Breaking the silence of a forgotten genocide

Shaved heads

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On January 27, as we celebrated the International Day of Remembrance of the Victims of the Holocaust, the European Roma Rights Center shared testimonies of Roma from around the world who answered a simple question: “What is your story about the Roma genocide? ”

Reading these testimonies, I realized that I did not know enough about my own story. When I was a child, my paternal grandmother told me that the Nazis came to her village in Serbia and shaved her head because they said that Roma people were dirty and had lice. I was only eight at the time, and I didn't ask him any more questions. So that's all I knew, before January 27, about my family's history during the Holocaust.

That night, after reading several testimonies, I started looking in databases for the names of people locked up in concentration camps in former Yugoslavia. I found my grandmother's but the birth date didn't match. I asked my uncle, “How come the Nazis shaved his head? Was she imprisoned? According to him, she had not been imprisoned. He explained to me that the officers had come to the village to incarcerate the Roma, but that seeing the kindness of my great-grandfather, they had spared his family.

However, an officer decided to shave the head of one of his six daughters — my grandmother Radmila — who had long black hair. My grandmother, like many Roma women, had her hair up to her hips until the very end of her life. Now I can better understand why they were so dear to him. The next day, I discuss it with my mother and she tells me without emotion: “My grandfather was also imprisoned, the whole family was imprisoned at the time, I don't know if my father was imprisoned anymore.”

I don't know the rest of these stories yet, my grandparents are all dead. Traditionally, among the Roma, we don't talk about death, and very rarely about our misfortunes. We have a saying: “The dead with the dead, and the living with the living.” At the age of 85, Lajos Molnar is breaking the silence. In the company of his 11-year-old granddaughter and his daughter Kristin, he tells us about his experience. He wanted his granddaughter to be there. “She's pretty big now, she needs to know,” he told Kristin before the interview. Mr Molnar was born in Budapest, Hungary. At the start of the war, he was five years old. “From 1941, I remember everything, every second of the war,” he tells us in the garden of his house in Montreal. He too had his head shaved during the war. “I was completely bald, the Nazis said we were dirty and full of lice. We had to shave our heads; it was to recognize ourselves,” he explains.

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Saved by music

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At the start of the war, Mr Molnar's father was in the Hungarian army in Russia. He returned to Hungary in 1943. Six months later, the militias picked him up and took him to a concentration camp, because he was Roma. “When they needed us for the army, we were Hungarians, but after that, it was over, we were Gypsies,” he said. Four months later, the father of the family managed to flee the ghetto and returned to the village. “The same evening, at 2 or 3 am, the militia came to our house and said: “We are looking for Mr. Molnar; he escaped from the ghetto.” My dad hid under the feather mattress on the bed. I lay on the bed and they didn't see it. We were lucky that they didn't have a dog with them, because if they had found it, we would all have been machine-gunned in the yard,” recalls the octogenarian. The next day, the whole family left the village of Cinkota for Budapest. “We all took refuge in an empty house in Budapest.

At some point there was bombing, and we all hid in the basement. We were there in the cellar, we did nothing, and then we waited to die,” explains Mr. Molnar.

“One day, militias came looking for us. We were reported. There were then nearly 200 people in the cellar. They took us out around 3 or 4 am and put us up against the wall to kill us. My dad was the last to leave the building. All of a sudden, the officer recognized my father and said, “Lajos, I have to kill you; no, that's not true, we're leaving.” He recognized my father, who, before the war, had played with his orchestra in an officers' club.” Music saved the Molnar family more than once. In the spring of 1945, before the end of the war, the Russians came to look for the Germans in the houses of Budapest. For the Molnars, the Russians were as terrifying as the Germans, since many Russian officers raped Roma women.

“My father, because he knew the Russian army, explained to me: “When you hear the sound of boots in the corridor coming towards the cellar, you will go to the door, and when you see a soldier, you will take out your violin and start playing Russian dances.” One day, an officer opened the cellar door in Budapest, and I started playing. He took off his machine gun and started dancing. He was looking for Germans and yelled, “Nemski, nemski!” I will never forget that strong little guy.”

Shortly after, the family returned to Cinkota. But fear still reigned in the family due to the rape of Roma women by Russian forces. To protect himself from it, he played Russian music on his violin, accompanied by his grandfather on the cello, as soon as a Russian soldier approached the family home. “That's how we saved our mother, our aunts, the women. Every time a car stopped, we played,” Mr. Molnar tells us. His aunt and cousin were not so lucky. They were locked up in Auschwitz. “We didn't know what happened with them. My cousin was raped repeatedly, she practically went crazy,” he recalls. However, the women survived.

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Aftereffects over several generations

Kristin Molnar, Lajos' daughter, grew up in Montreal. She heard about the Holocaust around the age of eight from books. When she got to high school, she came across a series of books on the subject, but said very little about Roma. “I was reading that, and it was physically hurting me,” she explains. Around 16, one day when she was watching a documentary on the Holocaust, she fell to the ground. “My legs gave out, I was in pain and I started to cry,” she recalls. The subject of the Second World War was not often raised by his father, who told him about his experience in snippets.

It was when we met that she heard the whole story chronologically for the first time. She still notices the effects on her daily life. “I remember a summer a few years ago when I asked her to go look for chairs in the cellar. He told me: “Listen darling, I am not able to go down into a cellar, I am afraid””, she said.

“In Hungary, in my family and in all of Romance, we never talk about that. It's like another humiliating case,” she adds. Andras (fictional first name) is 18 years old. He comes from Miskolc, Hungary, where he experienced racial segregation and neo-Nazi attacks. He does not want to give his real name, as he fears attacks by Hungarian neo-Nazis living in Canada. He discovered the story of his family during Porajmos here just three years ago during a school presentation at his high school in Toronto, where he has lived since 2016. “Here, the community commemorates the Roma Holocaust every year,” he explains.

So I decided to present it and started to be interested in my family history.” After a few calls to his aunts in Hungary, he learned that his family had been a victim of the Holocaust. “My great-great-uncle and great-great-aunt were locked up in Auschwitz. They never came back. During the war, my great-grandmother was raped by Russian soldiers in our village.”

Now he would like this story to be shared from generation to generation in his family. “We need to talk about it, because there is still denial. It is a story that is still unknown, which is absent from our history courses. We need to keep talking about it until we get respect because our history and our suffering are still being denied,” he exclaims. Andras sees similarities between the stories told by his aunts and those he experienced and experienced by Roma in Europe. “When I was four, neo-Nazis came to my village to attack Roma.

They surrounded my house — I still remember how I cried, I was afraid to die, I was afraid my parents would be killed. It is not normal to experience this in a country that is a member of the European Union”, he denounces. These events prompted many young people to learn about the Second World War.

“Several young people from Miskolc have begun to be interested in this part of our history because of the racism of today,” he reports. A finding shared by the Roma journalist and artist Gilda Horvath, who lives in Austria. According to her, the annual commemoration in Auschwitz, where several young Roma meet every August 2, puts into perspective their daily lives that are still full of hate. “It is important to include ourselves in the blind spots of history,” she pleads. Ms. Horvath's great-aunt, Ceija Stojka, was an Auschwitz survivor who long campaigned for the recognition of the Roma Holocaust.

She made numerous paintings about the Holocaust. Today, Ms. Horvath is praising her in museums across Europe and organizing commemorative events. “When she shared her experience with me, I realized that her story is the story of my ancestors — it didn't strike me before,” she explains.

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Dignity

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For Elena Catalina Gauthier, a Roma from Romania adopted by a couple of Quebecers when she was a child, learning the history of the Roma during the Second World War allowed her to better understand her journey. Today, she lives in Rimouski and discovers her origins through her reading. For the past three months, the 30-year-old has been learning about the Roma genocide during the Second World War.

Growing up in the region, everything she knew about her people was negative and full of stereotypes. “I agree that being Roma didn't mean much to me growing up. It was frowned upon, even in my family,” she says. So she has never heard of the Roma as having been victims of the Second World War.

“They never told me about the fact that they were marked with a T or a Z, that they were locked up in concentration camps. There is a whole part of the story that I did not know. Reading this story allowed me to reconnect with my origins, to understand that the Roma form a nation,” she tells us. Back in Lajos's garden with his daughter and granddaughter, the survivor tells us how his experiences affected his self-esteem.

“I had the feeling that I was a piece of shit, that I could not accept being who I am,” he says, reflecting on the years when he was ashamed of his Roma identity. He would like to see official recognition of this terrible episode of Roma history, which is often overshadowed by the dominant narrative about the Second World War.

He also wants us to remember the positive: “There were people who defended us anyway, we must not forget that — I had friends”, he recalls, bursting into tears. “People say that we will eradicate racism, but we will never be able to do it, because racism is the lack of knowledge of others. What hurts me is that my children still have to go through this thing.” — Lajos Molnar