WARSAW (dpa) – Krystyna Trojanek, in a gesture of helplessness, pulls her shabby coat, which is at least two sizes too large for her, more tightly around her shoulders.
“I don’t understand all this bureaucracy,” the 73-year-old woman says, standing outside the Polish Treasury Ministry. “But I do know that we were done an injustice.”Along with several dozen other gypsies of the Roma tribe from around Poland, she has made the journey to Warsaw to demonstrate for an unbureaucratic handling of her applications for compensation for her being forced to perform slave labour for Nazi Germany during World War Two.Time is running out: by the end of the year the former slave labourers must have submitted their applications. But for many Roma, it is like doing battle against a windmill.“They want to see documents from us, but we don’t have any,” says Zofia Smilinska while nervously puffing on a cigarette, her dark eyes flashing from a slender face. “The Germans treated us like animals – and animals don’t need any documents.”The Roma, in comparative numerical terms only a small group among all the victims of Nazism, are afraid that their suffering will one day be forgotten, precisely because so little has been made public about their persecution.“There are hundreds of books about the Holocaust against the Jews, but only the victims themselves and a few scholars know about the Holocaust against the Roma,” bitterly notes Roman Chojnacki of the Association of Polish Roma.“In order to document all this, historians and archivists are needed. But we Roma don’t have any archivists,” he added.Many of the Roma slave labourers did not even have any identification documents, and so many of the survivors cannot prove that they once lived in a ghetto. It was not only the Jews, but also Roma who during the German occupation of Poland who were trapped inside ghettos.Not even the infamous German penchant for orderliness is of any help, says Stanislav Stankiewicz with a sigh.A member of the International Auschwitz Committee and vice president of the International Roma Union, Stankiewicz says that “many labour camps where concentration camp inmates performed slave labour existed for only a few months. So the Germans did not bother with the administration of inmates’ records”.Those who survived had only their memories and nightmares left to them.“We were animals for them, and it was like animals that they treated us,” Krystyna Trojanek said.“Hunger and beatings – that’s all they had for us,” adds Zofia Smilinska, recalling that as a 13-year-old girl she witnessed how her father was beaten half to death. Like many Roma of her generation, she can neither read nor write.Only one Roma organisation may issue notarised documents for the Nazi victims – an additional problem for the members of this ethnic minority spread out throughout the entire country.“We only wish to be treated like the other victims,” Stankiewicz stresses. But the Roma did not even have a representative in the executive organ of the “German-Polish Reconciliation” foundation charged with handling compensation matters.A great deal of bitterness has meanwhile built up during the long wait for justice.“We Roma, in contrast to other groups, were also not compensated as an ethnic group for lost property,” Stankiewicz stresses. The Polish Roma, who as late as into the 1960s had lived a migratory life, had been affluent even without possessing houses and property.“Our horses, jewelry, and even our women – the Nazis robbed us of everything and never compensated us,” he said.
