Uncovering the Past (Roma Holocaust in Slovakia)

World War II ended more than 60 years ago, but the Roma Holocaust in Slovakia is only now being recognized.

Tens of thousands of Roma in Europe were among the victims of the Holocaust, but many Slovaks still don’t know that people other than Jews were victims of persecution during World War II. Only recently, moving stories of Roma survivors have begun to emerge. Those survivors are finally seeing their pain acknowledged in memorials, and some have even received compensation.

The Roma Holocaust is called Baro Porrajmos in the Roma language, which literally means large losses of human lives or “the Devouring.” Porrajmos is a strong word, reflecting the most traumatizing period in the history of Roma. Like some other ethnic groups, Roma were considered by the Nazis an inferior race leeching off the rest of the population.

Many Romani survivors, like 77-year-old Jozef Balogh, are still reluctant to talk about their experiences. Balogh, who lives in the eastern Slovak town of Kosice, was deported to the Dachau concentration camp in Germany when he was 16 years old. He said he still hears the shouting and swearing of the SS officers.

“They deported us from Kosice, along with the Jews, like cattle in wagons, to the town of Moldava nad Bodvou [eastern Slovakia],” Balogh said. “The same day, in the evening, they deported us to Hungary to an underground prison in [the town of] Komarom Dunantul. About a month later they deported us to Dachau. There I experienced terror. You cannot imagine what it is to wake up in the morning with dead people lying next to you. It is hard to talk about what I had to experience there. Hunger, misery, fights.”

Balogh called the morning lineups “horrible,” recalling one in which an SS officer clubbed to death 10 to 20 people. “I can still hear it all today,” he said. Horrible, too, were the experiments the Nazis conducted on him. Once, an SS officer held a gun to the head of a Polish doctor, who was forced to experiment on Balogh, he said. He never found out what the Nazis were trying to discover. Balogh would not talk in detail about the experiments, but he said they stressful but not painful.

Balogh was the first Rom in Slovakia to receive financial compensation for his forced work for the Third Reich from the German foundation Erinnerung, Verantwortung, und Zukunft (Remembrance, Responsibility, and Future). The Berlin-based foundation was created in 2000 by German law to financially compensate former forced laborers and others victimized by the Nazi regime.

Zuzana Kumanova, a Slovak expert on Roma history and culture, said Roma were not compensated as a group after World War II, although compensation could be claimed individually, provided the claim was supported by evidence of suffering. Between 2001 and 2004, the International Organization for Migration distributed financial aid to Slovak Roma born before 1945 who survived the war, in what was the first formal recognition of their suffering, as a group, in 60 years.

But Kumanova said this is hardly real compensation for the Holocaust. The public knows what happened during the Holocaust, but few people know that it also happened to the Roma, she said, adding that the persecution that Roma endured during World War II was largely dismissed after the 1945 liberation. Many crimes have not been investigated and the perpetrators have never been punished. Even most Roma themselves believe that suffering and subjugation must be quickly forgotten.

In 1940, SS leader Heinrich Himmler ordered the first transport of Roma to the Zigeunerlager, or Gypsy camp, where they were sterilized and used as laborers for the German ammunition industry. In 1942, deportations intensified and Roma were transported to a special “Gypsy” concentration camp in Auschwitz II-Birkenau. Romani prisoners wore tops with black triangles and had a tattoo on the forearm with a number and a “Z,” for the German word for Gypsy, Zigeuner. More than 22,000 Roma entered Auschwitz and more than 19,000 starved to death, succumbed to disease or were gassed, according to historical accounts.

On the night of 2 August 1944, the “Gypsy” concentration camp in Auschwitz II-Birkenau was shut down. Some of the Roma from the camp were transported to the concentration camps at Buchenwald, where 918 Roma prisoners from across Europe were deported, and Ravensbruck. But the rest, 2,897 Romani men, women, and children, were killed in gas chambers in a single night. Following lobbying in the early 1990s, particularly by Polish and international Roma organizations, the day of 2 August has been known unofficially since 1994 as the International Day or Remembrance of the Roma Holocaust. Since then, every year, memorial vigils for the victims take place in the former “Gypsy” camps.

According to estimates, some 300,000 European Roma died during World War II. In Slovakia, Roma were persecuted but were not herded en masse into concentration camps, according to Kumanova. Instead, Slovakia had work camps where hundreds of Roma died building railroads, reservoirs, and roads, according to Kumanova. The last major work camp was in Ustie nad Oravou, central Slovakia, where Roma helped build Oravska priehrada, the largest reservoir in Slovakia, she said.

The largest work camp, in operation from 1942 to 1944, was in Dubnica nad Vahom, western Slovakia. Entire Romani families from Slovakia were transported to this camp, which Kumanova said could also be considered a concentration camp. “The conditions [in Dubnica nad Vahom] were extremely harsh,” she said. “There were large numbers of detainees and nearly no hygiene. No access to medicine and severe malnourishment caused diseases to spread. Children and old people, especially, died.”

In February 1945, typhus broke out in the Dubnica nad Vahom camp. Germans, who were running the camp at the time, found a radical solution. On 23 February, pretending that they were transporting the sick Roma to the hospital, German troops instead trucked them to an ammunition factory and shot them. Not all died immediately, and some were buried alive. The Nazis buried the 26 Roma – 19 men, a 15-year-old boy, and six women, including one seven-months pregnant – in a common grave. Toward the end of the war, the camp was shut down, Kumanova said.

Slovak Roma were among those who took part in the Slovak National Uprising in August 1944, which started in the central Slovak town of Banska Bystrica and sought to oust the pro-Nazi government. Hundreds of Roma died in the fighting, and after the uprising was suppressed by Nazi occupation troops in October, repression of the locals, including Roma, intensified. Many were imprisoned, tortured, and sometimes killed on the spot. Roma were executed in the towns of Cierny Balog, Svaty Kriz nad Hronom, and Motycky-Stubna, in central Slovakia. Others were deported and murdered in Kremnicka, Nemecka, and Kovacova, and in the Jewish cemetery in Zvolen, all towns in central Slovakia. Most Roma victims were from the village of Ilija, also in central Slovakia, Kumanova said.

FORGETTING THE PAST? Although there are many memorials, obelisks, and reverent commemorations of World War II in Slovakia, until recently few, if any, mentioned the Roma as victims. But in 1995, officials in Cierny Balog built a memorial to Romani victims. Then in 2005 the Ministry of Culture launched a project called Ma bisteren! (“Don’t forget!” in the Romani language), organized with the help of the Slovak National Museum in Bratislava, the Museum of the Slovak National Uprising in Banska Bystrica, and the In Minorita civic association, which focuses on projects that mix Romani and mainstream culture. Ma bisteren! aims to remind the public about persecution of Roma in various towns by unveiling seven memorials, particularly in the southern part of Slovakia, which was Hungarian territory under the rule of dictator Miklos Horthy de Nagybanya during World War II.

The first of these seven memorials was unveiled on 2 August 2005 at the Slovak National Uprising Museum. The same day, the museum launched an exhibition on the Roma Holocaust in Slovakia.

Although Kumanova said the exhibition has gotten an enthusiastic response, she said, “Sixty years is really too long to [wait to] honor the memory of the murdered Roma. Moreover, most of the people who survived World War II are dead now.” She thinks the Roma Holocaust was not recognized for so long because of the communist regime’s policy of assimilation and its refusal to acknowledge ethnic identity. “There have been talks on concrete numbers of victims, but the fact that the reason for their torture, forced labor, and murder was ethnicity has never been recognized.”

After 1989, with gradual ethnic emancipation, Roma began to become aware of the reasons behind their people’s persecution during World War II. Yet most historical accounts of the war and the Holocaust written during the 1990s did not deal with the plight of the Roma. With some exceptions, historians didn’t seem interested, and many eyewitnesses refused to talk about their war experiences, Kumanova said.

Frantisek Toth, the Slovak minister of culture, said the government is interested in raising awareness about the suffering of Roma during the Nazi era, but he said efforts are hampered by a lack of information. Unlike the Jewish Holocaust, which has spurred countless publications, articles, and films, the hardships of the Roma during and after the war have received little discussion until recently, Toth said. The ministry has a program of grants for groups trying to bring to light the plight of the Roma during the Holocaust.

But Kumanova said that there is lack of information on both sides. Non-Roma are often astonished when they hear about work camps for Roma, killing of entire Romani communities, and deportation to death camps from the southern territories of Slovakia. On the other hand, Roma know their local history and have heard about the tragedy of their ancestors. Both sides need more information, Kumanova says.

“In order to avoid ethnic intolerance, racial prejudice, and negative stereotyping, the important thing is to realize that such situations [like the Roma Holocaust] could under some circumstances happen again,” Kumanova said.

Klara Orgovanova, the Slovak government’s commissioner for Roma affairs, said, “These days, it’s important to remind particularly young people of this. It’s at once a question of knowing the history and [heeding] a warning for the future.”

What a bunch of crap. First of all, the Catholic Church in no way supported the mass murder of Serbs by anyone, anywhere, anytime. Second, the fact that the Croats were Catholic is essentially meaningless. At least 50% of the Germans who killed Serbs for more than three years were Protestants. Does anyone ever bother to even say that? No. Why? Because it really has nothing to do with it.

Third, 750,000? Don't be so sure.

From C. Michael McAdams:

MYTH: "TWO MILLION SERBS DIED"
Myth: Between 500,000 and 2,000,000 Serbs were murdered by the Croatian government during World War II.

Reality: The exact number of war victims in Yugoslavia during World War II may never be known due to fifty years of intentional disinformation by the Yugoslavian and Serbian governments, Serbian exile groups, and others. However, it is likely that approximately one million people of all nationalities died of war-related causes in all of Yugoslavia during World War II and that as many as 125,000 Serbs died of war-related causes in Croatia during the War.

The question of war losses during World War II represents the most divisive, heated and emotional issue among all of the nationalities of the former Yugoslavia during the post-War period. The bloody multi-sided War in Yugoslavia involved the German, Italian, Ustashe, Partisan, Domobran, White Guard, Slovenian Guard and at least four different; Cetnik armies. The multifaceted war pitted Serbs against Serbs, Croatians against Croatians, Serbs against Croatians, and Serbian Orthodox against Catholics and Muslims. The loss of life was heavy and difficult to document. As the war progressed and even long after the war ended, the mythology of the numbers of victims continued to grow.

The Growing Numbers

On the question of the number of Serbs killed in Croatia, it became possible to simply pick a number and virtually any press medium in the world would publish the figure without question. In one sixty day period in late 1991, David Martin put the number at 500,000 in the New York Times; Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic at 750,000 in USA Today; Josif Djordjevich at 1,200,000 in the San Francisco Chronicle; Teddy Preuss at 1,500,000 in the Jerusalem Post; and, setting an all-time record, Peter Jennings' ABC News program set the figure at a record 2,000,000. Further, each of the sources added a separate twist to the number. For some, the number represented total "killed," for others "murdered," others "murdered in concentration camps," and still others did not define how the losses occurred. None listed any source for the figures. To illustrate the magnitude of these charges, it would require killing one person every 90 seconds, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week for the entire duration of the War to reach Mr. Preuss' figure of 1,500,000. The fact is one million people did not die in Croatia from all causes during the War. Many scholars doubt that there were a million lives lost to war-related causes in all of Yugoslavia during World War II.

Yet this mythology runs deeper than virtually any other. As early as April 1942 the Serbian Orthodox Church in America, based upon Mihailovic's reports, claimed that over one million Serbs had already been killed in Croatia. As the war progressed, the numbers continued to grow in the Serbian press until actually exceeding the number of Serbs in Croatia. It must be noted that no Croatian troops set foot in Serbia during World War II. Thus all accounting of Serbian losses must be for those living in Croatia, Bosnia and Hercegovnia.

Post-War Accountability

After World War II, the Communist Yugoslav government set the total demographic losses for all of Yugoslavia from all causes at 1,700,000. The figure was never verified and was contradicted by demographic data comparisons between the Yugoslav census of 1931 and 1948. Nevertheless, this figure, which included natural mortality and decreased birth rate, was presented to the West German government for war reparations. At the same time, the Belgrade media began circulation of the figure 750,000 Jews, Gypsies and Serbs killed in Croatia during the War. By 1958 the number 750,000 was used to describe losses at a single camp, Jasenovac. Such high numbers were used not only to gain additional war reparations from Germany, but also to legitimize the Communist governments' role in saving the peoples of Yugoslavia from the horrors of nationalism. Germany refused to accept the 1.7 million figure and demanded documentation. On June 10, 1964 the Yugoslav government secretly ordered that the exact statistics regarding war victims be assembled. The task was completed in the Socialist Republic of Croatia by the Center for the Scientific Documentation of the Institute for the History of the Worker's Movement in Zagreb. By early November, the data had been collected and were sent to the Federal Institute for Statistics in Belgrade. When the data were tabulated, excluding Axis forces, the actual figure was 597,323 deaths for all of Yugoslavia. Of these, 346,740 were Serbians and 83,257 were Croatians for all of Yugoslavia. These figures excluded the deaths of any person who died fighting for the Cetniks, Ustase, regular Croatian Army, Slovenian Home Guards or serving in the German or Italian Armies. The government returned the data for re-tabulation and the figures were confirmed and provided to Germany.

The Data Made Public

In July of 1969, Bruno Busic, an associate at the Center for Scientific Documentation, published data from the 1964 study showing that 185,327 people were thought to have died of all causes in Croatia during the War and that 64,245 may have died in German or Croatian prisons or concentration camps. In September of that year the magazine that published the data was banned and Busic was arrested in 1971. After serving two years in prison he escaped to Paris where he wrote several monographs on political prisoners in Croatia. He was murdered in Paris in October 1978 by the Yugoslav Secret Police. In 1985, the Serbian scholar Bogoljub Kocovic published a major scholarly research work which put the figure for total demographic losses in all of Yugoslavia at 1,985,000 of which 971,000 were war-related. Of these 487,000 were Serbs killed anywhere in Yugoslavia by any side including Germans, Italians, Croatians, Albanians, Hungarians, Soviets, American bombing or by other Serbs. Kocovic concluded that some 125,000 Serbs and 124,000 Croatians died in Croatia during World War II. Kocovic also noted what many previous demographers had ignored. The first post-war census was taken in 1948 and "it is fully justified to take into account these post-war victims of communist terror," in reference to the thousands of Croatians slaughtered in late 1945 and 1946 in what have come to be called the Bleiburg Massacres. In 1989 The Yugoslav Victimological Society and the Zagreb Jewish Community published what is now considered the definitive work by Vladimir Zerjavic which set total war losses at 1,027,000 of which 530,000 were Serbs and 192,000 Croatians. 131,000 Serbs and 106,000 Croatians were listed as having died of all war-related causes in Croatia.

The Myth Grows On

Regardless of which scholarly study is consulted, no study has ever reached the figures so casually thrown about in the media. And despite all scholarly evidence to the contrary, in 1992 the Serbian Ministry of Information in Belgrade continued to claim that 600,000 Serbs were killed and the President of Serbia claimed 750,000 were killed by the Croatians during World War II. The Western media, unfettered by any need for factual documentation not only published these numbers, but, as in the case of ABC News, increased them by over one million victims. The Serbian scholar Bogoljub Kocovic best summarized the dilemma of those who would dare to seek the truth in this complex and volatile history:

Very soon it dawned upon me that the major obstacle to my work would be the myths created over four decades about the number of victims, myths by now deeply implanted in the soul of the people of all religions, political beliefs and nationality; myths which, by repetition became a 'reality'. There will be many who will reject my study because it does not conform to their beliefs...Many of them are looking for spiritual food to ignite their hatred of the Croats.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.