And Poland's Roma?

Poland's Roma community battles discrimination

The Association of Roma in Poland is located near Auschwitz, where German Nazis murdered more than 1 million people. Speaking to DW, spokesman Wladyslaw Kwiatkowski says the community still faces discrimination today.

DW: How many Roma live in Poland today and what is their living situation like?

Wladyslaw Kwiatkowski: Today there are probably about 25,000 to 30,000 Roma in Poland. Although the situation has gotten better over the years, there is still a lot of discrimination — not here in Oswiecim [Editor's note: the town near Auschwitz where the Association of Roma in Poland is headquartered], this is Auschwitz and a lot of people travel here. But in other cities like Katowice, Warsaw or Gdansk there are problems between Roma and other Poles. There are also problems in a little town not too far from here. Business owners there tell people: "You're Roma, you can't come in here." Minorities are also discriminated against when looking for housing. That town is just 30 kilometers [18.6 miles] from here. Our organization intervened and the situation has gotten a bit better.

Few in Germany are aware of the mass killing of Sinti and Roma during the Second World War. How is the situation in Poland?

The situation is similar in Poland. Many say: "Genocide of Roma? No." But there was indeed a Roma Holocaust, one comparable to the Holocaust of the Jews. When we refer to the Jewish Holocaust we say Shoah, when we refer to the Roma Holocaust we say Porajmos, which means "The Devouring."

Our organization worked with the minister of education to develop a program that allows the topic to be dealt with in schools. Now, when children learn about the Shoah, they also learn about the Porajmos. Unfortunately, there are very few survivors to relate their experiences [to younger generations].

On the night of August 1-2, 1944, the last 2,900 prisoners of the so-called Gypsy Family Camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau were murdered — many of them children and their mothers, as well as elderly people. How do you commemorate that day?

We have been organizing the commemoration along with the Heidelberg Sinti and Roma Center for more than two decades. On August 1, we gather at the place where Crematorium No. 5 once stood, and on August 2, we meet for a memorial at the former Gypsy Family Camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Participants come from Poland, Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, France — from many European countries.

What changes would you like to see to improve the lives of Roma in Poland today?

That is a good question. We do not speak about politics but the most important thing would be improving education: Education for Poles, education for Roma — for everyone who lives here, so that we can succeed in living together.

Like his father Roman, Wladyslaw Kwiatkowski works for the Association of Roma in Poland. During the Nazi era the Kwiatkowskis lost more than 100 family members in concentration camps, executions and death marches. Wladyslaw Kwiatkowski's grandmother was the victim of tests carried out at Auschwitz by Nazi SS doctor Josef Mengele.

Less than 20 miles from Auschwitz, where once they shouted “Jews out”, football fans chant “Gypsies out”.

The small Roma community of Andrychow is living in fear since Polish far-right groups began a campaign of harassment against them.

The campaign began with a rally last month where the chant “Cyganies raus” (Gypsies or Roma out) was heard and has continued with social media and intimidation.

Roman Kwiatkowski, head of the Association of Roma in Poland, said Andrychow is the first case he has seen of an organised anti-Roma campaign in the country. “It is very dangerous,” he said. “It does not allow us to look to the future with confidence.”

Roma residents say they are living in fear.

Human rights campaigners believe the situation is being exacerbated by activists from outside the town who are being advised by the Jobbik party in Hungary on how to emulate their success.

Tamas Fodor, a Jobbik activist who was in Warsaw this month for meetings with like-minded Poles, denied his movement was giving recommendations to anyone in Poland.

“But if they see something that worked in Hungary, they can use it,” he said.

The football fans were shouting at a rally organised by Robert Winnicki, a far-right leader from Warsaw who said all the 100 or so ethnic Roma living in a town of 20,000 people should be driven out.

Jobbik’s tactic has been to hold rallies blaming Roma for crime and social grievances. They then recruit local youths into vigilante patrols, with the stated aim of protecting citizens from the Roma.

In Andrychow last month, a pregnant Roma woman was attacked as she walked in the street. Soon after, two young ethnic Poles were beaten up in what many residents assumed was a Roma revenge attack.

Anger erupted. Supporters of the local football club, Beskid Andrychow, set up a page on Facebook. It published accounts of what it said were violent attacks by Roma, and photographs of ethnic Poles it said had been beaten up. The page has now been “liked” by 14,182 people. One post read: “We’re not going to sit quietly and pretend that everything is OK. We are shouting long and loud: enough of Gypsy impunity!”

The Roma community said the patrols by football fans were still going on at weekends. They now only go out at night to get essentials from the shops, and then, never alone. One man, Rafal Strauss, said the community had started keeping their children home from school. Two Roma woman said they had heard that ethnic Poles in at least local two apartment blocks had submitted petitions to the city authorities asking that Roma neighbours be moved out – an assertion that could not be verified.

Another Roma man, Mieczyslaw Pankowski, said he was now too scared to take his  seven-year-old disabled daughter for treatment in a nearby town and the family lived in fear of attacks at night: “We take it in turns to keep watch,” he said. “We’re frightened to go to sleep in case someone throws a bottle through the window.”

Party officials from Jobbik and Ruch Narodowy – an umbrella organisation for far-right groups – said that the events in Andrychow were a spontaneous, grassroots upsurge of anger. The politicians were only there to help, they said.

But they acknowledge that the example of how Jobbik grew on the back of anti-Roma sentiment may have been an influence. “I think that the organisers may have viewed certain successes in Hungary as an inspiration,” said  Winnicki.

Events in Andrychow indicate that Jobbik – snubbed even by many west European far-right parties as anti-Semitic and racist – is spreading its ideology beyond Hungary’s borders, in this case to Poland – by far the biggest and most influential ex-Soviet bloc state in the European Union.

The Romani people
The Romani people, also referred to depending on the sub-group as Roma, Sinti or Sindhi, or Kale are an Indo-Aryan ethnic group, who live primarily in Europe. Wikipedia says the Romani originated in northwest regions of the Indian subcontinent and left sometime between the 6th and 11th century to work in Middle Eastern courts of their own volition, or as slaves. A small number of nomadic groups were cut off from their return to the subcontinent by conflicts and moved west, eventually settling in Europe, Turkey and North Africa via Iran.

Wikipedia also references the notion that the Romani have been described as unique among peoples because:

Romani have never identified themselves with a territory; 

Romani have no tradition of an ancient and distant homeland from which their ancestors migrated: 

Romani make no claim regarding the right to national sovereignty in any of the lands where they reside: 

Romani identity is bound up with the ideal of freedom expressed, in part, in having no ties to a homeland.

Migration of Romani Peoples 12th - 16th centuries

The absence of traditional origin stories and of a written history has meant that the origin and early history of the Romani people was long an enigma. Indian origin was suggested on linguistic grounds as early as the late 18th century.

One origin theory, among several suggests that the ancestors of the Romani were part of the military in Northern India. When there were invasions by Sultan Mahmud Ghaznavi and these soldiers were defeated, they were moved west with their families into the Byzantine Empire between AD 1000 and 1030.

The genetic evidence has positively identified an Indian origin for Roma. Genetic evidence connects the Romani people to the descendants of groups which emigrated from South Asia towards Central Asia during the medieval period.

The Roma people have a number of distinct populations, the largest being the Roma and the Iberian Calé or Caló, who reached Anatolia and the Balkans about the early 12th century, from a migration out of northwestern India beginning about 600 years earlier. They settled in present-day Turkey, Greece, Serbia, Romania, Croatia, Moldova, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Hungary and Slovakia, by order of volume, and Spain. From the Balkans, they migrated throughout Europe and, in the nineteenth and later centuries, to the Americas.

As of the early 2000s, an estimated 4 to 9 million Romani people lived in Europe and Asia Minor. although some Romani organizations estimate numbers as high as 14 million. Significant Romani populations are found in the Balkan peninsula, in some Central European states, in Spain, France, Russia, and Ukraine. 

Romani people in Poland are one of Poland's recognized ethnic minorities.
 
According to the Polish census of 2011, 17049 people in Poland declared themselves as Romani people.
 
The recorded history of the Romani people in Poland dates to the 15th century.
 
Major ethnic subgroups of Romani people in Poland are: the Polska Roma, the Bergitka (Carpathian) Roma, Kalderash and Lovari.