Like the Jews, the people known as the Roma (Gypsies) have suffered centuries of persecution, and even enslavement, in Europe, the Middle East and North Africa. Suspicion and hatred for this race of foreigners is legend and, for Jews, resonates with our own experience in those regions.
The Roma, now generally much more vulnerable than most of the world’s Jews, are currently receiving help from the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, the overseas arm of the American Jewish community, through its non-sectarian program to provide aid to people in crisis. The JDC’s efforts on behalf of the Roma are underwritten by Milwaukee philanthropist Alfred Bader.
On Monday last week, Iowa native, Marquette University graduate and resident of Serbia Paul Polansky together with Roma activist Miradija Gidzic, two experts on the Roma of Eastern Europe, spoke to an audience of some 65 at the downtown University Club and screened a film they had produced. Their visit was part of a four-city speaking tour.
In an address titled “The Roma in Europe: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow,” Polansky and Gidzic told the history of the Roma, who are thought to have left their homes in northern India 1,000 years ago, migrating and, in some cases, carried off by vanquishing armies. The Roma scattered over several continents.
The speakers explained the depth and virulence of prejudice and abuse the Roma have and continue to endure in the Balkan states, but their primary message was a cry for help on behalf of 500 displaced Roma refugees living in United Nations camps in Kosovo, a province of Serbia.
During the ethnic wars that blew Yugoslavia apart at the end of the 1990s, the Roma of that region found themselves caught between the larger populations of warring Serbs and Albanians. They were persecuted most harshly by the ethnic Albanians, who saw them as Serbian collaborators.
For the last eight years, since the end of the war in Kosovo, these 500 displaced Roma have suffered increasing physical, psychological and mental damage caused by lead poisoning from a toxic waste dump adjacent to their camps.
Three huge mounds of industrial waste, the by-product of a lead smelting factory that operated from the 1920s until 2000, according to a Feb. 5, 2006, article in the New York Times, are causing birth defects, brain damage and physical illness.
“All Romani children conceived in the U.N. camp are born with irreversible brain damage,” Polansky said.
Though the U.N. would allow them to leave the camp to return to their homes in Kosovo, the Roma of Mitrovica fear that they would be in danger from the ethnic Kosovar Albanians who drove them away initially.
Gidzic said they want only to receive compensation for the homes they lost and the freedom to relocate to a place of their own choosing, a remedy that she said Serb and Albanian refugees have been granted.
But, according to Polansky, the U.N. consistently responds to requests by or on behalf of the Roma by saying that they “do not meet our criteria,” though it is never clear what those criteria are.
Polansky, a poet and author who majored in journalism as an undergraduate, stumbled upon the Roma of Eastern Europe while conducting genealogical research on his own family in the Czech Republic in the mid-1990s.
He has written several books about the Roma, including three about the Roma of Czechoslovakia.
Gidzic, 25, is Polansky’s assistant head of mission for Kosovo and Serbia, for the Society of Threatened People.
The Oct. 8 program was hosted by the Helen Bader Foundation and co-sponsored by the Nathan & Esther Pelz Holocaust Education Resource Center of the Milwaukee Jewish Federation’s Coalition for Jewish Learning and the University of Wisconsin-Center for Jewish Studies.
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