The Roma in the Holocaust and America with Ioanida Costache
Ioanida Costache is an ethnomusicology PhD student at Stanford University who is Romani-American and activist. In this episode, Eugene speaks with Ioanida, a friend from college, about Romani-American identity, the erasure of the Roma as victims of the Holocaust, and the continued separation of Roma families in modern day America.
Were you always interested in Roma advocacy? If not, what happened?
After that year that I was teaching at Amherst, I applied for a Fulbright to Romania. I had already kind of delayed my life being a graduate TA, and I needed to actually figure something out.
Even that process was interesting because the ethnomusicologist on faculty asked me if I was interested in studying Roma music. I had this freak out where I was like, “how dare this person talk to me about wanting to study this music that I had never really studied.”
Roma music was something I heard a lot of stories about, but I was a Western classical violinist. So I was really offended and ashamed that this professor was bringing up this personal, intimate music into an academic sphere. Fast forward five years later, Jeffers is helping me draft this proposal to go to Romania and study Roma music. That in itself was already a process of coming to terms with this identity of being Roma that I had basically rejected for 20 years up till that point. That’s an inherited shame that a lot of Roma people have.
When I finally did end up in Romania, I met other Roma whose stories resonated with mine. There was an inherited shame that’s passed down in families that comes from societal racism that then becomes internalized. That year was extremely formative for me because it was the first year that I assumed my ethnic identity in any sort of public sphere, even among peers. It was also the year that I learned that Roma were killed in the Holocaust. As an American growing up in the U.S. education system, I never learned that Roma people, my own ethnicity, were targeted by Nazis during the Holocaust.
I came to this startling realization when I was invited by a group of young Roma to go to Auschwitz for the 70th commemoration of the liquidation of the Gypsy camp in Auschwitz. You can imagine my shock. I also became very critical of historical narratives at that point. I started questioning like, “what are the conditions that allowed me to become a 23-, 24-year-old person in the world who didn’t know about the ethnic persecution of their own people?”
Why were you rejecting your ethnic history? What do you mean by “inherited shame?”
I think it’s also a question of passing when it comes to Roma. Roma identity is not a legible identity, especially in the U.S., but even in other contexts, like if a Roma person doesn’t meet cultural indexes, which are basic, like they have dark skin, or they wear a certain kind of clothes, it’s really easy for Roma people to pass. In some cases, I wouldn’t say it’s easy. It’s also tied to this historical reality of forced assimilation in communist Romania, where my parents grew up. My parents moved to the U.S. in ’85 and I was born in the U.S., but they experienced forced assimilation, which meant you couldn’t speak the Roma language. There were all these policies of what’s called Romanianization.Tthe government was trying to Romanianize the population. What that results in is Roma people who are ashamed to show their culture publicly. Just because my parents were transplanted to the U.S. doesn’t mean that they don’t take all of that with them. When they moved overseas, they brought all of that shame and baggage with them, which they passed on to my brother and me.
I grew up knowing I was Roma the whole time; there was nothing that was like hidden from me. My father was very proud of being Roma, whereas my mom’s not so much the same way, and that has to do with their individual relationships to their own ethnic identity, but it was understood that you don’t tell people this part of yourself. I remember at an orchestra rehearsal, my dad was talking to the director and he said something about being Roma, and my mom shushed him and was like, “what are you doing, don’t talk about that.” I was probably seven or eight, but, as a kid, you totally latch on to those memories, and they inform your own understanding of your identity going forward. There’s a lot of little examples of how that kind of manifested, which brought me to this point of having to come to terms with being Roma in public settings.
Did that manifest itself in them explicitly telling you not to think about your ethnicity?
I think it was really related to the Fulbright. What’s sad about it is that for me, I needed this sort of elite, academic legitimization in order to feel like, “now I can declare this thing.” I think if it hadn’t been for the fact that I was going to Romania through this elite program, I probably wouldn’t have been able to feel comfortable saying things publicly about being Roma. There’s this little part of me that still struggles with that because I know it’s not something that my mom would necessarily want me to be talking about. She’s changed her opinion about this over the last eight years, but it’s been a process for both of us that we’ve been going through together.
What was the change to suddenly telling people about your identity like?
It wasn’t until maybe high school that I started even saying the word Gypsy or Roma, but prior to that, I would just say I was Romanian. People didn’t really know what Romanians were, so that was fine. But as I got older, people started to even question that because I do have dark skin. People would ask me, “well, you don’t really look Eastern European.” So that story was falling apart. It wasn’t until high school that I gave the further explanation to my very close circle of friends. At that point, I was using the word Gypsy, which is I’ve now realized is a pejorative term, and that the word Roma is the correct term to use when referring to the ethnicity.
Where are you now in terms of understanding your history and being more deliberate in the words that you say, and feeling more educated about everything? Where do you see yourself in this process?
I’m really grateful for everything I’ve been able to learn about Roma history, considering how institutionalized the suppression of Roma history has been. There’s this amazing quote from bell hooks, and she’s quoting somebody else, but she talks about this institutionalization of ignorance of history and culture. She says “institutionalized is the ignorance of our history, our culture, our everyday existence, that often we do not even know ourselves.” That pretty much exactly describes my experience. The fact that Roma history is so suppressed in schools, especially in Romania, but really globally, made me cut off from it. So now, it does feel empowering to be in this position where I can actually be part of writing that history. Especially in the Romanian context, there are very few people who are doing work on the Roma Holocaust. I know Roma historians who are working on writing the history of Roma enslavement on Romanian territory, and it just feels very validating. It feels very healing to be able to be part of that process of bringing these histories that have been suppressed to light .
Bringing these histories to light can feel overwhelming or empowering. How does it make you feel?
It’s overwhelming because you feel like the stakes are so high. When it comes to Roma, in the Armenian context, and Europe more broadly, there are still people who write Nazi slogans on videos of Roma music. I’ve gotten death threat messages when there have been articles published about me in Romanian magazines that are along the lines of “you filthy little Gypsy,” “shut your mouth,” “all of you should be gassed directly” on things that I’ve posted on my personal Facebook page. We’re trying to change people’s impressions of a minority that’s been very misunderstood. Part of that misunderstanding comes from this ignorance of historical oppression.
One of our responsibilities today in a globalized society is to manage all of this information and understand a lot more dimensions than in previous generations, where it was, “this is you, you are this thing, and everybody else is this other thing.” That is a very difficult thing for everybody. Howdo we manage to do that?
When your individual world was smaller, you had civic responsibility to a smaller group of people. But now it’s like, I need to understand the nuances of the Israel-Palestine conflict extremely well, I need to understand all of these things. It’s amazing that we have extended our community to this global scope such that we feel this civic obligation to more people. I think that’s actually one of the amazing things about globalization. It’s making Roma trauma matter on a global scale in a way that it didn’t before. Part of it is because people are moving and there are Roma showing up in Berkeley, California, for example. People need to be aware of what the history of this population is because they’ve suddenly showed up here.
How does the “inferiority” of Roma people relate to Jews during the Holocaust?
Roma people have been in European territory for 12 centuries. They are people who migrated from northern India. Upon their arrival to Europe, they were treated as this exotic other. There are laws in England from maybe the 1600s that talk about the impurity of Roma.People thought, if a Roma person touched them, they would become black. It was racist. Leading up to the Holocaust, there were a lot of restrictions on Roma movement because part of the community was nomadic. During the Habsburg Empire, there were laws restricting Roma movement, too.
They’re pushed out by society, and then they’re reprimanded for not assimilating. They’re always in this limbo of, we don’t accept you into the body politic because you look different, you dress different, you have all of these markers of difference that make you unassimilable into what we consider white European identity. Then at the same time, they’re being persecuted exactly for that reason, that they are not assimilating.
But this is the way that identity is constructed, right? Every identity needs a foil. It’s like Roma have been the constituent of the outsider for the European whiteness for centuries. European whiteness has been constituted on the existence of Roma in European territory. The Holocaust was really all of that coalesced into the moment of political war on these people. It wasn’t like a sudden thing that Hitler went after the Jews and now going after the Roma too; it was a process to get there. Roma were always a part of it. They were always integral to the persecution of these races during the Holocaust.
In Germany, in the 1929 Olympics in Berlin, there was a Roma encampment pulled out of Berlin, and they were sent to this concentration camp in Marzen. This was one of the first things that happened during the Holocaust, putting these folks in a concentration camp. The persecution of Roma as an integral part of the Holocaust is just so widely ignored. If you look at the historiography and the numbers, it’s appalling when you think about how many people died, and how we just don’t talk about it at all.
Was it just assumed that these people are inferior and neglected, so whatever happens to them doesn’t matter? How was that perpetuated? And is that the reason why those stories are all erased, as opposed to the stories of Jews?
I think that a lot of it has to do with political power, and also social and literal capital that Roma just have never had. Roma in Romania were enslaved for 500 years. When we think about how that affects a community, we think to the African American model and what it mean to be a disenfranchised group and how that affects you in the present.
That kind of mindset doesn’t exist when it comes to Roma in Romania. Their voices are so silenced that even after the persecution during the Holocaust, they had no voice, they had no power to appeal to. There weren’t organizations that were Roma organizations to voice their needs or their desire for reparations. It was just folks were liberated from camps. They were told to walk home; they weren’t even provided transportation. A lot of people died just on the way back. They were in survival mode. For a lot of these people, it was just “how do I get the next day and the next day?” They didn’t have the luxury to politically organize and fight for their rights or their desire for reparations, just given their status in society.
Romani suffering was not simply eclipsed; it was was systematically erased in the post-war period. Is it because recognizing the Romanis would have compromised a powerful person’s career or status?
There’s this investment on the part of Jewish organizations to make the Holocaust. Even now, in the European context, saying something about Roma is only done by politicians when it’s a very far-right perspective. It’s really done to win votes. There was a politician in Romania who had this big quote about how he provided water to this Roma community; he did it in order to win their votes.It was just shameless, and then went into how Roma women should be sterilized. It’s to appeal to the racist people in his town to vote for him. There’s a lot of instances of this, where it’s seen as in the interest of the people, and then politicians reify these stereotypical ideas, and then use them in this propagandaesque way to win majority favor.
It’s terrifying that Romani history is not at all different from what we are seeing in America. Is racism, or seeing someone as different from me, just a part of human nature?
In order for the sovereign to exercise his power, he must create these divisions between people. When Gambon talks about the Holocaust, he mentions Roma, but he’s talking about Jews. He’s describing how there’s the creation of the body politic, which is like the majority people. There’s at the same time creative minority, which he refers to as their life. That means that that life is essentially expendable.
In order for a state to have, consolidate and define its power, it creates these internal hierarchies within the nation. You see this across history. But the role of ideology and the role of government in brainwashing and controlling the way we think about ourselves and relate to other people shouldn’t be ignored. It’s a really huge part of that process.
How does anger factor into your life? How does it factor into Romani culture? Does anger fuel what you do now?
Carmen’s a very good friend of mine, she’s the executive director of the only, to my knowledge, feminist Roma NGO in Romania. When she said that she was drawing on Audrey Lorde, the Black feminist thinker, who famously says “my response to racism is anger,” I think it just makes sense to anyone who has ever experienced racism.
I think anger is the second step, because the first experiences of racism made me feel shame. They really did affect me personally. That’s why it’s so important to have solidarity with people of your identity and other people, not necessarily of your identity, but who are also experiencing racism, because through solidarity, we can transform shame into anger. Then anger can be a catalyst for social change. Because it’s this fury that you can then use to actually do something with. But in order to feel anger, that’s already an important step, because it means that you’ve been able to depersonalize it in some way. When somebody says something racist to you, you no longer feel shame, you feel anger.
For me, that was like an important part of my own process of coming to terms with my Roma identity: meeting other Roma women and becoming in solidarity and sisterhood with them. We can work to construct something together. When you’re alone, it’s hard because you’re just suffering in this solitary way when dealing with these really difficult things.
How do you use anger in a more productive way?
Using anger like what you did, you sent it to some people and that diffused your anger, which was effective, because then you shared this story with other people. It was for good reason that you felt less anger, because you were like, “okay, I did something, maybe to bring awareness about this thing.” But I also think using anger efficiently is something I’ve learned in the last year through activism. For a long time, every single racist thing that happened, I would write a Facebook post about it. Then I read this quote from Toni Morrison, which is “racism distracts you from your work.” It’s this idea that no, you have a thing to do. You have a job, I have a dissertation to write; I’m trying to construct history about Roma. Yet, here I am, every time a politician says something racist about Roma, wasting my day, writing a response to it. The third step for me has been how to channel that anger effectively in ways that I’m still doing my work. I’m clear about what my mission is and why I’m doing the things that I’m doing.
What were your reactions to the story about a Roma boy who was separated from his family at the U.S. border?
It’s about a Roma boy, who was the youngest child separated from his family at the U.S. border. His parents came through Mexico. It was his parents, then his brother, and Constantine, the baby. They were seeking asylum. They came through Mexico and were trying to cross in Texas, and the mother and the older son never made it across the border because they got wind that the father and the baby were detained. They were arrested when they tried to cross. At some point, somebody called their mother, Florentine, and said she shouldn’t cross, so the mother went back to Romania, and when the father and Constantine were in custody, they separated the child from the father, Vasile. Vasile was in a detention center for maybe two months. Then Constantine somehow ended up in Michigan in foster care. Constantine was in foster care for five months. He was nine months old when he was finally returned to his family in Romania. He spent five months in foster care, which was more than he had spent with his own mother at that point. The story is about a family who was seeking asylum in the U.S., and part of the reason was ethnic persecution. In the article, Florentina mentioned that she was forcibly sterilized, which is a Roma women’s issue topic that’s widely not recognized. Although there has been documentation of this, especially in the Czech Republic, that was just one of many reasons that they were seeking asylum in the U.S.
How common is the story of this family? Are there a lot of Roma refugees or asylum seekers? Or is this an anomaly?
I can’t give you like numbers. I’m not sure how many Roma, especially from Romania, tried to illegally cross into the U.S. The phenomenon that’s really common in Romania is that once Romania was in the EU, a lot of parents would try to work in more Western countries like Germany, Italy, Spain. This divided families and is one of the effects of capitalism in Romania. There are folks who are leaving their children at home, sometimes in the care of grandparents, but sometimes just alone in their homes, and the parents are going outside to do menial labor, elderly care or field work, picking fruit, that kind of seasonal, contingent labor. I think that’s probably more common than this particular story of trying to seek asylum in the U.S.
Tune in to Episode #36, contact us at dividedfamiliespodcast@gmail.com and follow us at @DividedFamiliesPodcast.