Racists always build a wall to isolate their victims
There is news that must be read twice to believe that what it tells can be true. In the Slovak city of Ostrovany a wall, which is 150 meters long and two meters tall, has been built in order to isolate the Gypsy community from the rest of the population. Isn’t it true that it is hard to believe this can happen precisely this year, which is the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, in a country which is a member of the European Union? Do these insane people know what the construction of that wall represents?
In 1961, the communist authorities that ruled in Germany, divided after the Second World War, built that horrible wall, in order to prevent many citizens from escaping towards other free locations. It was, for forty years, a witness of the tragedy that represents dividing the citizens according to their beliefs in closed spaces in which any attempt to reach freedom is punished with prison or death. I was fortunate to experience first-hand the wonderful night in which the wall was destroyed in Berlin. At that time I was a Member of the European Parliament and I belonged to the Justice Commission which those days was, by chance, celebrating one of its meetings in Berlin. On November the ninth of 1989, German people from both sides of the hated wall and whose illusion exceeded their physical strength, grabbed hammers and picks and began destroying the opprobrium which had divided whole families during four decades. That night I went to bed early, but a colleague of mine who was sleeping next door at the hotel, began knocking nervously on my door telling me to wake up since we had to go to the street in order to intensely live a historical and unique event: the destruction of the wall. I stayed the whole night out, I was happy to witness freedom’s triumph. Every rock that I saw fall was like a trumpet announcing a new era. Every blow stroke to that infamy was a note which contributed to the fulfilment of the best hymn to praise peace and concord among human beings. Obviously I could not repress the temptation to bring to Spain some pieces of the wall, which I gave out amongst my family and friends. Nowadays, I still have on my office’s shelve a piece of that cement, a mute witness of so much infamy.
The local and international press have called the Slovak wall the new Berlin Wall, right on the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the symbol of European division.
Ostrovany’s Mayor, Cyril Revákl, says that he is not racist since he knows that “there are a lot of decent people living amongst our Gypsy neighbours”. Nevertheless, he justifies the wall’s construction since the gadyè neighbours say ―and this is the main accusation― that Gypsies, usually, take the fruit of the trees located in private gardens.
A Gypsy who lives condemned on the other side of the wall says that the construction of that separation does not help anyone, nor the gadyè nor Gypsies. Others, resigned to their fate, say that they feel as in a zoo. Poor people! Now they will be able to satisfy their hunger and misery with the fruit that the racist authorities will throw them from the other side of the wall, just like my son did when they were kids and they threw apples to the monkeys in the park.
I have just done an unforgettable and horrifying trip to Poland. Apart from visiting the extermination camps in Majdanek, Treblinka and Auschwitz, where more than half a million of Gypsies where gased together with millions of Jews, I saw the remains of the walls that shaped Varsovia, Lublin and Cracovia’s ghettos. They are hurtful living testimonies from the most hard and dreadful period of humanity’s history. People were confined behind those walls before being condemned to death.
We know that in Slovakia there is an extreme fascist and violent right, which would like to repeat those black pages of Europe’s history. They may be the heirs of those assassins which collaborated with the Nazis that oppressed them from Poland on the north and from Hungary on the south. We, Gypsies from all over the world, are horrified by the maxim that says: “People who forget their history are condemned to repeat it”. It is not coincidence that this phrase is written in English and Polish on the entry of the fourth block in the extermination camp of Auschwitz: Kto nie pamięta historii, skazany jest na jej ponowne przeżycie. The one who does not remember history is bound to live through it again.
Juan de Dios Ramírez-Heredia is a Spanish Romany lawyer and journalist
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