A single water meter serves nearly 700 residents. Toxic asbestos insulation oozes from the walls. It was this address – a one-time meat-packaging plant known as Masokombinat – that was fire-bombed by skinheads last year, though fortunately the projectiles landed in a clump of bushes out front. Unlike, say, the Molotov cocktail assault in April on a Roma home in the town of Vitkov that left a 22-month-old girl with burns to 80 per cent of her body.

These are not isolated incidents. In Czech towns with a heavy Roma population, in the gypsy ghettos of Prague, violent attacks against the ethnic minority have escalated alarmingly in recent years. Right wing groups and the anti-immigrant political parties that feed on Roma resentment are on the march across all of Europe, most especially in former Iron Curtain countries.

But of course, the Czech Republic defenders, in a case of the most twisted racial logic plead the Roma want to live like this and that old stand-by – The Roma bring it on themselves. Part Two is carried here and while Canadians can feel smug that no school bus driver’s job in Canada would be safe after shutting the doors on a child based solely on the child’s ethnicity; the Canadian government effectively shut the door on those Roma’s who seek a life in Canada without fear of persecution. Same shit, different day – or – prohasar man opre pirende – sa muro djiben semas opre chengende”.

If your Roma, you will understand the title, if your not, I can’t help you.
Toronto Star:

KISLETA, Hungary – Hundreds of people gathered today to pay their respects at the funeral of a 45-year-old woman, the sixth fatal victim in a series of attacks against Gypsies in Hungary.

Police say the attacks are linked, may have been committed by the same small group, and that the weapons used in Monday’s shooting of Maria Balogh and her 13-year-old daughter in their home in Kisleta, a small village in eastern Hungary, had been used in at least two of the previous attacks.

Balogh’s daughter survived the shooting and is recuperating in a hospital.

Police have 100 officers working on the crimes, the first of which took place in July 2008, and this week doubled the reward for information that could solve all the attacks to 100 million forints (C370,000, $525,000).(…)The attacks usually have been carried out at homes at the edge of small villages near highways providing a quick escape route.

Serial killer(s) stalking Roma in Hungary. Tell me again Jason Kenney - which EU member state provides safe harbour for the Roma?

According to some.

The Edmonton Journal carries this article on part 2 of the Immigration and Refugee Report released on the plight, (and I do mean plight) of Roma in the Czech Republic.

Incidents of members of the Roma minority in the Czech Republic being firebombed, turned away from restaurants and refused housing by landlords are contained in a fact-finding report released in Ottawa Monday.

The report by the Immigration and Refugee Board also noted that in May, the Czech government was considering a ban on two extremist political parties after the broadcast of a National Party video on Czech television which called for “the final solution” to the Roma “question.”

The report was released two weeks after the Canadian government reimposed a visa requirement on Czech citizens to reduce the flow of Roma –once known as gypsies–claiming refugee status in Canada. It was the second of two reports from the March 23-31 fact-finding mission.

Fact-finders were told Roma “rarely travel by train for fear of being intimidated or attacked and instead prefer to travel by bus.” One contact told of accompanying a group of Roma children on a field trip and being denied entry to four separate restaurants.It recounted two separate arson attacks against Roma homes and noted that one of them, in which a two-year-old girl was critically injured, prompted nationwide anti-extremism rallies by thousands of demonstrators.

Immigration and Refugee Board members consult such fact-finding reports to help them determine the credibility of individual refugee claims of a “well-founded fear of persecution” or a threat to their life in their home country. The board is independent of government and does not make visa policy.

Because we all know how the Conservative Minister of Immigration feels about the persecution of the Roma in the Czech Republic and too bad he never bothers to read the reports his department puts out…who knows why – maybe too many pages? Although, I did find this little gem at Embassy Magazine:

Mr. Kenney has said that the Roma face no state persecution in the Czech Republic—where attacks on their communities by radical groups are said to be on the rise—in spite of the fact that the Immigration and Refugee Board has approved nearly all such claims. In 2008, 94 per cent of Czech Roma claims were accepted, while in the first six months of 2009, 72 of the 90 cases heard were accepted.

The Immigration and Refugee Board did publish a report detailing all kinds of unpleasant facts about state protection for the Roma in the Czech Republic in November 1997.

Karel Holomek, a Romani leader in Brno, believes that police protect Roma poorly. Based on his own personal experience Holomek stated that there is a high level of prejudice within the Czech police and he points to the Pisek case[6]6 as an example of the problems found within the Czech police and judiciary (24 Sept. 1997).

The ERRC researcher states that surveys of the police academy reflect that 80 per cent of students display high levels of racism; this percentage is reportedly worse than any other student group.

Jarmila Balazova reports that two years ago the Ministry of Interior conducted a survey in the police academy (25 Sept. 1997). The students were asked whether they would help a Romani child that they saw being attacked on the street. A large majority of the students surveyed said that they would not help the Romani child (ibid.; see also CEO 30 Sept. 1997). According to an interview conducted with Balazova by Central Europe Online (CEO), “all of those who said they would not help a Roma child are now on the streets- as police officers. Every year society produces a new generation of racists and we don’t do anything about it. If the government ignores the situation then the police, lawyers and judges will be among the racists” (30 Sept. 1997). She reports that an opinion poll conducted after the last election showed that the army and police voted in a large majority, approximately 70 per cent, for extremist parties, particularly the Communist and Republican parties (ibid.; Balazova 25 Sept. 1997). Balazova believes that very often racially motivated attacks on Roma are qualified as disorderly conduct and the paragraphs qualifying an incident as racially motivated are not put into practice (25 Sept. 1997).

Utterly charming, and if recent events are anything to go by – a whole lot of nothing has changed in the Czech Republic – except the official Canadian attitude has now reverted to the worst excesses of prejudice and outright bigotry. Let us not even discuss the utterly deplorably conduct of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs towards naturalized Canadian citizens abroad. These many be your ‘Canadian values’ in action but they are certainly not mine.

Further to my post on the treatment of the Roma at the hands of EU countries, a great deal of the debate centred around the use of ‘special schools’ for upwards of 90+% of Roma children in countries like the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary. I suppose that’s so much more palatable to debate and rationalize away to North American audiences than the practice of coercive sterilization of Roma women.

Can you imagine an entire group of people whose children….down to almost every single one is incapable of learning in a regular classroom setting? It might be possible to believe it – if you were reading about historical arguments against the education of North American slaves or reading the historical debate for the need of a ‘residential school’ system for Canada’s Aboriginal population.

Except, this is exactly what the governments of the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary want us to believe in 2009. It might have even the slightest sliver of plausibility or creditability….except under the old Soviet system Roma children never made up more than 2.5% of any given population at ‘special’ schools for children with learning disabilities.

And yet, somewhere between the fall of the Soviet satellite system and the Velvet Revolutions there has been a sudden implosions in the cognitive abilities of Roma children; whereby over 90% of all children educated in the ‘special schools’ of Central Europe are Roma. What I have found is an interesting and obscure report which was submitted to the EU which detailed a great deal of ‘special’ and ‘interesting’ facts concerning the warehousing of Roma children in schools for the mentally disabled throughout Central Europe. The report is dated from March 2003 but given the same funding formula remains in place and the general European apathy towards all things Roma; I don’t suspect much of anything has changed other than racists of 2009 use a much more ‘nuanced’ argument than in the days of Jim Crow South. Check this out.

HUNGARY – SUMMARY

80. Between 1989 and 2003 we estimate that the number or Roma children in Special schools in Hungary increased from some 15,000 to 70,000.

81. During this same period the total financial transfers have been of the order of Euro 751.25 million.

82. Some Euro 75 million can be accounted for in terms of teachers salaries.

83. Some Euro 676.25 million remains unaccounted for.

CZECH – SUMMARY

84. Between 1989 and 2003 we estimate that the number of Roma children in Special schools in the Czech republic increased from 15,000 to 65,000

85. During this same period the total financial transfers have been of the order of Euro 850 million.

86. Some Euro 95 million can be accounted for in terms of teachers salaries.

87. Some Euro 755 million remains unaccounted for.

SLOVAK – SUMMARY

88. Between 1989 and 2003 we estimate that the number or Roma children in Special schools in the Slovak republic increased from 10,000 to 80,000.

89. During this same period the total financial transfers have been of the order of Euro 700 million.

90. Some Euro 54 million can be accounted for in terms of teachers salaries.

91. Some Euro 646 million remains unaccounted for.

CENTRAL EUROPE – SUMMARY

92. The summary figures for Central Europe are provided in the graph below.

93. This shows that the number of children in Special schools are estimated to have risen from some 40,000 in 1989 to 215,000 in 2003 in spite of the prolonged discussions and undertakings with the European Union to reduce their number and in direct contravention of Article 13 of the European Treaty.

94. Some Euro 2.30 billion was transferred out to local authorities under the Special school scheme during this same period and around Euro 224 million can be accounted for in expenditures of extra teacher salaries.

95.This leaves, for Central Europe as a whole a total of some Euro 2..076 billion not being accounted for within the education domain.

Well, well. It looks like the Roma still have a great many lessons to learn about the art of boosting from their Euro-compatriots.

So much for the ‘Decade of Inclusion’ and all of which makes a mockery about the so-called scholarship funds allegedly set aside for Roma students throughout the the EU. But really now – if hardly any one Roma ever leaves the special schools for the mentally challenged – what is the point of scholarships for post-secondary training or education?

Effective immediately, all Czech citizens are now required to produce a valid visa to enter Canada. Why centre out the Czechs? Well it seems the number of Czech citizens making asylum requests to find safe refuge in Canada has expended exponentially in the first quarter of this year but these are not ordinary Czechs. In fact, you would be hard pressed to find a Czech who would even recognize these citizens as Czech nationals. You see, these are the Rom or in the English vernacular – Gypsies. The one ethnic group everyone and their grandmother is allowed to openly despise or oppress in good conscience and without fear of repercussions.

I want to quote at length of a speech given by .Mr. Paul Polansky on December 14, 1995 to a meeting of Holocaust historians at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC. Its important to understand the deep apathy and hatred the Czech held the Roma in long before 2009.

I would like to dedicate this speech today to Mr. Dusan Eremias. Dusan used to be the editor of a Romany magazine in the Czech Republic until the President’s office complained to the Minister of Minorities about an article Dusan had published, an article that was highly critical of the Czech government’s failure to live up to the Helsinki Agreements on the preservation of WW II death camps. This year the Czech government closed down for good that Romany magazine, Amaro Lav, and Dusan lost not only his job, but also his right to Czech citizenship. Today he lives in Presov, Slovakia, working part time at the age of fifty-one as a musician in a cheap restaurant. What is so unfortunate about this case is that this was the first time in his journalism career that Dusan had ever published anything remotely critical of the Czech government. Dusan is not a protester, a political activist. He is a dapper little man, with short gray hair, always impeccably dressed in a suit and tie. He is one of the few Romany in the Czech Republic to hold a university degree. But Dusan thought his people, the Romany of the Czech Republic, should know something about their unfortunate past. No newspaper in the Czech Republic had until then informed their readers that during WW II the Czechs had operated a death camp where thousands of Romany were murdered. The article about this camp actually was a paper I had presented to a Human Rights congress in 1994 in Warsaw, Poland, attended by 58 countries including the Czech Republic. Several governmental delegations and numerous NGOs were so vehement in their attacks against the Czech government for their new citizenship law, which was compared to the Nuremberg Laws of 1939, that I thought my paper was completely ignored. But someone passed it to Dusan who, unfortunately for him and his government-sponsored magazine, published it.

Today I would like to tell you something about racism in the Czech Republic, that death camp, and how 500,000 Romany are struggling to survive because of the Velvet Revolution. Racism has never been defined in the Czech Republic, although an attempt was made last month in Prague, at a seminar under the patronage of thePresident of the Czech Republic. The title of that seminar was: “Racism, Yesterday and Today.” Ironically, all the speakers were white. There was only one dark-skinned Romany in the audience and when he asked for permission to speak, he was denied.

The first day and a half of the seminar was devoted to speeches about how the Nazis had brought racism to the Czech Republic during WW II. As far as the seminar was concerned, racism never existed until the Nazis invented it. It doesn’t take much research to find centuries of racism in the crown lands of St. Wenceslaus. From the 15th century until as late as WW I, Gypsies in Bohemia and Moravia were so unwanted that it was not uncommon to see a Gypsy hanging from the village gate as a deterrent to other Gypsies to stay away. In fact, it was common practice right up to WW I to cut off the left ear of a Gypsy who wandered into a Czech town where he was not wanted.

I think it is important to understand this racism prior to WW II in Czechoslovakia, because what happened next and what is happening today has its roots firmly entrenched in that violent racial past. In 1938, the New York Times reported, in an article about Gypsies in eastern Europe, that the best authorities estimated about 35,000 Romanies lived in Bohemia and Moravia, with several times more that number in Slovakia. This report for me is very interesting, because no one has been able to find a census for Gypsies. Today the Czech government says their country had no more than 6,000 Gypsies prior to WW II. The discrepancy in figures is important because at the end of WW II, everyone agrees there were only about 80 Gypsies left in what is today the Czech Republic.

After the treaty of Versailles, one of the most publicly debated issues the first government of Czechoslovakia had to deal with was what to do with the unwanted Gypsies in their new country. Although the Czechs had promised the allies that all minorities in the newly created country of Czechoslovakia would have equal rights, President Masaryk personally vetoed citizenship status for Gypsies. Long before Hitler came to power in Germany, there were calls in Czechoslovakia to get rid of their Gypsy minority. Bitter discussions were held in parliament while editorials appeared in many newspapers demanding the government find a solution to the Gypsy problem. Several proposals were made to send the “blacks of Bohemia” to darkest Africa. The less extreme proposals were to put Gypsies into camps, camps to teach them how to work. Thus plans were already being made to sort out the Gypsies in Czechoslovakia when the Germans arrived in 1939. In fact a law to intern Gypsies was passed by the Czechs before Hitler’s troops marched in. By August 1940, the first camp for Gypsies was established in Czechoslovakia near a village called Lety in southern Bohemia. Lety was the official camp for all Gypsies who lived in Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia, the three kingdoms that today make up the Czech Republic. The first Gypsies arrested in 1940 were taken to Lety to build the camp on a Czechoslovakian army base. The contractor for the camp was Schwarzenberg Enterprises, owned by Prince Karel Schwarzenberg, who lived 2 kilometers away in his castle. He later used Gypsy and Jewish slave labor from Lety and another camp during the war.

From the very first day the camp was opened, local doctors were recruited to attended to the prisoners. One doctor who worked at the camp and who is still alive told me that he quit after a year because the Czech commander didn’t pay him enough. I think this is a very significant detail, because today the Czech government says that all Czechs who worked at the camp were forced to do so by the Germans.

Canada’s own minister of immigration, Jason Kenny June 2009:

“The report, as I’ve read it, says there are difficulties for Roma in the Czech Republic, we all know that, but the government is doing its best to improve the legal treatment of, and economic opportunities for, members of that community,” Kenney told Canwest News Service on Thursday. “The Czech Republic is a full member of the European Union and in compliance with the European human rights law, and I think the report underscores that there is no policy of state-sponsored persecution against Czech Roma.”

Really now. Let’s roll to this You Tube report on the Czech government’s educational outreach opportunities to the Roma community circa November 2008.

The Czech government after WW2 continued a policy of coercive forced sterilization of Roma women whenever the opportunity arose. The Czech government at first denied it but eventually was forced to own up and allegedly rescind the policy in the early ’90’s. While that policy has now been rescinded, accounts are still surfacing concerning the forced sterilizations of Roma women as of 2001.

The deep hatred and bigotry which justified such a horrendous practice in the first place is still very much alive in the Czech Republic and runs rife throughout the European Union.

Those Canadians who object to the very idea of a Roma making an application for refugee status in Canada justify their blatant ignorance and racism by saying there are at least 25 other European Union countries the Roma could move to from the Czech Republic but can a safe harbour be found in any EU country for the Roma? Let’s see what Italy has to offer.

The real issue for Canada’s Conservative government is not that the Roma from the Czech Republic have made unfounded refugee claims and the government is overtly concerned with its ability to summarily deported the failed Roma applicants after their applications have run its course though the Canadian refugee system but that the majority of Roma applicants would easily meet the criteria for refugee status defined by any measurable standard used. And if you are the Canadian minister of immigration circa 2009, it appears – just one Rom is one too many. My how things change, not.