Black Lives Matter, Czech style? This country’s Roma get neither respect nor justice

The current American events can hardly be translated into the Czech context. But we have one debt nevertheless: the structural racism against Roma men and women, on both symbolic and practical levels.

The memory of my first encounter with racism is sadly too vivid, even though it happened almost twenty years ago. A funfair had arrived in Brno, with its kitschy merry-go-rounds, which I went to ride on with my father and a friend. We sat down in a mock flying saucer, and just before it took off we saw a boy zigzagging between the various amusement attractions. A Roma, not much older than I. Pursued by a gang of Neonazis, baseball bats in hands, chasing their prey. The anxiety and hopelessness I felt watching the hunt for this poor kid is something I can neither forget nor blot out. But actually I am glad that I remember.

In those days, ”Gypsy hunts“ were quite frequent. The term ”racist murder“ was only just beginning to take roots and find its place in the legal and social vocabulary. In those days, some sections of the population were dismayed by the sight of Roma men and women becoming targets of brutal and premeditated murder which had a single motive: the colour of their skin. In those days, the Roma were not protected by the State and the thugs walked away from courts with laughably minor punishment. Even though in most cases, they killed or hunted just for fun. The names of the murdered Roma remain unknown to most people. There are quite a number of them, and they are not just a spectre from a distant past.

Recall who those people are

Emil Bendík, beaten to death with rods. Tibor Danihel, drowned by the Neonazis for fun.  Milan Lacko, kicked unconscious and left in the road to be run over by a car. Helena Biháriová, thrown into the flood of the Elbe River. Karel Balogh, stabbed repeatedly with a knife at a nightclub. Radek Rudolf, a six-year old boy, brutally beaten by a drunk Neonazi, and stabbed several times with a glass shard. Oto Absolon, killed by multiple knife stabs. And also some foreigners: Sudanese Hassan Elamin Abdelradi, stabbed to death by the Nazis. Or an unknown Turkish citizen, mistaken by the Neo-Nazis for a Roma and beaten to death with chains and rods. Miroslav Demeter who died in unexplained circumstances after excessive police handling. To all those names we may add numerous anonymous violent attacks, sterilisation of Roma women against their will, arson attacks, or the hate marches bordering on pogroms, sometimes prevented by groups of activists. And daily occurrences of structural oppression and humiliation, life on society’s fringe, often spent in fear.

The names of the murdered Roma remain unknown to most people

”I am saving a few hundred crowns from each wage payment to have some for when we have to leave,“ one Roma friend told me after a discussion with high school pupils. It brought tears to my eyes. I was shocked by what she had to listen to from her peers. And yet, she replied calmly to the most racist fallacies and hoaxes, explaining to her audience that she really did not receive a hundred thousand crowns in social assistance, or that Roma are not beasts raping blond girls. Had I been in her place, I would have told them all to get lost, and left. Just to watch the humiliation of her defending her very existence was maddening. And she had to live with this every day?  This has been aptly described by such journalists as, for instance, Fatima Rahimi.

Just a memorial is not enough

A few years ago, the Government approved the purchase of the pig farm in Lety and its reconstruction into a memorial of the Roma holocaust. Here, where Roma men and women died with the complicity of Czech police, the embodiment of our greatest shame as Czech society has stood for decades. We called it ”The Memorial of Czech anti-Gypsyism“.  It aptly expressed Czech society’s attitude toward the Roma. And not just that – it stood there as evidence of how much we have been trying to exculpate ourselves from our complicity in the Roma holocaust. Of how much we refuse to confront it, how much we want to deny it. The story of our shame at Lety is gradually coming to its conclusion in these days. Yesterday, the Museum of Roma Culture presented its first visualisation of the new Memorial of the Roma and Sinti Holocaust in Bohemia. The public competition for its design was won by Atelier Terra Florida and Atelier Světlík. Their winning design symbolises a forest. The demolition of the pig farm is to begin soon and by 2023 the site of the tragic suffering of Roma and Sinti may at last become the first sign on the way to a dignified recognition of Czech-Roma historic debt.

Just to watch the humiliation of her defending her very existence was maddening

In recent years, streets and squares have undergone a new wave of renaming. In their own way, the changes always serve as a political statement, locally and globally. The need for the politically inspired renaming of streets is in itself debatable. The square in front of the Russian embassy was renamed after dissident Boris Nemtzov, even though its previous name was harmless – “Under the Chestnut Trees.“ The idea was to show Putin who is boss here. We, the Prague citizens, of course. A petition was in circulation for the renaming of Marshall Konev Street in Žižkov to Maria-Theresa Street, since, if his statue is being moved into storage, no trace of this Bolshevik must be left anywhere. Some of the debates about public space are quite debilitating, partly because rarely do they express the need to come to terms with national history and responsibility. To name streets and squares after Roma victims of hate violence could be an ideal way of fulfilling such a purpose. It could start a journey of self-reflection and of starting to repay the debt, which the greater part of society owes to the Roma. But without additional structural changes, even this would remain just an empty gesture.

So that our children may be able to live here – together

Last year, crossing the imaginary frontier between the northern corner of New York’s Central Park and Harlem, I fell into a spiral of ambivalent emotions. We were standing at the top of Malcolm X Boulevard, named after one of the most important personalities of Afro-Americans’ rights movement. Like other places – Marcus Garvey Park or Adam Clayton Powell Junior Boulevard – the Malcolm X Boulevard, cutting through the heart of Harlem, is a painful reminder of Afro-Americans’ (and other ethnic groups’) endless struggle for equal rights in the United States. Evidence of continued racism that for us, who are not living it, is hardly imaginable and will not go away until we self-critically accept it as a bare fact and support all ostracised people in their own struggle for a just world. Were I standing on Malcolm X Boulevard today, I would feel even more out of place there after the police murder of George Floyd. A street bearing the name of a black radical is a bitter reminder that symbolic recognition is not enough.

A street bearing the name of a black radical is a bitter reminder that symbolic recognition is not enough

Discussions on current events in America often suggest how important it is to consider the Czech context, too. It differs fundamentally – starting with the fact that police in Europe are on the whole not so violent, and because we in Czechia do not believe that our racism pushes the Roma to the fringes. We do not value their memory because we do not value them, so we wouldn’t think of sharing the public space with them. It would of course be absurd to think that Roma-named streets remove racism from Czech towns. It would be improper to use names of the murdered to embellish today’s Roma ghettoes, as it would be just as ridiculous to plant them in the new luxury developments where housing is beyond the reach of most of us, let alone the socially deprived. However much I may be yearning for a Helena Biháriová Street or a Tibor Danihel Square, I do not want them to serve as a cover-up of a further deepening of unequal treatment of our Roma. Any Roma-named streets would make sense only if all levels of society – from education and housing to social recognition – make an effort to ensure that Roma families can live not only without fear of violence but in the hope of a better and more just life.

When Trianon hurts differently

One hundred years and one day. This article was intentionally not written for June 4th. It did not intend to insult anyone, nor interfere with anyone’s commemoration. But I did want to get it out.

I was raised so that for a long time I believed I must feel pain because of Trianon. We did not talk about it all that often; thinking about it, it would get mentioned once or twice a year, and even then it was accidental, perhaps as part of some old story. But it was there, in our environment and surrounding us in our home in Transylvania, and later in Partium.

Our family is a Transylvanian middle-class family in the classic sense, with one branch from Nagyenyed and one from Nagybánya, with grandparents born before 1920. One grandfather read law, the other engineering, and the grandmothers, having completed their secondary education, looked after the household, raised the children and kept the family together. There were loads of books in both homes, they played cards, travelled, and occasionally just sighed. And they had principles. One side was strictly Catholic, the other more secular Calvinist, where on the odd occasion one or another theology teacher or pastor would make an appearance, without anyone thinking too much of it.

Yes, for a very long time I believed that Trianon must hurt

But manners were extremely important. Once, as a three or four-year-old, I got up from the table during lunch, and my grandfather’s voice caught up with me before I reached the yard. I did not ask for permission, so I had to drag myself back. He was a strict man with a quick temper. One of those two thousand or so intellectuals in South Transylvania who were dragged away by the Romanian authorities to the Zsilvasar (Tirgu Jiu) camp and kept there for several months. They had done no crime other than that they were Hungarians, and they were able to stand up for their rights.

My father was the proper son of his father. He too wanted to become a lawyer, but with his background he would have had no chance of getting admitted. He became a teacher, and at the university he was dragged through mud, but that did not extinguish the explosive organiser and cynical intellectual in him.

I simply respected my grandfather, but my father I worshipped. When he told a story, I never forgot it, when he handed me a book, it was not even a question whether I would read it.

And, he was guiding me. Sometimes with Hemingway, then Hasek or Miklos Banffy, or even Albert Wass, whatever he saw best. And me, as just a 15-year-old from Partium in Ceausescu’s Romania, I seemed to have understood why I had to read “Sword and Scythe”.

Credit: Hadtörténeti Múzeum

Yes, for a very long time I believed that Trianon must hurt.

At least, it seemed for some time that I was raised to feel that pain. But later on, I actually realised that this was not the case. That it is not the trauma of Trianon they had passed on after all.

Perhaps my grandparents, yes. They lived through Trianon, they were old enough to understand and to experience the direct consequences. They were torn away from their relatives in Budapest, they had to learn to live in Romania, to attend university in Bucharest, instead of Budapest, and to become a minority having been the majority.

My parents’ situation was different. My mother was born in 1943 in Nagybánya, again in Hungary, but by the time she would become more conscious, she was a Romanian citizen. My father, born in 1940, experienced it, yet again, differently. He was born in Romania, and lived there until the end of his life. He had only heard stories about Trianon, he did not experience it, although a mere 20 years passed after Trianon until he was born, these stories were still very vivid. However, the wrongdoing that affected him did not spring directly from the dictate, but from the melange of post-war madness, nationalism, grief, thirst for revenge, frustration, and poverty. Added to this was the still recurring memory of Trianon, though somewhat more distanced, but the Second Vienna Award much closer, and also the psychological and physical devastation of the spreading of a violent ideology. “His crime” was that he was Hungarian, but differently than it was in his father’s case.

No, I was not brought up to be obliged to feel pain

As for me, having been born almost fifty years after Trianon, this was now all just history. And history evokes respect; it might make one feel disappointed, even angry, or in a better case it can educate, but actually it does not hurt. Perhaps one can believe this is the case, however it would require someone who would intend one to believe it – either because he too was made to believe it or because he had his own selfish agenda.

No, I was not brought up to be obliged to feel pain.

I was simply raised as a Hungarian Transylvanian, who does not forget Trianon, one who does not forget what his family endured, but one that does not hate every single Romanian as a knee-jerk reaction, and does not accept every Hungarian unconditionally. I was used to seeing my grandfather caring for the cases of his Romanian clients just as much as for those of the Hungarians. And my father became a Romanian Litterateur and would hand me Rebreanu and Cosbuc as much as Bánffy or Albert Wass. I was encouraged to learn Romanian perfectly, but I was also conditioned to quite literally go weak in the knees when in 1981, at 13 years old, I saw for the first time a freely flying Hungarian flag as the train chugged with me for the first time across the border.

Is this nationalism? In a certain sense, yes. It is different from that of my parents’ and very different from that of my grandparents. It could perhaps be called a sort of open nationalism, or even some kind of national awareness with a liberal approach. Something that reflects the time and the environment where one lives, the distance in time from the historic events, the being a minority, but also by being surrounded by an utterly mad version of an insane ideology, the system of Ceausescu. When it is not the Romanians you hate but the communists, and since more amongst them are Romanians, the two blend into each other sometimes. When the reason you are not rooting against every Romanian team in every sport is not because they are Romanian, but because of the force with which the powers shove their expectation into your face (also quietly noting: in the same way as the Hungarian public service and pro-government media does today). Or when you would not necessarily fall into a trance by listening to Istvan, a kiraly (Stephen the king), but because you are only able to listen to that tape hidden away in the back rows of the bookshelf on the lowest volume to avoid being reported, then suddenly you become a convert and sometimes you hum nothing else for weeks. When there are people who expect that you would never go out with a Romanian girl, but you know perfectly well that this is not because you would not like any of them or that you would be deterred by their nationality, but because the barrier is inside you: you love in Hungarian.

And all the while Trianon clearly does not even cross your mind, and why should it – that is not your pain.

In actual fact my own attitude to the national feeling was bothering me. Especially after 1989, when as a twenty-something year old student I was immersed in the Hungarian student youth and political organisations in Romania, where once again, national exclusivity was way too often an expectation.

Romanian soldiers in Târgu Mureş in March 1989
Credit: Wikipedia

And this communal atmosphere of course also included the disappointment that at the beginning of 1990 the illusion of reconciliation disappeared in a puff of smoke within weeks, and there was the March of Marosvásárhely (Targu Mures), there was Funar, Iliescu and the other extremists.

But there was also frustration mixed with pridefulness, perceived cultural superiority and national romanticism, and feelings from the soul, with the emerging political interests of individuals and groups.

I found solace when I came across for the first time and immediately identified with this phrase by Miklós Mészöly: “I perceive my being Hungarian as a pleasant accident”.

This is when things fell into place.

And I am no less Hungarian when Trianon does not hurt or not the way it is expected to

It pleases me. I am not more nor less just on account of being Hungarian, but that is fine just like that – and there are numerous reasons I can list for this. From Nagyenyed (Aiud) and Nagybánya (Baia Mare) through Szatmárnémeti (Satu Mare) and Temesvár (Timisoara) to Budapest, from Kányádi to Esterházy, from Bartók to LGT.

But it is an accident, and it does not oblige. I am no less Hungarian if I don’t want to holiday in Székelyföld (Szeklerland) but on the Italian riviera, if I believe that any democrat is better than a Hungarian despot, if I believe in the EU and not in the nation state, if I do not stand up when I hear “Nélküled” (Without you) as I find it awful and especially do not consider it to be an anthem.

And I am no less Hungarian when Trianon does not hurt or not the way it is expected to. As yes, hurt it does. But I am not lamenting the territory and the geographical or political grandeur, but the people and fates. Just like the ones affected by the holocaust, the victims and refugees of 56, or all of those who were snitched on by Kádár’s agents and were crippled by their regime.

Credit: Reviczky Zsolt

What’s more – my real Trianon is when, with the greatest love, I am trying to convince my only child not to come back from his British university to László Kövér’s ideological shambles, not to the darkness of the CÖF (Civil Cooperation Forum), not to the country where protesters are beaten apart, then the black clad groups with their distorted faces are permitted to wreak havoc in Deak square, while the Roma of Gyöngyös become the subjects of political shooting galleries.

If something hurts, then it’s this.

This article was intentionally not written for June 4th. It did not intend to insult anyone, nor interfere with anyone’s commemoration. Everyone must interpret Trianon for themselves. My father and my grandfathers would be, I am sure, of different opinions, but I believe they would understand me.