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Remembering without Commemoration: The Mnemonics and Politics of Holocaust Memories
among European Roma
Author(s): Michael Stewart
Source: The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Vol. 10, No. 3 (Sep., 2004), pp. 561-
582
Published by: Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3803795
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REMEMBERING WITHOUT COMMEMORATION:
THE MNEMONICS AND POLITICS OF
HOLOCAUST MEMORIES AMONG
EUROPEAN ROMA
Michael Stewart
University College London
Much has been written in recent years about the ways Gypsies (Roma) relate to their
past. One important study of Holocaust memory has used the Roma as a paradigmatic
case of a people who forget rather than remember their history. Rather than examining
processes of'obliterating' or downplaying the past, the approach taken here is to consider
ways in which, despite Gypsy 'presentist' rhetoric, the past is 'remembered' among Gypsy
populations. Following Maurice Bloch s call for greater integration of psychological and
anthropological work, this article considers what can be gained from seeing memory as
a socially distributed function in which the role of 'implicit' memories, embedded in
dealings with others, is significant. This approach enables us better to grasp how Romany
communities, which were persecuted by the Nazis and their allies during the Second
World War,'remember' the past even though they may not commemorate it.
In discussing Gitano (Spanish Gypsy1) understandings of their own history,
Paloma Gay y Blasco has recently suggested that out of undue homage to
their informants' own sense of temporality, ethnographers have, commonly,
'neglected to analyse the Gypsies' attitudes towards their own origins or their
own past' (2002: 631). On reflection, the same criticism can also be levelled
at historians who work on Gypsy populations. The growing scholarly litera?
ture on the nature of the Nazi persecution of the Sinte, Roma, and other
Gypsies (Burleigh & Wippermann 1991; Lewy 2000; Zimmermann 1996)
almost entirely bypasses the relationship of the victims to their own history.
In this article I hope to rectify some of the neglect that Gay y Blasco has
rightly identified, but rather than focus on the means of'forgetting','obliter?
ating', and 'downplaying' the past' (2002: 636, 639), I focus on the ways in
which, despite Gypsy 'presentist' rhetoric, the past is 'remembered' among
Gypsy populations.3 Apart from the ethnographic contribution of this analy?
sis, there is a more general lesson to be learned here: the difficulty that ethno?
graphers have in conceptualizing the past in the present (e.g. Stewart 1997)
results from the imprecise way in which 'memory', especially so-called
'social memory', has been treated in the anthropological literature. Following
the call of a number of anthropologists to engage in the contended relation?
ship of cognitive psychology and anthropology, not just to mark the limits of
? Royal Anthropological Institute 2004.
J Roy. anthrop.Inst. (N.S.) 10, 561-582
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562 MICHAEL STEWART
anthropological ambition (e.g. Bloch 1976), but also to enrich and make more
precise our ethnographic interpretations (Bloch 1988: 39-53; Boyer 1990; Cole
2001; Sperber 1996), this article seeks to show that a more psychologically
nuanced understanding of the workings of 'memory' can contribute significantly
to the analysis of social practice.
Why, the reader may wonder, psychology in particular? After all, the boom
in 'memory studies' has reached the point that almost any academic ship can
now sail under this particular flag of convenience (J.Winter 2000). Moreover,
if one turns to standard psychological textbooks on memory (e.g. Baddeley
1997), even when memory in the real world is in question, the analytic focus
remains firmly on the workings of individual brains. Those intersubjective
aspects of remembering in which anthropologists are most interested, involv?
ing people 'thinking in partnership with others' (Salamon, cited in Cole 2001:
29), appear in most psychological work in the form of technical devices or
contexts which measurably enable or hinder registration and recall in indi?
vidual brains. As a result, when one puts this laboratory work beside much of
the recent anthropological literature on 'memory', it seems, as Carsten has
observed, as though we are talking about two entirely different things (1995:
331). Like Carsten, I am unhappy with the prospect of leaving such a yawning
gulf between psychological and anthropological usages.4
The advantage of a psychologically inspired approach to the way in which
the past is actively remembered can most simply be made with reference to
work which approaches 'social memory' from a different angle. To take one
otherwise exemplary study, Rosalind Shaw has described a west African society
where the slave trade is forgotten as history, in the sense of vernacularly
transmitted narratives, but is 'remembered' as spirits, as a menacing landscape,
and as images in divination, marriage, witchcraft, and postcolonial politics, all
of which, we are told, contain what are, in effect, hidden memories of
the slave trade (2002: 9). But Shaw also takes pains to point out that when
Temne diviners invoke images of a past landscape involving roads and crossroads
in their ritual practices, these do not express 'explicit recollections of
the past ... These diviners ... did not intend to recall a past landscape' (2002:
94).D One of the difficulties I have here is that since these 'memories' are not
only implicit and non-discursive but also hidden, there is no native exegesis
to sustain claims that today s practices recapitulate historical experiences. To
take an example from our own experience, when English children dance
round the playground singing 'Ring-a-Ring-of-roses ... We all fall down',
their behaviour does carry the sediment of a seventeenth-century horror, but
it would be perverse to say they are 'remembering' the plague or that this
ditty is a hidden 'memory' of our collective past. The danger here is that
the anthropologist may become like an 'archaeologist of the word', digging
up meanings that are not only obscure to the outsider but also lost to the
locals (Herzfeld 1981). When diverse Temne diviners 'draw on different aspects
of enslavement' (Shaw 2002: 115-16) in their practices, whatever else they
are doing they are not consciously reconfiguring a narrative of the past in
the present
? as Hebrew scholars do discursively and explicitly draw upon
different aspects of the biblical history to reframe current concerns (Webber
2000).
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MICHAEL STEWART 563
It is relatively easy to distinguish cases like Temne divination from those
like the Jewish or Christian commemorative celebrations of Purim, Passover,
or Communion in which the past is explicitly commemorated. In these cases,
events several thousand years ago are recalled and remembered (at least in
Bartlett's sense) by participants in the rituals. The material I am dealing with
in this article concerns yet another modality in which the past lives on in
the present and one which demands a more precise analytic apparatus to
link mental processes and social practices. Jennifer Cole has demonstrated an
alternative, psychologically guided approach in a case that is, superficially at
least, rather similar to mine. In a study of the Betsimisaraka on the northeast
coast of Madagascar, Cole shows how a subterranean, socially repressed
memory of colonial revolt erupts into conscious discourse in a particular his?
torical context (an election campaign in 1992). In explaining this she uses a
range of psychological literature to demonstrate that 'knowing how' to
behave with others ? the implicit understandings of everyday life ? becomes
in some contexts transformed into more discursive forms of 'knowing that'
(2001: 282).
Like Cole, and in contrast to those who gloss as 'memory' social representations
which might equally be called 'culture' or 'ritual', I am concerned here
with how personal experiences of Roma in the Second World War have been
handed on through time and, in various ways in diverse places, turned into
shared memories, despite the paucity of occasions for their re-creation, the
complete absence of any commemorative ceremonies, and a general lack of
interest in matters past among the Roma. I thereby hope to make a contri?
bution to cultural-psychological work which goes beyond both individualist
and socio-centric stances. There is a range of work in this area that cannot
be surveyed here. Whitehouse, for instance, has argued that different types of
memory are supported by and linked to different social institutions and prac?
tices, and that mnemonic devices - means of focusing attention, for example
vary
according to ritual forms and contexts of interaction (2000: 9-12). Of
greater immediate relevance is the work of scholars such as Brockmeier
(2002), Middleton (2002),Wertsch (2000) and White (2000) who are working
towards a psychologically plausible theory of mind that is attentive to the ways
in which minds 'extend beyond the skin' (Wertsch, cited in White 2000).
In exploring memory in the social environment, these innovative authors
have emphasized the role of narrative as a social form mediating between
individual experience (mental processes) and public representations. This
article proposes that it is time to focus attention on the way in which nondiscursive
forms of memory can fulfil a similar function.
Remembering without commemorating
The source of this article lies in an ethnographic puzzle. Before my first visit
to the field in 1984, I had assumed that during my research I would gather
considerable oral historical material from my Romany-speaking Hungarian
Gypsy informants. In particular, I expected to collect accounts ofthe war years
when not only their way of life, but their very survival as a people had come
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564 MICHAEL STEWART
close to obliteration. Donald Kenrick and Gratton Puxon's pioneering study
of the Nazi persecution of the Roma, The destiny of Europe's Gypsies, contained
reference to deportations from villages situated only a few kilometres
from the town of Harangos6 where I was going to live (1972: 126-7), and so
I was confident that I would be able to add significantly to the historical
record of those times.
It is, of course, in the nature of field research that one's own preoccupations
give way to those of one's hosts. Since the medium- or long-term past
featured so little in the Gypsies' own conversations, as I was absorbed into the
life of a Gypsy settlement I abandoned attempts to probe deeply into peoples
sense of their recent history, let alone the distant past. There was no term in
colloquial Romany for the events that we have come to call 'the Holocaust'
- an American Romany intellectual had coined the term Porrajmos, the
'devouring', but one is still more likely to fmd this term on the internet than
on the lips of Roma in the lands occupied by the Germans during the Second
World War.7 Daily life was lived with barely a passing acknowledgement of
those events.
This is not to say that there was no mention of the historical past in every?
day life. The old man whose house I shared would every so often comment
to me and anyone else who was listening8 that if it had not been for the
arrival of the Red Army, who occupied the area in 1945, none of the Roma
I knew would be alive today. Occasionally he would briefly narrate an event
from the end of the war when he and other members of his family
- after
hiding out 'on the plain' in a peasant barn - were sent on a forced march
towards the railway line that had been used the previous year for the deportation
of local Jews. As they crossed the fields near the station, gunfire could
be heard from the surrounding hills; knowing this to be the sound of Red
Army troops approaching the town, the German troops fled, leaving their
Romany prisoners in the hands of local Hungarian fascists, the Nyilas.9 They
too then took to their heels, leaving the Roma to make their way home.
There were other images too that came into people's minds. One man recalled
a woman who had been raped while lying across her sisters legs as her father
looked on. Other such experiences were described to me at second hand,
most commonly from younger Roma who told me about conversations they
remembered with their elders. I came to feel that for many people, the
memory of the entire war was condensed into a few images that were normally
kept deep in the shadows of the cave, illuminated occasionally and
incandescently before being enveloped again in the penumbra of the past. In
since talking about such phenomena with Roma from other parts
of Hungary,
I have come across similar practices in other settlements. Agnes Daroczi, a
Hungarian Romany cultural activist, told me of hearing as a small child of
boards appearing outside every house in her settlement one evening towards
the end of the war. On each of these boards the next morning there was a
number written indicating
how many were to be taken from each house.
Another fragment of a past, another image torn from an experience of
terror and helplessness. And, in Agnes's childhood, as in my experience in
Harangos, these iconic moments were recalled and described by people as if
they were understandable in and of themselves, without needing to be situ?
ated in any more general narrative framework. These are certainly memories,
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MICHAEL STEWART 565
but they do not seem to me to be part of a process of remembering which
involves the possession and sharing of a narrative history.
And yet, eighteen months after I had left Harangos I saw that the past did
live on in peoples lives, albeit almost imperceptibly. Amid the turbulence
which arose in the fmal years of Hungarian Socialism as 'civil society' gave
birth to its natural twin, 'uncivil society', groups of youths, modelling them?
selves on British skinheads, formed rock bands. Their fans then toured the
country performing their ostentatious and deliberately shocking displays of
brutal fascist-like behaviour. Traditional anti-Gypsy graffiti, like 'Gypsy-Free
Zone', which had occasionally been seen in the past on bus stops or on factory
walls, now took on a more sinister resonance for the Roma. In the early
summer of 1988 a series of what the media called 'skinhead hysterias' swept
the Romany communities of Hungary. In Harangos, in June 1988, a colleague
of mine, the late Zita Reger, visited 'my' settlement and found the twentyeight
families living there crammed into three houses in the centre of the set?
tlement, with the men maintaining an armed watch at night. Skinheads had
recently sprayed, 'we'U be back to get the stinking Gypsies' on a wall near the
settlement. A few days later an elderly Gypsy woman had seen a car full of
skinheads pass through the main square, or maybe she had seen skinheads
gathering there; the stories varied. On her return home, a local self-defence
strategy was agreed. The local factories went without Romany labour that
night and until they laid on a bus to bring the night shift home. For weeks
after the immediate panic had passed, the Roma walked home in groups protecting
one another from the threat of racist attacks. In fact, no one is reported
to have been attacked in Harangos or in any of the other communities in
Hungary where 'skinhead panics' occurred at this time.10 But the fear of attack
was real. Zita Reger recounted later how Roma had talked to her of their
fear ofthe return ofthe Arrow Cross (Nyilas), the wartime fascist party. The
foreman of the Parquet flooring factory, Istvan Nemeth, said that there had
been talk of the fajgyulelo (literally, 'race-haters') returning
? the term used in
official discourse for adherents of Nazi and other racist ideologies. Later that
summer, when I was living in the settlement again, the more colloquial term
'racist' (rasszista) was being widely used by younger Roma to describe the
skinheads. And while some said that these were just hooligans (this was the
official Party line), others insisted that there were 'politics' at work here. It
wasn't just older people who told me 'they would take us all away and kill
us', using exactly the phrase that cropped up in accounts of the war. There
had previously been next to none or even no official discourse about racism
in communist Hungary
- that was seen as a problem of the West and not one
worth mediatizing. So, I feel confident in asserting that if these Roma saw
the link between the 'hooligans' and the wartime fascists, this was their own
construction.
Here then are the pieces of my puzzle: talk about the war was rare and
moreover popped up in fleeting, fragmentary images. There were no forms of
collective commemoration in which the historical memory of persecution was
re-lived and re-created anew for each generation. I had come from a world
where, as our common sense tells us, commemoration is the root of histori?
cal awareness. The Jewish injunction zakhor!11 is surely self-explanatory, as is
the slogan that sells poppies for 11 November, Armistice Day,'LestWe Forget'.
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566 MICHAEL STEWART
But in that northern Hungarian town where I lived and worked, the people
I knew had no literary tradition and barely spoke of the historical past; they
certainly did not ritualize it. Yet this was a people who appeared to have
suddenly acquired a strong historical awareness. Something was clearly amiss
with my model.
History
In re-thinking the ways in which Roma relate to the war, I need to consider
how they relate to the past more generally. At one and the same time I wish
to argue two apparently contradictory things. First, in contrast to those around
them ? readers of this article, for instance ?
many Roma in Eastern Europe
do manage to live without history as we know it: the more or less formal,
discursive or performative reproduction of the past in the present. But second,
contrary to certain journalistic and even academic simplifications of this
insight, Gypsies manage not to forget crucial aspects of their history because
of the ways in which personal, fragmentary narratives interact with broader
cultural understandings and a series of prompts in the world in which Gypsies
live. These prompts remind them of the nature of their ongoing relationship
with their defining others, the non-Gypsies.
Whether one draws inspiration from the early works of Halbwachs on col?
lective memory (1925) or Connerton's more recent discussion of 'social
memory' (1989), it is clear that Romany peoples lack many of the mnemonic
devices which ground shared memories in European societies. The built environment
in which they live, either of their own or others' making, is so temporary
that it hardly bears a trace of the past. At death almost all personal
possessions are normally given away, sold, or destroyed, and even in everyday
life objects of daily use are passed on to others, almost as if with the deliberate
intention of preventing them from acquiring the smell and feel of the
past. This is a world without nostalgia, inhabited by a people who seem to
'celebrate impermanence' (Kaprow 1982). The institutional practices, calendrical
rituals, for instance, by which others reproduce the past in the present
are almost totally absent. How can I put this more succinctly than to say that,
unlike their Jewish 'kin' (the Roma's image, not mine),12 the Roma have no
Passover? So, the 'more or less ritual performances' which Connerton sees as
universally essential to conveying and sustaining 'images' and 'recollected
knowledge of the past' simply do not exist for these people (1989: 40). There
are no commemorative ceremonies, no prototypical events, and, therefore, no
re-enactments.13
There are the kind of now-you-see-them-now-you-don't, flashbulb memo?
ries14 I have mentioned, as well as extremely conventionalized accounts of
the 'great poverty' in a period referred to as 'sometime' before the present (see
Gay y Blasco 2002: 634-6; Stewart 1997: 245). Occasionally, in some com?
munities, events of the war might be incorporated in a personally composed
song. The following, recorded in Romania in 1995, tells of the experience of
deportation across the Dniester river to the area known to Romanian Roma
as 'the Bug.'
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MICHAEL STEWART 567
Sabu rom, Devla, d'avasa
Ando Bugo zasa
Haj nakhasa v'o Nistro baro,
Haj merela e lumja ando Bugo, sja.
Ame kana avasa palpalje,
O namce mudaren ame
Haj le rusa kalaven ame,
Haj le rom but kay merena,
Haj luma buti ci maj xana.
(Ban 1999: 202).
All the Rom, oh God will come
They will go to the Bug
And will even reach the great Dniester
And the whole world will die in the Bug
And we, when we return home,
The Germans kill us
And the Russians liberate us
And so many Roma will die
And so many will not eat again.15
Beyond such powerful, if dramatically disjointed and somewhat 'flattened',
reminders, there was precious little record ofthe events of 1940-5. I heard no
stories and saw no commemoration of the dead of that time. Personal
accounts, of varying degrees of elaboration, could be elicited from those who
had been through the camps, as I later discovered when researching a televi?
sion film about the Holocaust, but in everyday life virtual silence seemed to
be the answer of the Roma to 'the call of history'.16 The past was, or so it
seemed, truly 'another country' (Hartley 1953).
This perspective on the past was not just to be found in attitudes to the
traumatic events of the war. As I have argued elsewhere (Stewart 1997), the
Romany world I encountered was one without ancestors and ancestral
justifications. In contrast to the Hungarians around them, who at times seemed
to cultivate a popular nostalgia for ways of life and religious practices dating
back to the mists of quasi-mythical Finno-Ugric time, most Roma were
supremely unconcerned about their past. One man I knew, when asked
where his ancestors had come from, joked that one of them, maybe his father's
grandfather or great grandfather, might have lived in a good country but then
made the terrible mistake of moving to Hungary. What a fool, was my
informant's comment. The choice of personal names also reflects this casual
relationship with the past. These names denote positions in a network rather
than a unique, personal identity that endures over time (Williams 1984: 151-
60), and so a person may have a gazikano anav (official, non-Gypsy name used
for entries in the official birth registry), a romano anav (Romany name nor?
mally given by godparents) and others too, depending on where he or she
has lived and whom he or she has befriended. Likewise, the names given to
social networks (nemzeto) tend to refer not to a glorious but to a comic,
bathetic past. Ronald Lee provides a striking illustration of this practice from
Canada, where one of the main networks of Yugoslav Roma is known as the
Minesti. Minesti, it turns out, was not some successful horse dealer, nor even
the person who brought these Roma from Belgrade across the Atlantic. In
fact Minesti was not a person at all, but a pig, a great fat Serbian sow which
had served to carry many children across the Montenegran mountains (Lee,
cited in Williams 1984: 136). Similar, if less comic, examples could be drawn
from Harangos.
So how are we to interpret the relationship of the Roma with their past?
As a first stab at interpretation one could say that, like some other marginal
peoples, they have turned the experience of living in a state of constant
jeopardy into a positive celebration of the present moment. But this
approach comes perilously close to a recycling of the old romantic view of
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568 MICHAEL STEWART
the carefree, footloose Gypsy which is now anathema to all serious anthro?
pologists (Gay y Blasco 2002: 632). In earlier work I tried to give expression
to the Roma's distinctive relationship to their frequently traumatic history
suggesting that, being unable even to dream of re-assembling the past into a
coherent present, they had turned their faces to the future, ignoring the chaos
that Chronos wreaks behind them (Stewart 1988; also 1997: 245-6).
These are ideas which underpin a number of influential works, most notably
Isabel Fonseca's widely read popular account of Gypsy life, Bury me standing,
in which the author identifies an insouciant 'defiance' among the Roma,
and makes much of the Gypsy 'art of forgetting' (1995: 276). Forgetting is
identified as the Gypsy way of enduring when dealing with events like the
Holocaust. Fonseca's material has been reworked in a more formal, academic
mode by the anthropological historian Inge Clendinnen. Clendinnen's highly
acclaimed study Reading the Holocaust (1999) refers to the case of Europe s
Gypsies as an example of people who have chosen 'not to bother with history
at all' and who 'seek no meanings beyond those relevant to immediate sur?
vival' (1999: 8).
Of course, the suggestion that Roma have somehow healed themselves of
a painful past by insulating themselves from traumatic memory is a striking
and even heartening proposition. But think of the implications. If it were true
that 'the Roma forget', then the Nazi persecution of the Gypsies would have
had no lasting effect on Romany social life, would have passed as an event
without trace. Everything in 1950 would have been much as it had been in
1930. The events in between - war, hunger, fear, slaughter
? would be on the
way to being forgotten by those who went through them. The trouble is that
all this may be no more than wishful thinking. The idea of people finding a
way to live without reference to a burdensome past may be so appealing, even
to an intelligence as sharp as Clendinnen's, that the troubling implications of
such a claim may not be recognized.
Living with the past
In fact, Roma are no more able than anyone else to forget in such a simple
or unproblematic fashion. Take, by way of example, the experience of one
German Gypsy woman of Sinto descent whom I have come to know in
Britain. Of course, like every former victim's story, her tale is unique. Yet it
can also stand for a number of general features of Romany people's experi?
ence both during and after the war (cf. Todorov 1999: 258-60), as its central
character has herself discovered through meeting with members of the
Heidelberg-based Romany Holocaust research centre as well as on trips to
Auschwitz with fellow Romany and Sinte survivors.
Ilsa Schmidt was 7 years old in the summer of 1942, when, as she remembers
it today, two men in military coats arrived at her home asking for her
by name. They took her to a warehouse on the docks, where they left her
among crowds of people already gathered there. Ilsa had no idea why she had
been brought there. In fact, she had no idea that the people all around her
were 'Gypsies'. Nor, on this occasion, did she have a chance to find out, for
within hours her father had found her and brought her out of the docks. He
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MICHAEL STEWART 569
told her that there had been a misunderstanding and that she should forget
all about what had happened.
Ilsa though
she did not know it then ? was the daughter of a 'half-Gypsy'
who had married a non-Gypsy 'Aryan'. As such, under the Nazi race classi?
fication system that was in force at the time, she was automatically classed as
a 'ZM minus', a mixed-race Zigeuner (Gypsy) with 'a greater proportion of
German blood'. Such mischlinge (persons of mixed ancestry) were seen as more
of a menace than the so-called 'pure Gypsies' because the 'mixed-race' Gypsies
threatened the purity ofthe 'folk community' (Ritter 1941). Ilsa was extremely
lucky to have survived for this long, concealed as she was within a German
'Aryan' family which had adopted her some years before. She herself had been
too young to remember any of this and had no inkling that she might possess
ties to any family other than the one she had always regarded as her own
natal kin.17
Two years later the men came to the door again. Ilsa's adoptive father realized
that it would not be so easy to bring her back this time, and so he told
her she was not his biological child.
He cried when he said this. And my mother said through her tears,'we are not your real
parents.You will meet your real mother at the place where you are going now.' I was
completely unprepared for all this and I just could not understand it ... There are details
which you particularly remember as a child. For instance, I had always held hands with
my adoptive parents when walking so as not to get lost. I can clearly remember that I
looked for the hand of one of the Gestapo for me to hold, but he pushed my hand away.
These are small things which I can remember quite clearly, because for me as a child
they were big things (Rose 1995: 180-1).
Amongst the scores of thousands of people of Gypsy descent who were
taken away from their homes and caravans between 1936 and 1945, Ilsa was
almost uniquely fortunate.18 Her adoptive father, having succeeded once, at
the docks, braved the offices of the SS again and, after a prolonged corre?
spondence, secured letters of release for her. Five months after she was taken
away, he travelled to Ravensbruck to reclaim her.
In a recent interview Ilsa explained that her last obligation in the camp was
to sign a paper in which she undertook not to tell anyone of her experiences
there or of her earlier stay in Auschwitz. There was little need for the ritual
of the signature. 'My adoptive parents in Hamburg had no idea how cruel
reality in the concentration camps was. They had accepted that there were
very bad forced labour camps, but they could not imagine that people were
ill-treated, murdered and burned there. So they could not understand the
frightful things I had gone through' (Rose 1995: 184).
After her return Ilsa's parents drew a protective veil at home over her
torment. Despite her parents' best efforts, however, she could not be protected
from the, perhaps unintended, consequences of school procedures.
I was told to tell people that I had been with an aunt in the German countryside. That
was what I was to tell them ? to get away from the bombing. I had the concentration
camp number tattooed on my arm with just a plaster to hide it. And the children did
not guess ... But not the adults, the teachers, you see ... In front of the classroom the
teacher asked me what was under the elastoplast. I froze again. Froze again. Knowing,
remembering, remembering. You see anything that made me remember made me freeze
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570 MICHAEL STEWART
... And he [the teacher] obviously never realized this. And I was told not to sit down
till I told what was under the plaster. I just stood there like a zombie ...'19
Ilsa never told her parents about this. 'Anything, anything relating to that
[time] wasn't touched upon. Instinctively I knew I would freeze up again'.
From that day, for nearly thirty years, Ilsa spoke with no one at all about what
had happened to her in Auschwitz and Ravensbruck aged 8 and 9. She says
she was numb, 'too numb. I don't think I came out of that numbness till I
was thirty-nine years of age'.
This story of one Hamburg girl speaks, in some ways, to the experience of
many Gypsy camp inmates.20 On returning from the camps, they found that
the price of gaining re-admission to their homes, villages, and towns was to
remain silent about their exile and the attempted destruction of their people.
And if any of them did try to speak of their experiences, their listeners would
merely say 'you know, we suffered too'. Often it was they, the victims, who
were blamed for their own suffering due to their 'criminal' or 'asocial' (Gemeinschaftsfremd)
lifestyle.21 It was easy enough for those who had stood by or even
taken an active role in the deportations of their neighbours to generate this
kind of expedient rewriting of history. For the Gypsies, however, such expe?
riences could not just be willed out of consciousness.
Years later Ilsa's past welled up unbidden as she found herself dreaming of
things she had observed but not fully understood during her time in the
camps. At Auschwitz she had seen piles of'white corpses', bodies which had
been sprinkled with white lime,
all piled on top of each other. As a child, I just could not understand what it was.Very
much later, years after my liberation, I had awful nightmares about this sight: that I am
standing under the portal at the city hali in Hamburg, and the people standing next to
me are saying to me I should come with them. But I say 'no, I cannot walk on the
ground, the whole floor is full of corpses'. But the other people in the dream cannot
see the dead; they just walk over them with their high-heeled shoes and take absolutely
no notice of the corpses (Rose 1995: 182).
Ilsa Schmidt escaped her nightmares by fleeing to England and leaving the
world of her childhood behind her. Most of Europe's Gypsies have had less
success getting away from tangible reminders of the past.
Forgetting
After the war Ilsa Schmidt continued to be raised by her adoptive family
having lost nearly all her natal family in Auschwitz. She is, thus, unlike those
Roma who returned from the camps to be reunited with surviving family
members and with them set about reconstituting their prewar communities.
But her experience of being unable to find a public place for the past in the
present is typical (at least for those Roma who live outside of Germany). If
we try to explain how this persecution never came to be publicly commemorated,
two factors need to be considered, one external and one internal
to Romany social life. First, and not in any way to be dismissed, there is the
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MICHAEL STEWART 571
fact that most of the pre-1933 persecution and, indeed, part of the Nazi
persecution of the Sinte, Roma, and other Gypsies was carried out by offi?
cial state institutions under the ideological pretext of dealing with an antisocial,
indeed criminal, layer ofthe population (Strauss 1986). The Nazi Party
had no need to construct its own lists of Gypsies in the 1920s and 1930s since
so many central and eastern European countries possessed police files on
Roma dating back as far as the eighteenth century (Lucassen 1996); in many
cases there was also extensive twentieth-century documentation deriving
from the work of various public welfare organizations. Moreover, these regulatory
institutions had been operating in a climate where social policy had
become gradually biologized (Peukert 1987: 208-35). In part then, the perse?
cution of the Gypsies by the Nazis and their allies had its roots in prewar
Weimar and Wilhelmine eugenics and social cleansing policies.22 After the war
the persecution of the Gypsies and even the mass slaughters were often
explained, in the very terms the Nazis had used, as a necessarily firmly repressive,
security-driven policy for dealing with the wayward (and nationally nonaffiliated)
poor (e.g. Doring 1964). Indeed, even today, there are still some
historians whose ostensibly sympathetic accounts of the Holocaust explicitly
suggest that in some way the Gypsies provoked their own persecution (Lewy
2000: 11).
Because, in part, there were no war crimes trials of those who persecuted
Gypsies
? no Romany witnesses spoke at Nuremberg
? and the 'German on
German' trials ofthe early 1960s barely dealt with the issue, no official criminalization
of these acts took place until the 1970s. The fact that the perse?
cution of the Gypsies was never properly delegitimized meant that after the
war even senior officials who had taken a leading role in formulating geno?
cidal policies against the Gypsies were neither prosecuted nor deprived of offi?
cial posts; some were even restored to their original positions.23 My recordings
of oral testimony from Roma are replete with stories of encounters with
former persecutors. From Angyalfold in Budapest, Jeno Daroczi told me
about being visited on his return from the camps by the very policeman
who had personally loaded him onto the cattle cars that had taken him to
Dachau: 'Don't make a fuss (ne ugrass) or we will send you back', he was
told. The fact that many Gypsies have not received official reparations for their
sufferings has also been an important factor; in this sense too there has been
no public acknowledgement of a crime committed and a collective loss
experienced.24
These, then, are elements of the external context which curtails talk of the
past. As Laurence Kirmayer has put it, the 'landscape of memory' is such that
the past remains out of view (1996: 187-90). But I doubt if this is a sufficient
explanation. The Roma have not had much access to public space for the
airing of their grievances and yet amongst themselves they manage to sustain
an ever sharp sense of their own distinctive experience of the world. Much
Romany cultural activity takes place in Romany landscapes of which the
wider world is almost entirely ignorant. So, to understand fully Romany
silences over the Holocaust we also have to consider factors internal to Gypsy
social life, both the mnemonic devices available in Romany cultures and the
very notion of what it is to be a Rom.
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572 MICHAEL STEWART
Mnemonics and the local construction of the person
Concerning Romany mnemonics, it seems that narrative devices may them?
selves shape what is retained and what is forgotten in social memories (Bartlett
1932). Such devices can be of a quasi-technical nature - much Romany narration
takes place in dialogue form - or they can be more thematic. A world
view in which Roma are the superior party in a world divided between them?
selves and the 'foolish' or 'stupid' gaze (non-Gypsies; pronounced gadje), does
not leave much narrative space for the massive historical defeat that was the
Holocaust. Just as Cole has argued for the Betsimisaraka in relation to the
1947 uprising in Madagascar (1998, following Langer 1991), so it seems that
for the Roma memories of the war are never redemptive but remain sources
of 'pure misery'. This judgement is confirmed by the only published study
dealing with Romany memory of the war. Martins-Heuss notes that for many
years German Sinto society was 'able to maintain and reconstitute itself after
National Socialism by means of the further marginalization
? or even expulsion
? of [former victims] who ... were regarded as "weakened" or socially
impaired' (1989: 202).25
The absence of a social landscape for the production of wartime memo?
ries is a subject worthy of much more extensive investigation. However,
because it opens a broader perspective on the Roma and also broaches issues
of broader concern for anthropologists, I want to focus here on Romany
notions of'the person in time'. As Bloch has argued, while psychologists may
plausibly assert universality for procedures of short-term, working memory, 'as
soon as we move to long term memories such as autobiographical memory
... the problem of the nature of the subject must come to the fore' (1998:
81) and such subjects will have to be seen, in part, as culturally constructed.
In an argument that I can only summarize here, Day, Papataxiarchis, and I
(1998) have suggested that Romany social practices constitute a very special
sense of subjectivity in an expansive, non-durational 'present'.26 Building on
an insight of Woodburn (1968) and Meillassoux (1973) concerning the
economies of hunter-gatherers, we have argued that a resolute short-termism,
which can become in some contexts a 'present' without duration, is estab?
lished, inter alia, by practices such as:
(i) representing economic activity as foraging/gathering, rather than as
production;
(ii) sustaining an ethic of immediate consumption; and
(iii) conceptualizing sharing as a model of social relations rather than
exchange.
Together these make possible
(iv) the discursive construction of a sense of living in an abundant, affluent
world in which temporality can be transcended (Day, Papataxi?
archis & Stewart 1998: 1-3).
A few words of explanation may be in order here. 'Economy' is a limitedgood
model of behaviour (with associated notions of scarcity, saving, delayed
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MICHAEL STEWART 573
consumption, and planning) according to which present actions should
provide for the future. 'Gathering' implies that there is no need for present
action to provide for the future since this is guaranteed by a generous, affluent,
physical environment (see also Stewart 1997: 17-26). Another crucial
feature of Romany sociality
-
sharing
- also has implications for the repre?
sentation of temporality, since this too takes the sphere of distribution out of
time. The interested calculation that is reciprocal exchange is replaced by an
ethos of sharing that exists in, or, rather constitutes, an expansive 'present' (see
Bourdieu 1972; Woodburn 1998). Though this is in so many ways a rhetori?
cal, exaggerated (at times wilfully one-sided) representation of their existence
in the world, this anti-economic social orientation helps form a sense of the
person rooted in current relations with others. The explanation of the current
dispositions or practices of persons is something that is always understood as
existing in a present that owes nothing to the past and holds no hope for the
future (Day, Papataxiarchis & Stewart 1998: 18-22).27
It is no surprise that the behaviour of subjects who are strategically constructed
as living in a continuous present is rarely explained by reference to
tales of the historical past that account for the present, that is, for our sense
of history. This is not to say that there is no 'memory'. Both Fonseca and
Clendinnen take the line that they do because they see memories as possessions,
the enumeration or telling of which in narrative allows a self to be
remembered or created (Bruner 1990). But as Neisser (1994) has argued, to
think of memories as possessions implies and legitimates a very particular
notion of identity. It is no surprise, then, to fmd Fonseca suggesting that recov?
ery of'memory' will be an act of cultural empowerment, and hence the route
to cultural self-discovery (1995: 276-7).
And note here, again, where Fonseca and Clendinnen take us. If in Romany
communities there is no remembered self, then there is perhaps no self, no
identity at all. And if memory is cultural DNA (Lambek & Antze 1996: xixvi),
the means to hold the past in the present, then if there is no memory
there is no culture. The problem here is that while I am certain that this is
not anything remotely like the intention of either Fonseca or Clendinnen,
this kind of perspective comes perilously close to those which underpinned
the views of the prewar and wartime racist commentators who derided the
Roma as social parasites who were by defmition devoid of'culture'.
Memory in the midst of amnesia
The problem that Fonseca and Clendinnen have created for themselves derives
from the loose or metaphorical way in which social scientists have come to
use 'memory' to cover a promiscuously wide variety of phenomena (Bloch
1998: 114-27) without reference to those who study memory as a mental
process. I have been particularly struck by Connerton's path-breaking work,
to which I turned initially with great enthusiasm, but which I ultimately found
rather frustrating. Connerton (1989) was concerned to show that history can
be embodied in non-textual (non-inscribed) practices, and so it seemed that
he would be a good guide as to how people like the Roma, who live 'without
history', do in fact live in diachrony. Connerton's interest in bodily practices,
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574 MICHAEL STEWART
however, focuses on cases in which habits contribute to a hierarchy of social
practices with 'commemorative ceremonies' at its apex. Bodily automatisms
(politeness gestures, for example) contribute to habits which themselves both
constitute and structure 'commemorative ceremonies'; by re-enacting the past,
these in turn embody and incorporate the past in the present (1989: 6-7).
Habitual behaviour and practices, such as European peasants' treatment of
bread and wine (see, e.g., Pina-Cabral 1986), are hierarchically incorporated
in commemorations like Communion. Such commemorative ceremonies then
provide a collective autobiography and so form the basis of an (historically
shaped) collective identity (1989: 70).
When dealing with a population like the Gypsies who are 'without history'
not because they lack inscribed (textual) history but because they lack any
commemorative, calendrical, or other rites of re-enactment and ground their
'identity' not in a shared past but in shared activity in the present, clearly
Connerton's work can be of little direct relevance.28 But the difficulty in using
Connerton's work is not just a matter of ethnographic suitability. While
brilliantly portraying the relationship between ritual and everyday habits,
Connerton, with an almost Durkheimian emphasis on the social and collec?
tive, skates over the mediation of personal experience and public representa?
tions of the past.
Searching for a route between Durkheimian exaggeration (societies remem?
bering) and its psychological counterpart (brains working individually), I
turned to work in the field of 'social remembering', in which cognition is
seen (in part) as a property of intersubjective relations. William Hirst has
been one of several pioneering contributors in this field (e.g. Hirst 1994;
Hirst & Cuc 2001; though, see also Hutchins 1995 and Neisser 1994, amongst
many others). Hirsts work on a group of patients with memory difficulties
suggests a broad set of propositions about the nature of 'remembering'
which can be applied beyond his experimental cohort, and throws particular
light on my material in which commemorative recall cannot be the
source of 'remembering'. Hirst reports on work with a small number of
patients who had suffered limited brain damage, losing certain brain functions,
but leaving linguistic, perceptual, and cognitive abilities intact (1994: 254). His
key finding is that these amnesiacs do in fact 'remember' and 'construct a
sense of self. The implication of this is that Bruner (1990) may not be
right to portray selves as constructed primarily through the recall of past
events in personal narratives. The aim of Hirst's experiments was to test the
area of his patients' cognitive functioning, which psychologists refer to as
episodic memory. This is the form of memory which is thought to provide
the raw material for autobiographical narratives, and from this work Hirst
adduces a number of findings. Three of these are particularly relevant to my
problem.
First, amnesiacs' recall appears to vary according to the type of cueing
received, and, therefore, rather than rely on a simple record-recall model
of memory, the process of recognition should be included in the forms of
activity which we define as memory. Thus, for instance, one group of amne?
siacs were asked to study a list of words and then recall them. On this task
amnesiacs performed poorly compared with those without impaired memory
function. But in a second experiment, after studying a word list, subjects were
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MICHAEL STEWART 575
asked to complete stems (some of which had occurred in the studied list)
with the first word that came to mind. Here, amnesiacs performed as well as
normals. Hirst's conclusion is that everyone possesses recollections which fall
into the category of implicit memories; this entails memory in a form which
is difficult to access declaratively or verbally, and may thus appear to be imperceptible
to the individual almost all ofthe time (1994: 263).29 Secondly, despite
an inability to recall any events since the onset of amnesia, the subjects retained
a sense of a unique and distinct identity and a changing autobiographical nar?
rative. Most simply, the amnesiacs knew (remembered, even if they could not
strictly 'recall') that they had lost their 'memory', and they were depressed at
this realization. In other words, despite their difficulty in constructing declarative
statements of an autobiographical kind, they lived with a sense of their
own subjectivity, that is, of a self that they were aware was changing over time.
Thirdly, these experiments, as well as work on diary-keeping among these
subjects, led Hirst to reject the possessive individualist view of memory as a
box in which is kept the property of the owner who can run through an
inventory of all that makes him- or herself unique (1994: 273). By contrast,
Hirst argues, there are ways in which the social situation remembers things
for people
? not just for amnesiacs, but for all of us. All kinds of'reminders',
that is to say, the traces of past actions, are effectively distributed in people s
social relations, in the ways that others behave, their expectations and misunderstandings,
as well as the socially constructed material environment through
which they pass. For instance, a father who sees the empty room with a picture
of a child who has left for university will recognize that his son is not at
home. These are the ways in which amnesiacs can construct an accurate sense
of a relationship with the past without recourse to declarative, narrative
devices.
Autobiographical memory is thus, in part, rooted in quasi-procedural (or,
for Connerton, 'habitual') dealings with others that act as implicit memories.
Hirst's suggestion that such 'procedures' shape not so much what is narrated
as what is done allows a much clearer picture of'social' memory among the
Roma, who lack many of the collective mnemonic devices with which we
are familiar. I fmd it quite remarkable that Paloma Gay y Blasco reports a
Gitano articulating just such an understanding of the social distribution of
remembering. Accounting for Gitano ignorance of their past, this man told
Gay y Blasco that in 'the life of before', 'we had no neighbours who could
tell us who we were' (2002: 633). What I wish to suggest is that the Roma
of Harangos are able to live without much of what we think of as 'history'
because they have their relations with us, the gaze, the non-Gypsies, to remind
themselves 'who they are' and who they have been, and thus to help them
recognize the nature of the durational world in which, despite their best
efforts, they are condemned to live.
So what do these Roma recognize in us? First of all, threats and danger.
In earlier work I described Romany groups as living in a 'state of siege' visa-vis
the outside world.30 In Hungary (as elsewhere in the region) the very
term for the Roma (Cigdny and its equivalents elsewhere) acts as an everpresent
reminder of their daily humiliation, since it is universally understood
to refer to a people who have no culture or at least none worthy of respect.
Repeated, if inconsistently pursued, attempts at assimilation of the Roma and
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576 MICHAEL STEWART
efforts to break up their communities since the Second World War, both
during and since the Socialist period, have continually reminded the Roma
of how the gaze see them (Stewart 1997). And then there are indeed all the
institutional practices of repression, discrimination, and oppression from which
Roma regularly suffer: lower wages for the same work, exclusion from public
spaces such as common footpaths or the village bar or the local school that
are nominally open to all. In the early years of Communist rule, some Roma
even had their own identity documents: the so-called Black Identity Books,
which they shared with other 'unreliables' (Saghy 1999). And, perhaps most
dramatically, there were the carnivalesque celebrations of radical 'othering'
which included forced annual bathing; this was referred to as 'disinfection' and
was enacted by public health departments with the assistance of the police
and military. These events, which took place in many settlements in Hungary,
and which only ceased in Harangos in the year I went to live there (perhaps
not coincidentally), surely kept in mind a memory of earlier forced cleansings
(RSK 2002; Weindling 2000). In such ways, features of the social world
act to sustain certain forms of remembering.31
It is a little easier, now, to imagine how the disjointed images of fear and
terror flashing up in the cave operate to sustain a form of collective memory
for Hungarian Roma. These highly compressed traces of traumatic events
provoke interpretations in their listeners through a process of inference (Bloch
1998: 123). Agnes Daroczi described to me how as a young Romany woman
coming across one of these lightning-lit fragments from her grandmother's
past, she constructed a story (an accurate one, as I later discovered) in which
the moment made sense in terms of what she knew about the ways of the
gaze and their world today. In brief (pace Connerton), the Roma do not need
commemorations to remember - the rest of the world does it for them on a
daily basis.32
The case of the Roma of Harangos and Hungary more generally, I would
argue, represents the most common way in which Roma have had to deal
with the experience of the war. Ilsa Schmidt's story, by contrast, points to the
way in which a minority of Roma have been able to link personal experi?
ence with public representations. This is someone who came to Britain to
escape the social contexts in which her memories made her 'freeze'. In fact
the mere change of location did not enable her to resolve her paralysing
unhappiness, but here, thanks to prolonged therapeutic analysis, she feels now
that she has found a way to come to terms with her life, as far as this is pos?
sible. In the long transcript of Ilsa's narrative there are many traces of the
context in which she found a way to narrate her life. In a longer study one
could compare her experience with the ways in which other German Sinte
have begun to create public narratives of their war experiences over the past
twenty-five years (see, for example, Rosenberg 1998).
In cases such as these, the suggestion of authors like Brockmeier,
Middleton, White, and Wertsch that narrative is the semiotic vehicle in which
the social process of remembering and forgetting (cultural memory) is
achieved can clearly be of great relevance (cf. Carsten 1995: 331). These
authors see narrative as the crucial practice of memory, the hub around which
a sense of self (individual or group) is formed and organized, because this
form of 'mediated action' has the 'distinctive capacity to give shape to the
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MICHAEL STEWART 577
temporal dimension of human experience' (Brockmeier 2002: 27). For
Brockmeier this places narrative at the centre of the process of transgenerational
and historical meaning construction (2002: 38). Ilsa Schmidt s story has
become part of the shared knowledge of German Sinte through the initiatives
taken by the Heidelberg research centre, which both published her nar?
rative and involved her in their commemorative activities. But it seems likely
that this whole strategy has only become possible (for financial as well as moral
reasons) thanks to a change of heart on the part of the German state
(Margalit 2002: 180-214). Although Sinte camp survivors were long treated as
criminals or asocials in the courts (see Burleigh & Wippermann 1991: 127;
Margalit 2002: 123-59), from the 1960s onwards, and especially after 1979,33
that situation began to change, at least in West Germany.34 A public space
became available to which Sinte like Ilsa Schmidt were asked to contribute
and, in so doing, turn their memories into public cultural forms.35
For the majority of Gypsies in the rest of Europe, narrating themselves into
public life is not possible. Geoffrey White wonders if historical narrative is not
a 'universal medium in which people represent to themselves who they are'
(2000: 496), but the Hungarian Romany case examined here shows this is not
the case. Moreover, this material stands as a lesson to all who would focus on
the centrality of narration in mediating personal and public representations.
Taking my argument about the Harangos Roma one step further, I would
suggest that a culturally attuned psychology should in future take greater note
of the ways in which the social environment enables minds to live, in nondiscursive
fashions, outside and beyond their skins.
NOTES
I am grateful to the Leverhulme Foundation (Grant: F/4/BR, 'The persecution of the
Gypsies: an ethnographic and historical investigation with special reference to Central and
Eastern Europe') for generously supporting the interdisciplinary work on which this article is
based. I thank Haldis Haukanes, Deema Kaneff, and Frances Pine for inviting me to present
material discussed here as a European Association of Social Anthropologists conference paper.
For helpful comments on earlier drafts I am grateful to Maurice Bloch, Nigel Rapport, Nikolai
Ssorin-Chaikov, and Jonathon Webber. I also thank the two anonymous fRA.1 readers for their
insightful suggestions.
1The term 'Gypsy' is used relatively loosely here to refer to all those people in Europe
who self-identify as Gypsies (or synonyms of this), not all of whom are Romany speakers.
Whether these 'Gypsies' or Roma ? a term preferred by many of the more politically active
- constitute 'a people' is really a political decision. In the absence of a nation state pursuing a
'nationalizing' political agenda, Roma may lack many of the common attributes thought to
constitute 'a people'; nonetheless, most anthropologists would hesitate (and not just out of fear
of offending their politically active friends) to say they are not a people. Romany, where it is
spoken, constitutes a single language with dialectal variations (Matras 2002).
2But see S.M.Winter (1999) for an exception. Zimmermann's interview is notable for the
way in which the relation of investigator and interviewee is carefully explained, in contrast to
many 'collaborations' of writer and former victim (e.g. Rosenberg 1998). Sinte (pl.) (Sinto: m.;
Sintezza: f.) has come to be used as an ethnonym of Romany-speaking Gypsies who have lived
mostly in German speaking areas of Europe. In German usage (as well as in the literature of
many international organizations) they are referred to as Sinti.
3Of course the marking of a line between past and present inevitably recollects the past
(Connerton 1989: 6-12), and Gay y Blasco goes on to show how the discursive obliteration
of the past is paralleled by its incorporation as silent memory in bodily practice of groups of
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578 MICHAEL STEWART
kin (2002: 636-9). Williams (2003) provides a particulady rich discussion of remembering and
forgetting among French Manouches (Roma).
4Carsten proposes that we examine the ways in which everyday practices are transformed
into narratives of community, and in a slightly different way I too seek to link the implicit
knowledge and rules embodied in interaction with non-Gypsies to the generation of particu?
lar forms of memory at certain moments in time.
3In fact, many of the images of Temne ritual, we discover, do not literally bring forward
direct images from the past, or what Shaw calls 'Durkheimian reflections of historical rela?
tionships' (2002: 110). Rather, she finds imaginative reconstructions and reconfigurations of his?
torical patterns (2002: 111-13).
6
Harangos is the name I have given to the northern Hungarian town where I conducted
my fieldwork.
7In fact, since the term porrajmoshas also an obscene meaning, it has recently been rejected
by most Hungarian Romany speakers, who use the calqued term Holocausto.
8Other members of his extended family were aware of these stories, so they were not just
elicited by my presence.
9The Arrow Cross (Nyilas) Party was a pro-German, anti-Semitic fascist party led by Ferenc
Szalasiwhich ruled Hungary from October 1944 to January 1945. During its short reign, 80,000
Jews were deported from Hungary to their deaths. The persecution of the Gypsies was also
intensified. After the war, Szalasi and other Arrow Cross leaders were tried as war criminals by
Hungarian courts.
10
See, e.g., Nepszava, Thursday, 21 July 1998, p. 5, article by J. Udvady: Bofeju-hiszteria
Borsodban(Skinhead hysteria in Borsod county); Nepszabadsag,6 August 1998, p. 3, article by
Szilvia Hamor: Bofejuek pedig nincsenek... (But there aren't any skinheads ...).
11'Remember!' From the field of Holocaust studies,JamesYoung assertsthat societies remember
'only in so far as their institutions and rituals organize, shape and even inspire their constituents'
memories' (1993: xi).
12
Jewish friends and colleagues of mine would be greeted in Harangos as 'brothers' of the
Roma; people would link their two index fingers to show how the fate of these peoples had
been twinned.
13
During my fieldwork in the late 1980s, Roma in Harangos attended the local Roman
Catholic churches for the purposes of christening their children, burying their dead, and seeking
blessings from the Virgin Mary.Therefore their participation in Catholic religious life featured
only those forms and rituals which were least likely to involve the cultivation of an historical
framework for their lives.
14The term 'flashbulb memory' was invented by Brown and Kulik (1977), who asked sub?
jects to remember how they heard of John F.Kennedy's death.
lDSung by Ileana, a Kelderas woman, born in 1935, living in the village of Gura Vaii,
Bacau county, in 1995, to Karoly Bari. This song is a personal account, liable to be sung to
close acquaintances. (Text at Bari 1999: 202; the song is on CD V, track 23 of the ten-disc set
which the booklet accompanies.)
16'The Forgotten Holocaust.' Historical documentary directed by George Case for World s
End Films. Transmitted July 1989, BBC1, in the Inside Story series.
171 know of no other cases like this and official ideology was opposed to the idea that
people of Gypsy descent could be assimilated via socialization. Robert Ritter's main collaborator,Eva
Justin, published a study which purported to show the pointlessness of raising 'mixedrace'
Gypsies in orphanages or German foster homes (Justin 1944). In Switzerland,
non-Romany speaking Jenischetraveller children were forcibly adopted out of their families in
this period.
18Her arrival in Auschwitz is noted in the camp register for April 1944; her departure to
Ravensbruck is not noted (State Museum 1995).
19Interview with Ilsa Schmidt, May 2001.Transcript and original in possession of the author.
Schmidt herself referred to the teachers as 'bad Nazis'.
J As Ilsa has herself discovered during visits to the Holocaust documentation centre in
Heidelberg, as well as at Roma/Sinte commemorative meetings at Auschwitz, two of which
she has attended in recent years.
This elastic term covered beggars, vagrants, Gypsies, petty criminals, and those who were
deemed to avoid the duty of work. In practice it included a wide range of people whose
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MICHAEL STEWART 579
lifestyles did not fit the Nazi model of the Volkcommunity, that is, the Gemeinschaftsfremde,or
'community aliens'.
22This is not to say that Nazi racial policies were the inevitable outcome of pre-war eugenicist
programmes: see Evans (1987: 145-66) for a critique of determinist arguments of this
kind.
23See Willems (1997: 262-74) for a discussion ofthe case of Robert Ritter in Germany.
24
See, e.g., Buruma (1994: 137-76). During a research trip to Ukraine I discovered that the
Soviet practice of celebrating the role of Romany partisans appears to have created a public
space for Roma to articulate their history as part of a (supra-)national history.
25This is no Romany peculiarity. It is reminiscent, for example, of the use of the word sabon
(soap) in Israel for Holocaust survivors until at least the Six Day War in 1967 (JonathonWebber
pers. comm.). In the Sinte case there may have been issues of guilt and betrayal in play,as some
of those who evaded deportation appear to have done so by presenting themselves as 'pure'
Gypsies, unlike the majority of mischlinge('mixed race'), who were almost all slated for exile
and destruction.
26The book argues this not just for the Roma but a range of other peoples.
27For evidence ofthe generality of this model among Romany populations, see Gay y Blasco
(2002), for Gitanos; Gropper (1975), for the USA; Piasere (1985), for Italy;and Williams (1984),
for France.
28In this sense his book might more accurately be titled 'How Societies Commemorate the
Past'.
29The coherence of the category 'implicit memory' has been questioned. Baddeley stresses
the diversity ofthe functions that this term covers (1997: 357-60).
30The image was taken over and developed from Luc de Heusch (1966).
31As part of a broader discussion of the difficulty of incorporating their past in the present,
Martin-Heuss (1989) describes how German Sinte s willingness to be the subjects of social
scientific or historical research has been effected by the persistence of such discriminatory
treatment.
32This is not to say that the use of the gaze to hold an image of the past in the present is
unproblematic or that all inferences are accurate. The fact is that in 1988 the fear of attack
proved to have been exaggerated. Nor is it necessarily true, as Roma tend to believe in such
conflict situations, that each non-Gypsy is an equally hostile 'other'.
33In January 1979 the US television miniseries Holocaustwas transmitted in West Germany,
leading to renewed interest not only in Jewish victims but also in non-Jewish victims of the
Nazis (Margalit 2002: 180-3).
34For the contrast between West and East German treatment ofthe Gypsies after 1945, see
Margalit (2002: 83-8 and 148-9).
35
Strikingly it is in Germany alone in Central Europe that prominent intellectual figures and
artists have stood up for human rights for Gypsies (e.g. Grass 1992).
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582 MICHAEL STEWART
Rememoration sans commemoration : mnemonique
et politique des souvenirs de PHolocauste chez les
Roms d'Europe
Resume
On s'interesse beaucoup, depuis quelques annees, a la relation des Gitans (Roms) avec leur
passe. Dans le cadre d'une importante etude consacree a la memoire de l'Holocauste, les
Roms sont pris pour exemple paradigmatique d'un peuple qui prefere oublier son histoire
plutot que de se la rappeler.Au lieu d'examiner les processus ? d'obliteration ? ou de minimisation
du passe, l'approche adoptee ici consiste a analyser les manieres dont les Gitans,
malgre leur rhetorique ? presentistes ?, se rememorent le passe. En reponse a Maurice Bloch
appelant de ses vceux une meilleure integration des travaux psychologiques et anthropologiques,
l'auteur cherche a savoir ce que peut apporter une etude de la memoire en tant
que fonction socialement distribuee, accordant une grande part aux souvenirs ? implicites ?
tisses dans les relations avec les autres. Cette approche nous permet de comprendre comment
les communautes roms, persecutees par les Nazis et leurs allies pendant la seconde Guerre
Mondiale, se rememorent le passe sans pour autant le commemorer.
DepartmentofAnthropologyUniversityCollege LondonWC1E 6BT, UK. m.stewart@ucl.ac.uk
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