INVISIBLE ROMA

A bedraggled six-year-old boy races toward me, palms open, as I climb out of my car. “Give me two dollars or I will piss on your car,” he shouts. Such is my introduction to the Roma village of Barbulesti, just 35 miles from the Romanian capital of Bucharest. Except for the occasional vehicle, Barbulesti resembles Dutch artist Pieter Bruegel’s paintings of 16th-century peasant life: Animals and humans wander along rutted dirt streets lined with wood and stone houses. It is in these impoverished, tucked-away places that the Roma are most often found.

“I do not know why it happened, but we are not in the same line as the rest of the world,” says Dorel in a hoarse voice. He’s one of several men milling around the gates of an old school on this cold, clear day. He is an unshaven Roma in his fifties, with eyes prematurely filmed over by thick, milky cataracts. “I do not know what made us, where we came from or who we are—only that we are gypsies in Barbulesti,” he says. He uses, as do most of the Roma I meet, the old pejorative, which is associated with the Greek atsinganoi for “untouchable” as opposed to the more politically correct Roma, the Romani plural of rom, meaning man or husband.

Tied together through Romani, their mother tongue, and loosely organized in insular tribes, the Roma have traditionally served as craftsmen, musicians or seasonal hired hands, and have a reputation throughout Europe as thieves and swindlers. Believed to have left India for Persia in the 5th century, they have been part of the backdrop of Europe since at least the 14th century. Whether nomadic or settled in communities such as Barbulesti throughout southern and eastern Europe, largely in Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary and Greece, they often go unseen or ignored by the rest of society.

This cloak of near invisibility has dropped over the past decade. In an era when Europe’s birth rates have fallen to record lows, Roma numbers are exploding: There are an estimated 11 million Roma today, more than the population of Sweden or Austria. Europe’s changing political tableau—in particular, the integration of the former Soviet bloc nations into the European Union—has also drawn attention to the Roma. Like many other new EU citizens, the Roma have migrated westward to countries such as France and Italy in search of better opportunities. There, they congregate in camps, living in trailers and tents, sustaining themselves and their families through farm work or begging.

The creation of the European Union brought new programs and protections for Europe’s minorities, but the long recession has rendered E.U. institutions increasingly fragile; Brussels, Schengen, Maastrich and Strasbourg are all struggling. As the currency crisis, unemployment and stagnant economic growth cast shadows of gloom, persecution of—and even violent attacks against—the Roma have increased, and individual nations have been emboldened to take unilateral action. In a move condemned by the European Commission, the Vatican and the United Nations, French President Nicolas Sarkozy exploited a legal loophole in 2010 to begin rounding up and deporting Roma who are not French citizens to the new member states in Eastern Europe, giving deportees 300 euro (about $430) to return to their country of origin. Sarkozy is not alone. In Italy, Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi clamped down on the Roma as well, demolishing shanties in Rome in an effort to push them out of the city.

They have nowhere to go but back to places like Barbulesti. There, Dorel leads me to some of the young men who have just been deported from France. We bounce along the poorly paved road to their village. “Here in the village our tribe is the Ursari,” Dorel says. “My grandparents used to be with the dancing bears.” He smiles at the distant memory of the old Roma tradition of leading bears on their hind legs and forcing them to shake or “dance.” “They would wander for a few days and come back. But the bears were stopped by the Communists in the 1960s. That was when our traditional skill was taken away.”

A gang of leather-jacketed young men—mostly teenagers—smoking and loitering outside a bus station comes into view. Dorel waves. The gang—maybe 12 or 15—rushes to the car, clamoring to tell their stories. The eldest, Nicolae Chelu, a professional beggar in his twenties, exhorts: “I was expelled from France the day Sarkozy came to power. The police came and said, ‘Gypsy out!’ I am now banned from France. They sent me back on a plane. As it took off I sat there thinking—now I am going back to poverty.”

As he speaks, a horse and cart pass, and I hear the word gadjo—the Roma word for a non-Roma, similar to the Yiddish-Hebrew term goy—hurled at me. Another teenager emerges from the pack. “Sarkozy is a racist,” he begins. His name is Gheorge Daniel and he too came back after the great roundup. “The police were chasing us from the squares, so I enlisted to be sent back,” he says. “Otherwise they’d have caught me anyway. I want to go back as soon as possible. Not all French people are racist. There is a good life there for a gypsy.”

There are smirks and grins among the members of the gang. I get back into the car but young Gheorge follows me, mournfully blurting out: “Parlez vous Francais?”

Gheorge, and most of these teenagers, not to mention the six-year-old who threatened to urinate on my car, should have been in school, but parents, I learn, regularly pull their children out of school to work. As a result, a large number of Roma are illiterate. “Our value system as Roma is negative toward education,” says Elena Ion, a Roma woman who has attended university and has come back to the village to teach at the school, which has no central heat and paint peeling off its walls. Dressed in city clothes, she is one of the few Roma women I talk to who does not seem beaten down by the Romas’ patriarchal society. “School is the only way out of poverty, but Roma do not understand why they should study,” she says. One UNESCO report puts the illiteracy rate at a staggering 30 percent, as compared to near total literacy rates among the general Romanian public. “They think since there are no jobs and no place for a Roma here or in France—why bother? There is nothing and nowhere for us.” She looks out the school window at the men on the street. “When you are Roma there is always…this loneliness feeling.”

The office of Romania’s National Agency for Roma is housed in a converted chemical plant in Bucharest that seems little changed since the days when the Warsaw Pact was forged some 55 years ago. The windows are unwashed and an old woman in a kerchief pilots the cramped elevator. Stray dogs strike up a chorus outside.

Ilie Dinca, an obese man who is the agency’s president, has the gargantuan task of dealing with—depending whom you ask—the country’s half-million to two million Roma and 2.5 to 10 percent of its population. He greets me with an offering of candies sitting atop a dish on his desk. Behind him hangs a Roma flag, a remnant of mostly failed efforts made by NGOs in the 1970s to unite and organize the Roma. “Integration of the Roma has fallen behind now that the country [Romania] is inside the E.U., even though it was a precondition for membership,” Dinca, who is Roma, says, “The situation of the Roma is going backwards and we have to be very careful so they are not put against the wall.”

He reels off a list of woes. Unemployment, long an issue, has become increasingly dire, reaching 100 percent in some Roma areas. Because of the recession, Bucharest has had to slash Roma subsidies by 35 percent. All of this is exacerbated by the fact that the Roma remain a weak political force. Few hold political positions in Romania, with the exception, interestingly, of Barbulesti, where Mayor Ion Cutitaru was elected in 2007. “There is only one Roma MP and there is no Roma political party for now,” says Dinca. Compounding the issue is the country’s inability to truly gauge the size of the community and document its needs. Many Roma don’t have proper identification or even birth certificates.

The Roma are generally not well-liked by Romanians, some of whom are now lobbying to call the Roma by the Romanian word for gypsy, tigan, in order to avoid confusion between the Roma and Romanians. Romanians are not the only European people with a tumultuous Roma history, but relations between the Roma and other inhabitants of Romania have been particularly fraught: Initial curiosity turned to hostility and enslavement. Landless upon their emancipation in the mid-19th century, the Roma carved out a niche in the semi-medieval Balkan world as nomadic craftsmen. Each tribe or village practiced a specific craft—some were coppersmiths, others worked with gold and there were, of course, the bear dancers.

Though poor and different, their lives were not atrocious until the double disasters of the mid-20th century. The first was the Holocaust, in which the Roma, alongside the Jews, were targeted. Berlin had determined they were sub-humans. Because the Roma were not generally included in censuses, it is impossible to calculate the loss, but estimates range from 220,000 to 500,000 murdered across Europe. The second blow was the communist regime that followed World War II, which was intent on transforming the Roma into workers. Caravans were swapped for forced settlements in blocks of flats and collective farms. Both totalitarian projects held the same goal: to make the Roma way of life disappear from Europe.

“These historical experiences—slavery, persecution and holocaust—have shaped the nature of the Roma community in Romania,” explains Magda Matache from the NGO Romani CRISS, a group that lobbies for the Roma. She is part of a new generation of Roma activists that has emerged since the fall of the Soviet bloc, in close contact with the West and funded by generous grants from billionaire philanthropist George Soros’ Open Society Institute. A Holocaust survivor, Soros is said to empathize with and even fear for the Roma in recessional Europe.

Matache makes it clear, however, that it is hard to generalize about the Roma. Although about 40 percent are semi-integrated and speak Romanian, there are many different tribes and settlements. “Each tribe has its own customs, level of development and problems,” she says. Even more than 20 years after the bloody revolution that overthrew President Nicolae Ceausescu, she says that the Roma are “hopelessly divided. Key problems are child marriages, parents taking their children out of school to work, rigid patriarchies and the intransigence of traditional leaders.”

I decided to drive into Transylvania to meet these leaders.

The emperor of the gypsies is poised on a throne in a dingy corner next to a buzzing refrigerator surrounded by ornamental cacti. He’s wearing a dirty fleece jacket, and I can smell his unbrushed teeth. His name is Iulian Radulescu, and he is one of a long line of Roma who for centuries have claimed to be emperors and kings, either through inheritance or by self-declaration; their power and influence varies by region.

“I am the emperor because I am the most civilized gypsy there has ever been,” he says, clearing his throat as the audience begins in his rundown shack in a Roma encampment in rural Transylvania, surrounded by the flickering gas torches of a petrochemical complex. “No gypsy has ever been as well-educated and civilized or achieved so many degrees as I have in all history,” he says. “I am a symbol of gypsies everywhere, equal in rights to Obama and all the rest of them.”

An elderly woman creeps into the throne room and sits in the far corner behind my back as Iulian speaks. “You ask about the gypsy way…ai….the gypsy way is the gypsy tricks.”

“Your Excellency, what are the gypsy tricks?”

“There are a million gypsy tricks.”

“I’d be humbled if you could tell me one or two.”

He scratches his five o’clock shadow pensively. “Well, a gypsy goes to Italy and,” miming the action over the table, “steals a car and then drives it to Romania and sells it to somebody else so then it is the other man’s problem.”

“That’s a gypsy trick?”

The emperor then gives me some background. “I went to Switzerland and I saw how things are there,” he says. When a Switzerland [Swiss] man wants to buy something but doesn’t have the money, he gets credit. But the banks won’t give this credit to a gypsy…so he begs. That’s a gypsy credit card.”

The woman in the corner curses. “Shut up,” she says, perhaps aware that the emperor is making a fool of himself. The emperor disregards her and before I leave, hands me his imperial business card. It is on printer paper and illegible.

From here I drive to the nearby city of Sibiu to see the emperor’s cousin, the king of the Roma. I arrive at the palace in the morning only to be told by a “court Roma” that the king is not available. “The king is sleeping because he had a party last night,” he says.

When I return later in the day, King Florin Cioaba I “of the Gypsies everywhere” is adjusting his tie in front of the mirror in his throne room. “The emperor is an impostor. He can call himself that if he likes,” grimaces Cioaba at the mention of his cousin. The palace is an oversized suburban mansion by a main road. The furniture is leopard skin and tiles are painted with fruit platters. Few Roma live in such luxury.

Cioaba, a stern man with a gnarled scar across his forehead, strides past oil paintings of his father on horseback. “I was crowned in front of a thousand Roma.” He tells me a list of names of organizations and international bodies that he has worked with, and indeed a United Nations report does say he holds “some moral authority” over the Roma in Transylvania.

Cioaba is somewhat notorious in Romania. He married off his 12-year-old daughter to the 15-year-old son of a rival. During the wedding, which was televised nationally, he wore a crown and held a scepter made by Italian jewelers, as local Roma eagerly darted in and out of the throng to kiss his palm.

The following day Iulian Preda, a Romanian government employee whose job is to help the Roma, shows me two sides of rural Roma Transylvanian life, the richest and the poorest. We drive through bucolic scenery that, for good reason, reminds me of the English countryside. Before World War I, these lands were part of the Habsburg Empire and inhabited by Saxon Germans. The region was not part of the Balkans, but of industrial and developed Europe. The stone churches have stout steeples and cottages are painted in St. Petersburg pastels—custard yellow, food-coloring green, infanta pink. Only after most Saxons fled in 1945, with the last major communities departing for Germany after 1991, did the Roma come here, drawn by fallow fields and abandoned barns.

“Drive off-road to your left over that field to the ridge,” Preda directs two or three kilometers from the hamlet of Blajel. “Welcome back to the 14th century,” he adds as the tires start to squeal in the mud. “Gyp-s-s-y,” he whistles, “gyp-s-s-y.” We climb out of the car and trudge on foot through patchy sheets of melting ice, wet grass and mire. Soon we see three earthwork dwellings, hand dug into the slope of a ridge. Snapped drainage pipes—for chimneys—poke through the earth roofs. Seven dirty children in an odd assortment of clothes clearly scavenged from a trash heap crawl out of openings held up by irregular planks of wood, rags and rotted pieces of carpeting. There are no toilets or latrines. I know this because the hovels are surrounded by human feces. I can taste the stench. I am lost for words as Preda gives the bread to the hungry pack of kids.

The children are smiling. They are happy to see strangers. Some of them are barefoot.

“How many of you can read?” I ask.

Two unwashed mothers, who have aged like women of the Third World, clamber out of the dwellings. The children shake their heads. Half of them are more than six, none older than twelve.

“No…no we don’t know.”

“None of us can,” admits a mother clutching a baby wrapped in an old coat.

These families are living like the last survivors after a nuclear holocaust—in the middle of a functioning E.U. welfare state. When was it that people last lived like this in Europe? The Bronze Age?

“What are you doing here?”

“I don’t know, ask our mother. She brought us here.”

He gestures to a woman with a bloodied right eye and a red headscarf: “My parents died. I came here,” she says.
None of them could explain how this had come to pass. Totally illiterate and living in holes, they no longer have the vocabulary. Never have I met people so lost. “Do you go to school?” I turn to a boy about ten.

“Teachers go…‘gypsy out!’ School….no, we don’t go to school.”

“The teachers say no gypsy children as they are dirty,” says one of the women. “But we cannot wash them.”

There is shouting. The children squeal with laughter. A Roma man waving his cap is briskly marching over the fields through melting snow. Seeing Preda, he rushes into his hovel and gestures, hollers and waves identity papers.

“We have them, we have them still, sir!”

“I have been trying so hard to help them,” Preda says as he takes a few shots with his digital camera. “But they can’t qualify for emergency relief as they haven’t been hit by an earthquake or a flood. They have been living like this all their lives, like after an earthquake. I found them a year ago—they have been here for 40 years!

“All they want is a container to live in. To not live in the mud! But they couldn’t even get social allowances, as they didn’t have identity cards until I made these for them.”

There is nothing more to say. The children chase our car, waving goodbye. We stop by the Saxon cemetery in Blajel to check the way to the next Roma community, some five miles away, where wealthy semi-nomads from the Kalderash tribe thrive.

The Calderaru family, or the Cauldrons, live in a stately, if unfinished, stone compound. The children, wearing astrakhan caps, giggle in the snow, while under a wall carpeting of tigers, the men down a bottle of schnapps with brandy before lunch. An elderly man, who physically resembles a cross between images of Christ and an Indian mystic, briefs me as his sons smoke.

“The other gypsies,” he smiles, “we are superior to them. We were nomads before communism, and my parents were deported during the war to the camps…we were healthier as nomads as we lived in the tents…from village to village we went…I was born in a tent you know? The other gypsies, they lost the traditions, they lost their skills.” His family didn’t, he insists; they are copper makers. “Without the skills they become criminals, drinkers and thieves.”

There are chuckles all around. The old man proudly tells us that not only is it a family tradition to grow beards “like Jesus,” but that he recently made a marriage arrangement between a three-month-old baby and a five-year-old. More schnapps.

“Do you know about the families that live in the holes close by? Do you help them as other Roma?” I ask.

“We know about them,” he scoffs and inhales a bent cigarette. “We give them some bread if we come across them, but we won’t carry them. They have a head and two hands and they should get to work!”

That evening, I arrive back in Bucharest and meet with Nicu Fortuna, a sociologist and Roma activist in his early thirties who has collected the stories of Roma deportees during World War II with the eye of a philatelist. “During the war the Roma were taken and put down like wild dogs,” he says.

“There is a difference between the Jewish and Roma deportees,” he adds. “The Jews were shocked and can remember the year, date and time it happened. The Roma shrugged it off. They said, ‘Of course I was deported. I’m Roma; these things happen to a Roma.’ The Roma mentality is different from the Jewish mentality. For example, a Roma came to me and asked, ‘Why do you care so much about these deportations? Your family was not deported.’ I went, ‘I care as a Roma’ and the guy said back, ‘I do not care because my family were brave, proud Roma that were not deported.’”

This highlights a difference between the Roma and the Jews during the Holocaust. “For the Jews it was total and everyone knew this—from bankers to pawnbrokers. For the Roma it was selective and not comprehensive. The Roma were only exterminated in a few parts of Europe such as Poland, the Netherlands, Germany and France. In Romania and much of the Balkans, only nomadic Roma and social outcast Roma were deported. This matters and has an impact on the Roma mentality,” Fortuna says.
Nevertheless, he tells me that he wishes that Jews would show “the Roma Holocaust a little more respect and acknowledgement.”
I ask him to take me to meet a survivor. It is late and he has a young child, but he agrees and we drive 30 minutes to meet one. When we arrive, the survivor is standing in a slovenly apartment that smells like a mix of unwashed feet and polenta. He is waving a wad of wrapped notes that are his savings. His face is gullied as if shaped by the tide.

“I want to be paid for my punishment,” he says theatrically, raising his hand like a circus conductor. “I suffered there for four years,” he says. “You must pay me for the interview as a recompense for what I suffered. You will take the interview abroad and make money.” The door slams.

Fortuna feels humiliated as the elevator creaks to the ground floor. “I feel so, so shamed when they do this,” he says. “So shamed. They always ask for money. They are living in the moment you see. They even ask me for money. They don’t understand why this is important.”

It is night now and Fortuna is making imploring calls. “We can go but for 10 euro…and a bottle of Fanta.”

The backstreets of Bucharest belong to the Roma. We turn off the car engine in a dingy alley and walk past a pile of oil cans into a Dickensian slum tenement. The survivor is sitting there cross-legged on a yellowing mattress watching Indian dancing on television.

“I like the Indian dancers,” she mutters. She is 77 years-old.

“I was deported when I was around ten,” she says. “The police came to our house.” She digs her thumb into a pillowcase. The dancing Indians are on mute.

“We were then taken on a train north that went to Russia. There were many gypsies there…crowding…people falling, wetting themselves. When we got to a camp there were Germans there and Ukrainians running it. There were so many people cramped into the space. We were given only rotten milk and stale bread and made to live in barns. Anyone who didn’t work was beaten. People were dropping, dying.”

Some 11,000 of the 25,000 deportees from Romania died in the camps where she was taken, in what is today Ukraine. “My parents were terrified and I saw people having their heads chopped off.”

“Do you talk about this often?”

“No, only when asked.” I pass her the money. The drive back to Fortuna’s Soviet-era apartment block is long because of traffic. “There is no national consciousness and no historical memory of the Holocaust because there is no Roma elite,” Nicu says. Nor are there books, or a homeland.

I ask if the Roma have anything at all to remember what happened. “Yes, the song Gelem Gelem,” he says. “It is a song selected in 1971 to be the anthem of the Roma. It is about what happened.” Gelem Gelem was sung by the gypsies of Auschwitz, whispers Nicu. The song originates in what the Roma call the Porajmos, or “devouring”—their word for the Shoah. Written by Žarko Jovanovic, the song was adopted by delegates of the first World Romani Congress in 1971.

That night, I listened over and over to the song. The melody is instantly recognizable as Roma and it soars in anguish.

I went, I went on long roads
I met happy Roma
O Roma where do you come from,
With tents on happy roads?
O Roma, O brothers
I once had a great family,
The Black Legions murdered them
Come with me Roma from all the world
For the Roma roads have opened
Now is the time, rise up Roma now,
We will rise high if we act
O Roma, O brothers

Europe continues to march into the future, but the Roma road seems to be veering in its own direction, neither forward nor back. I recall the words of an old Roma judge beneath his conical astrakhan cap, who wanders Romania’s Roma communities dispensing traditional Roma law as he knows it. “We came from India and we wandered until here,” he told me wistfully. “It would be good to go back…but we have forgotten the way home, we have forgotten where that was.”