Abstract
This article is part of the special cluster titled Social practices of remembering and forgetting of the communist past in Central and Eastern Europe, guest edited by Malgorzata Glowacka-Grajper
This study deals with the liquidation of a Roma colony from the Romanian town of Oradea during the 1970s. Colony life, as well as the process of removal, demolition of the houses, and relocation of the inhabitants into blocks of flats, is mainly grasped through Roma narratives collected from 2011 onwards. But here we do not narrow down remembering communism to a mere collection of untold stories from the past. Based on the framework developed by Maria Todorova for the study of remembering communism, the following questions are addressed: How is the pre-1989 condition of the Roma revealed through their narratives? What do these say about the condition of the Roma during state socialism? How do past events influence the present-day marginalization of the group? A comparison of the socialist and post-socialist conditions of the Roma could be considered an important issue in forming an account of this ethno-racial group in Eastern Europe. It is so, as—despite the current research, which is small in number, various interpretations exist, raising the demand for scholars to address this issue.
Keywords
This study deals with the liquidation of a Roma colony from the Romanian town of Oradea during the 1970s. Colony life, as well as the process of removal, demolition of the houses, and relocation of their inhabitants into blocks of flats, is mainly grasped through Roma narratives collected from 2011 onwards. But here we do not narrow down remembering communism to a mere collection of untold stories from the past. Based on the framework developed by Maria Todorova in her work on remembering communism, 1 the following questions are addressed: How is the pre-1989 condition of the Roma revealed through their narratives? What do these say about the condition of the Roma during state socialism? How do these past events influence the present-day marginalization of the group? A comparison of the socialist and post-socialist conditions of the Roma could be considered an important issue in investigating this ethno-racial group in Eastern Europe. It is so, as—despite the current research, which is small in number 2 , various interpretations exist, raising the demand for scholars to address this issue.
“Remembering communism”—as a new, theoretically informed framework developed by Maria Todorova 3 —occurs through a focus on the social and cultural aspects of everyday life during communist times in Eastern Europe. In doing so—to follow Todorova—this paradigm provides a better and nuanced understanding of state socialism, providing new patterns of “what was socialism and what comes next,” models different from already existing ones, like totalitarian versus civil society. 4 Remembering communism—instead of memories of communism—reveals the role and place of the pre-1989 times within the years of post-socialism. It is so, as this account grasps the past from the present from a contemporary point of view, and it “emphasizes lived experience . . . influenced by the exigencies of the moment at which the art of recollection . . . takes place.” 5
Roma Representations as Nondominant Representations
The relation between power and representation was addressed by the postmodern turn in social sciences, which occurred not only in sociology or anthropology but also in literary criticism, history, law and philosophy. 6 Also known as the crisis of representation, this paradigm neglects one outstanding and almighty account of reality, claiming instead the need for equally valid, and multiple, representations. Narratives, memories, and agency are not regarded as neutral concepts any longer; this paradigm tries to identify who produces and reinforces them. Thus, the postmodern turn attaches storytellers to stories, and agents to agencies and memories, all with well-defined social variables like ethnicity, race, class, and gender. 7 The groups who speak, act, and remember can be in dominant positions, or—to follow Edward Albee—in a muted one, with fewer chances to launch their representations in the social space. Such subordinated groups are the old, children, women, the physically or mentally disabled, and in many cases, members of ethnic or racial minorities. 8
This idea of dominance and subordination is well known in memory studies, too. Historians like Hobsbawm, Rangers, and Anderson revealed long ago that memories are subordinated to group interests; memories are constructed and become legitimate through the process of formalization and ritualization. 9 Shackel, who provides a well-documented stocktaking of theories on memory and power, states: “The control of a group memory is usually a question of power. Individuals and groups frequently struggle over the meaning of memory as the official memory is often imposed by the power elite.” 10
In my view, Roma in Eastern Europe are among the muted groups with fewer chances to launch their representations of the past. This group has always been regarded as an unwelcome other by the non-Roma society and power (see below data on this othering during socialist times). Moreover, unlike other ethno-racial minorities such as the Jews, the Roma, living on the fringes of the social structure, had no well-formed, powerful stratum of intelligentsia who could overcome non-Roma biases or misrepresentations.
Roma and the East European Socialist States
To follow Bárány, the Stalinist concepts of nation (requiring a common language and territory) could explain the fact that—with a few exceptions in Yugoslavia and Hungary—the linguistic and ethnocultural rights of the Roma were not recognized in East European state socialism. 11 This group was not allowed to use its language in schools, being also obstructed from establishing cultural institutions. And, above all, unlike other minorities, the Roma were not recognized as a self-standing ethnic category in the census of socialist states. 12 In Bulgaria, Roma were missing from the records, in Poland they were classified only as a population of Gypsy origin, in Czechoslovakia they were not among the constitutionally recognized minorities.
In parallel, a series of measures were introduced, beginning with the 1950s, in order to ban practices typical of many Roma groups in the region, depriving them of their right to free movement within the countries, accompanied by policies of forced sedentarization, employment, and school enrolment. 13
Together with sedentarization, demolition of Roma shantytowns was a major target for East European socialist policies. These measures were explained by Zoltán Bárány as intended to destroy autonomous Roma communities that—for the state authorities—represented a threat to social stability. 14 According to the data collected by Bárány, between 1972 and 1981 a total of 4,850 Roma families were removed from ghettoes to be given houses in Slovakia; meanwhile, in Hungary the number of Roma ghetto dwellers significantly decreased after 1971. 15 In many cases, the newly built houses allocated to the Roma had fewer comforts than the ones given to non-Roma; in other cases, these did not respect traditional Roma usage of space. Thus, in response to such ambivalances, the Roma sold their new properties and rebuilt the original shantytowns on their original sites. 16
To quote Michael Stewart, “the party intended to eliminate totally all traces of Gypsy lifestyle and behavior. . . . Gypsies were characterized less by a culture than by a ‘way of life’ marked out by behavioral traits such as scavenging, begging, hustling, dealing and laziness.” 17 The “Gypsy way of life,” as Stewart labelled it, refers to an engagement with traditional, non-industrial working activities such as wood carving, spoon making, tinsmithing, coppersmithing, drain-pipe making, fortune telling, or bear-leading. Small trade was also important among the pre-socialist Roma occupations: purchasing and reselling certain products, such as feather, saucepans, or horses. 18 All these required certain skills of negotiation and an ability to make connections with the non-Roma, 19 and also implied the condition of geographical mobility (which shaped many social practices) in order to obtain new clients and purchase goods. And this was in contrast with the officially recognized norms and virtues of the communist state which intended to control all sorts of economic practices and any form of motion within the territory of the country. 20
But according to the official discourses of socialist times, assimilation went hand in hand with policies that—officially—intended to “raise” the Roma, facilitating their access to public services and resources, such as the labour market, health care system, and public housing.
21
The positive impact of these policies is a fact acknowledged even by those anthropologists who show a critical attitude toward such forms of social engineering: The Gypsy policy’s success in getting the Rom into the wage labour market was more than statistical. When I talked to Gypsies, in some contexts at least, it did seem that work and the act of labouring had been given a new centrality and value in their lives. . . . The Rom did acknowledge wage labour as the source of the fundamental improvement in their living standards over the previous twenty years.
22
Such attempts to “civilize the Roma” 23 through enabling them access to certain resources were embedded in theories and practices deeply rooted in the political fabric of East European state socialism. In line with Katherine Verdery, centralized power is regarded as a core issue of East European socialism, the state being the only important agent in collecting and distributing (in fact: allocating) all kinds of resources. 24 Allocation was a basic concept, as communism was in fact a project of social modernization, which, according to party ideologies, intended to catch up with Western capitalist achievements. 27 Modernization—theoretically and sometimes practically—provided access to a set of material and symbolical goods for many groups exploited during pre-socialist times, like the economically subordinated working class or the landless peasants, and the Roma would easily fit into this category of the underprivileged. 28
Roma in the Romanian State Socialism
Roma in Romania were treated as in other Eastern European countries. As in Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, and Poland, the Roma were not classified as “self-standing ethnic groups”, nor were their ethno-cultural rights recognized. 29 Forced sedentarization of the Roma started in 1946, and went hand in hand with confiscation of horses and wagons. This process had almost been completed by the 1950s. 30 Policies of full employment were stipulated in Law 153/1970, sending Roma men and women to forced labour. 31 Increasing the level of schooling and prohibition of trading with gold were also targets for Roma policies in this country. 32
The most important aspects of Roma policies were stipulated in a Romanian Communist Party document from 1977 issued under the name of “Study Regarding the Socio-Economic Condition of the Gypsy Population in Our Country.” 33 According to this report, the Roma “refuse integration on the labour market” 34 and “do not provide any socially useful activities; thus, they live on social allowance. They have a parasitic way of life,” 35 “disregard their obligations, as they do not register themselves with the authorities.” 36 “The majority of the adults are illiterate or half-illiterate, showing reluctance (manifestându-se refractari) in sending their children to school; the children are sent to beg. . . . They live in tents under unhealthy conditions, many families in the same room; three or four persons of different sex sleep in the same bed.” 37
Framed by concepts of cultural racism, 38 the document issued by the Central Committee—one of the highest-level institutions in the hierarchy of power—did not only take stock of the problems but also claimed to have found a “solution.” Subsequently, the following tasks were assigned in the plan: “integration in agriculture, factories,” 39 “intensifying of police control over the Gypsies who do not integrate into the norms of social cohabiting and [who] perform a parasitic way of life,” 40 “raising the level of education,” and “providing daily food for schools with an afterschool programme. For delinquency, vicious behavior, and negative influence on other minors, children should be transferred to special schools of work and re-education.” 41 Improving the housing conditions of the Roma was a target, too, in this set of directives: “allocation of land to build houses, in accordance with plans of systematization, . . . demolition of unhealthy (insalubrious) houses” 42 were set as objectives to increase the living standards of this group.
Interventions in the spatial organization of the Roma in state socialism had two major dimensions. Sedentarization was one of them, a project that stretched out over more than two decades, having been completed by the 1980s, 43 and the construction of new dwelling places. For the Roma in urban settlements allocation of new apartaments enhanced the elimination of their neighbourhoods on the fringes of many towns. According to some scholars, this demolition was “not much of a loss” as the Roma were provided better living conditions than their previous ones. 44 But, as is also acknowledged these directives, simultaneously implied a forced relocation—a liquidation of neighbourhoods and communities. 45 As it happened, the forced relocation of the colony in Oradea was not an isolated case: the same happened in Bucharest 46 and in Cluj with the Bufnița neighbourhood. 47
It is likely that these policies were carried out in line with the Act of Systematization, which affected both the Roma and the non-Roma in Romania. Systematization was a centralized planning embodied by Law Nr. 58 of 1974, which aimed at reshaping urban environments in the 1970s and rural ones a decade later. According to its official objectives, “Systematization should assure the decrease of the built-up surface from the urban and local areas, and an optimal usage of the land that represents an important national good.” However, in contradiction with its officially admitted intention, the sole effect of the law (for towns and cities) was the mass removal of urban residents from houses into blocks, pulling down entire suburbs, or suburb-like areas, and turning them into districts. 48
Interpretations of State Socialism and Transition
According to András Bíró,
49
the living standards of the East European Roma were relatively high during state socialism: In conclusion the proletarianisation experienced by the Roma radically changed their role in society. As a rule, they were prevented from making their livelihood in the service sector, as formerly, and instead large numbers had to join the production process of their host societies. . . . The experience of a compulsory school attendance, receiving equal pay for equal work and being called up for national service in the army like their gadjo peers all strengthened the feeling of belonging to the nation. Of course discrimination did not suddenly vanish from everyday life but for Roma new opportunities appeared in on the horizon. Nevertheless, centuries-old-separation from mainstream social development still remained a major obstacle to their large-scale inclusion.
This view is also shared by other scholars who were principal investigators in comparative East European research projects on the condition of the Roma. In Gail Kligman’s view, after 1989 Roma were the first to be laid off from their factory jobs (true, hired for low-skilled labourers’ positions), meanwhile racism and discrimination dramatically worsened their condition after the fall of state socialism. 50 Along the same line, Júlia Szalai and Violetta Zentai see post-socialist transformations as a macro-level restructuration, a replacement of previously existing patterns, a change that caused the marginality of the East European Roma. Large-scale events like uncritical implementations of neoliberal economic principles and practices enhanced a restructuration of the labour market, engendering mass unemployment and unpredictability in long-term job perspectives. Moreover, the old, paternalistic state communist welfare system was replaced by new arrangements, supporting middle-class needs and interests. 51 Such accounts consider the Roma to be the biggest losers of the post-socialist transition, as their access to material and symbolic resources was radically encumbered in the new social, cultural, and economical structures that prevailed after 1989.
A different perspective opposes this discourse of Roma being “the losers of transition,” stating that post-1989 brought the possibility of ethno-cultural recognition and political representation, 52 as assimilationist policies ceased to exist after the fall of communisms.
A third perspective, represented mainly by scholars who have a deeper understanding of East European Roma communities and who had conducted long-term fieldwork during socialist times, stress the ambivalence of Roma policies in communist states. According to them, these measures aimed at social integration of the Roma; however, the states’ actions subtly reinforced Roma–non-Roma ethnic borders. In Hungary, for example, the distribution of labor and the everyday practices at the workplace—despite the proletarianization of the Roma—increased differences between them and their Hungarian co-workers. 53 Similarly, taking on waged work implied taking jobs not desired by non-Roma. 54 Pál Schiffer, a film director who worked together with the sociologist István Kemény, reveals the flipside of Roma commuting from the villages into cities and towns in the quest for a better workplace: dismantled families and alcoholism is seen as the “price” of such social engineering. 55
Roma Remembering Communism
As with researches on the condition of Roma during state communism, accounts of Roma remembering communism are also small in number. Literature on this issue, in my view, can be divided into two groups: the collection of Roma memories and the analyses based on them, or more accurately, Roma oral histories 56 and Roma life-stories. The focus is on the Roma storyteller, usually helped by the learned non-Roma, in order to bring to light previously unknown, hidden Roma experiences. The Slovakian Ilona Lacková is an example: a Roma woman helped by the non-Roma Millena Hubschmannova to produce a counternarrative to the dominant group’s negative labelling, which was intended to silence Roma narratives. 57 According to Lacková’s book A False Dawn: My Life as a Gypsy Woman in Slovakia, state communism remains an unfulfilled dream to her, as the Roma had no better lives after the instauration of the new regime. A somewhat similar type of this remembering is provided by István Pogány, recalling a Roma couple’s life in a small Hungarian town. From their viewpoint, Kádár’s communism was much better than the following years, as there was plenty of work then. Living conditions were better as the system liquidated the Roma colony and allocated new, better apartments to its inhabitants. The years of transition brought layoffs and impoverishment. 58
Roma life-story accounts tend to place Roma experiences in a broader, theoretical framework. Mari’s life history offers a good opportunity to reveal how identities are constructed at the junction of inward perceptions of the self and those from the outer social world. Through the story of a Roma woman from a small Hungarian town, Éva Kovács convincingly proves how personal perceptions of being a non-Roma are contrasted to public narratives that always push the storyteller into a negatively labeled box, reserved for the Gypsies. 59 Comparing a series of Roma narratives, Cecilia Kovai claims to demonstrate that there is no fixed, essentialist category of Roma: different people see their memories of communism from different perspectives. 60 Therefore, to Vlah musicians, transition brought no change; moreover, travelling abroad in communist times was always accompanied with fear: mobility has a price to pay. Meanwhile, while Ilona considers herself as a loser of the political and social changes, as these brought for her the lowering of living conditions and unemployment, Karola sees in post-socialism a new opportunity for upward mobility, as post-1989 enabled her to freely express her Roma identity.
The very few similar researches in Romania belong merely to the oral history category. As the biggest project of this kind is still ongoing (“The Untold Story: An Oral History of the Roma People in Romania” 61 ), with no tangible published results up to this moment, I will confine myself to only one book, Ilonka néni, where an old Roma woman speaks about her life to the ethnographer Csilla Könczei. 62 As a contrast to the Hungarian examples, in these oral histories, the communist past appears only as an indicator of life events, and the narrative provides no information that would make Roma life in communism more comprehensible. The reader has to have some previous knowledge to identify these scripts, for example, names of the industrial plants, and of certain bureaucratic institutions like the împăcare (peacemaking court), typical for the communism. Moreover, we have no clue whether life in communism was different than in pre- or post-communist times. It could be so, as—unlike the Hungarian examples—Ilonka néni, aunt Ilonka, is positioned on the fringes of the social structure, being unlearned, even illiterate, being always temporarily employed.
The Research Itself
Fieldwork for this research started in 2011, initially focused on the school integration of this specific Roma group from Oradea. Later, as recollections of the one-time colony became more and more salient in carrying out my interviews, I placed this issue at the centre of my investigations. Remembering the past proved to be of help when initiating contacts with the locals and trying to gain their trust: all of them were eager to recall their memories of colony life. But narratives about the 1970s were not just a useful fieldwork toolkit: these served as a resource in linking fragmented individual episodes to—as Loïc Wacquant puts it—the broader context of socio-cultural patterns in order to understand the pauperization, or up- versus downward mobility of the Roma in post-socialist Eastern Europe. 63
Men, women, and children whom I identify as “the Roma” in this article, belong to an economically and socially heterogeneous group; however, the majority live in an urban ghetto facing economically disadvantaged conditions. They refer to themselves as “Hungarian Gypsies” (magyar cigányok), which, in my view, may signify their assimilation towards local Hungarian society. It could be so as the generation of the grandparents speaks Romany although they do not identify themselves with any vernacular or subethnic group; only the parents’ generation understands the language, but Romany is not transmitted to their children. Younger ones are enrolled in the Hungarian classes of the local school; many parents apply for the education funds offered by the Hungarian state and allocated to those who enrol their children in Hungarian classes. “It is because we are Hungarian Gypsies. Gypsies but also Hungarians,” as a Roma woman—mother of two—explained to me. The term Roma was missing from our conversations; they use “Gypsy” instead, without any negative connotation.
The majority of my respondents were born in the 1950s and the 1960s, and, with a few exceptions, none of them was permanently hired as industrial worker; thus, the proletarianization of the Roma could not be grasped through these empirical data. Still, as may appear, in many cases the “Gypsy way of life” was affected by the forced relocation.
It is important to underline that this study focuses on the memories of one particular subgroup of the one-time colony dwellers. It deals with its lower class, which stays even today in the so-called Gypsy blocks, with no possibility to move out as the better-off ones have already done. Although the fieldwork deliberately included all kinds of colony members, the memories of the upper classes are so heterogeneous that their inclusion here would demand a new theoretical framework.
The Colony and Its Liquidation
The place known later as the Roma colony was settled on the eastern fringes of the town of Oradea during the 1890s, according to a map from 1890. 64 In 1939 the street bears the name of Colonia Țiganilor (Roma colony), in 1941 it appears as Cinka Panna Street, and in 1947 as Cigánytelep Street (Roma colony Street), finally being renamed as Micsandrelor according to a map from 1966. 65 The data are in line with the Roma narratives, which underline that the parents and grandparents of the respondents were living in this place “from the beginning of the nineteenth century.” Some Roma also recall the renaming: “There was a man coming to our place, saying that the street is renamed in Micsandrelor from now on.” Many families still have this street (Micsandrelor) as place of residence in their identity cards. As has been mentioned, the place was in fact a street with two rows of hovels forming an L shape, all the buildings having a private courtyard that enabled raising animals such as chickens, pigs, or rabbits and there was a communal fountain serving as the water supply. The street was quite close to a series of factories: the oil factory, the timber yard, the cement plant, the brewery, Fructexport (for collecting and processing fruits), and the poultry works. The Roma in the colony had different occupations. Some were employed in the factories, mostly men, but some women, too. Many women performed day work in Fructexport, collecting and sorting the fruits. There was also the complex category of the self-employed: a few had horses and carts and worked as carriers, transporting woods from the timber yard to the non-Roma households in the town, and carried paper and scrap iron to the refuse site. Similar to them, but mainly in a “lower” position, were the younger men or boys helping the carriers to process wood in the town; many women collected paper and other waste by hand, taking it to those with carts. As memories tell us, the great majority of the colony dwellers, both men and women, were engaged in small trade through personal networks with no authorization: they purchased goods from the Hungarian tourists in the town centre and resold them on the flea market; they prepared sunflower seeds and sold them in the vicinity of the stadium to the supporters before the Sunday football game. Others bought beer or non-alcoholic drinks in the town, reselling them to their fellow colony dwellers. Others made pies and sold them.
As official data have not yet been found, it is difficult to reconstruct the reasons for liquidation of the colony. According to the only written source, it was an initiative of the factory managers: “The local authorities nod assent to the demand for the land expressed by the surrounding factories. The place neighbouring the Eastern railway station was occupied by the Combustibil firewood and coal deposit, simultaneously the building of two blocks of flats was in Voltaire Street. . . . To wind up this slum, that it was a seedbed for criminality was one of the arguments used by town elites and the police for liquidation of the place.” 66 The same argument occurred in many Roma narratives, especially from the better-off: “the tin-yard needed the place, so we had to move out.”
In this reasoning, forced relocation was due to the economic interests of the factories; however, achieving such a goal was easier because of the already existing set of arguments framing “the Roma issue.” “Civilizing” the Roma by allocating them new, better apartments instead of hovels was in line with Party documents applied countrywide, and this accorded with the non-Roma demand.
The new dwelling place allocated for colony-dwellers was a set of two semi-detached blocks of flats, situated in the same district but still a one-hour walk from the initial location of the colony. As narrations of the past are always shaped by present experiences, it is difficult to approach them as mere documents about communist times. Still, some clues, other than recollections, may give us guidelines for interpretation. The only preserved photograph from the colony was that of one house: a hovel made of adobe. As all respondents agree, the colony had a poor infrastructure: there was only a communal fountain serving as water supply; only a few families had electricity, and the others bought it from them. According to the memories of a retired engineer who was working at the State Office for Housing and Urban Development in those times, the two newly-built blocks had a tile stove, a bathroom, a tub—true, a bit smaller than the regular size, as it was of 120 cm—and a sink. There was no central heating, but only a stove, no separate electricity meter, and only one for measuring water consumption; there were no wall-tiles, only cement on the floors, and a nylon rug.
It is difficult to reconstruct the exact course of the removal, so I will present the most likely version. As some respondents recall, there was an assigned order in which the families were to be removed. As the initial order was changed due to arrangements between the authorities and the Roma leader (vajda), some colony dwellers, who were initially eligible to leave in the first round, were moved onto the second, so they—possibly as a sign of protest—occupied the block illegally. This version is in line with that provided by a one-time bureaucrat who confirms this occupation, adding that after a while the authorities issued identity cards to these illegal dwellers indicating this new place as their home address. This meant—as the old bureaucrat said—legalizing their status.
This may explain why the second wave of Roma received derelict apartments. In their words, “There was dung in here, do you understand?” And this degradation became more and more acute: There was no cleaning. Nobody cleaned the stairway as it was nobody’s. I painted the stairwell myself, buying everything with my money. I took the garbage away, paid some beers to the fellows to take them. I tried to mobilize them to make a common complaint, signed by each one of us, go to the council and ask for central heating. I thought it would be better than the tile stove. But they did not come.
Or: They, the other Gypsies, were all making themselves a heater (hot plate) from tiles. But the sole electricity meter could not withstand this as it was extra consumption, and it did not resist. So, the electricity was cut off.
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To escape from these worsening conditions, certain categories of dwellers moved out. One was that of full-time employees in industry, who—in accordance with state policies—were allocated apartments by their factories elsewhere in the town. The second category were those who do illegal and informal activities on the black market, and cannot be, in my view, called employees, who lived from organizing gambling parties and illegal small trade on the black market with commodities (coffee, contraceptives, chocolate, etc.) purchased from Hungarian tourists and resold in the street or through personal networks. Success in such practices enabled them to buy apartments elsewhere in the town: We were never afraid of work. We left for the coach or train station or travelled to villages to play “here is the red, where is the red,” a popular game, as it was easier to bribe the policemen there. We gave him one or two thousands, which we later won back. This is how I lived out and made money to buy a house.
Others were using their Roma or non-Roma connections to legalize their status: I left from the colony and occupied a house. . . . I got acquainted with a woman for whom I did the cleaning. Her husband was a policeman, and he taught me tricks, what to do when the solders came and insisted on us moving out of the house. . . . Then I wanted to live in my apartment legally. I had the right as my husband was employed. I was told by one of my cousins, who was a musician, and played at the weddings of these people at the council, whom to ask for help.
Although the condition of the apartments worsened gradually, the Roma who stayed have not elaborated narratives about this issue. They recall isolated events that lead to the destruction of their own apartments (the neighbour who rammed their chimney) but have no broader perspective about the whole process. Those few pieces of information I obtained was provided by those who had already left. According to them, the Roma, who were not accustomed to have separate electric meters on the colony, improvised self-made heaters from bricks and wires, leading to such a high consumption that it destroyed the system. So the electricity was cut off, and then reconnection to the system became a matter of negotiations with the authorities. Being accustomed to a property of their own, many of these people refused to pay rent for these new apartments, stating that the removal was not at their initiative. Accumulation of unpaid utilities made the authorities stop the water and electricity supply, and adjusting the situation needed bigger and bigger investments. Thus in 2008 with the support of Habitat Romanes Foundation, the building of twenty houses was started for more than 150 persons living in 96 apartments. 68
With the lack of carefully designed post-socialist urban planning, 69 these conditions have not been seriously improved since, causing discontent on both (Roma and non-Roma) sides. The former blame the authorities for not helping the poor, and the latter, in the words of a retired bureaucrat, conclude that “in communist times, there was an attempt to make them better houses. But they destroyed everything. Nothing is good for them because they cannot appreciate what they have got.” Her young colleague, who seems to have been born in the time of the relocation, affirms, “EU funds did not bring visible changes. It is in vain to spend money on the Roma. We worked a lot, but no outcome is seen.”
Due to the permanent degradation, the place bears two names. It is known as the NATO block of flats mostly among the local Romanian society and local Romanian press, versus “Gypsy block of flats” by the local Hungarians familiar with the area.
Memories of the Colony
Non-Roma Representations and Misrepresentations
The local Hungarian society in Oradea—especially its older members—knows about a liquidated Roma colony in the town. They are familiar with its name, given after Cinka Panna, the famous female fiddler of Roma origin who was buried in the town. Non-Roma can also locate the place—on the eastern fringes of Oradea—but details of the liquidation are unknown to them.
Written sources about the colony are small in number, all of them being misleading or even biased. The Wikipedia entry on Cinka Panna mentions that “the Roma colony in Oradea bears her name up till now”; 70 however, the place no longer exists. A blog—defined as a “unique collection of home pages, information, and news about Oradea,” uploaded with the purpose of “loving Oradea and keeping its memory for the following generations,” 71 sees the colony as a center of Roma folk music, a place frequently visited by the well-known folk singer of Roma origin, Apollónia Kovács, who would collect songs from the colony dwellers. Approaching the area as an ethnographic thesaurus also occurs in an obituary of the famous teacher of Hungarian language and literature, Ágoston András, remembered also as a playwright, who collected Roma folk songs from the colony in order to use them as a “dub” for the play he was directing and staging with his students. 72
According to a database created to the order of the Democratic Alliance of Hungarians in Romania about the schools in Romania with Hungarian classes, before the 1970s, the Roma in Oradea “had lived in the Tokai colony, also known as Cinka Panna, until a flood destroyed their homes.” 73 Indeed, there is a place in the town that previously bore the name of Tokai Colony, but, according to discussions with local non-Roma, this was a non-Roma working-class area settled in the neighbourhood of the Roma colony; the children of these two areas (Roma and non-Roma) were attending the same school during the 1960s.
Misuse, wrong location of the place, and its confusion with the Tokai Colony are also common in homepages about the history of Oradea. 74 Confusing the onetime area with the present-day Roma urban ghetto is also a common way of representing the place. According to a piece of news on a member of the European Parliament, he visited the Cinka Panna Gypsy Colony in 2011. 75
According to my findings, there is only one written source about the area, a newspaper article on the memories of a non-Roma intellectual who worked as a teacher in the neighbouring school and was a well-known writer of local history. 76 Some fragments from his article are extracted and quoted here in order to show the range of negative stereotypes he used, similar to the ones in party documents. This similarity may show that cultural racism was not typical only of institutions and of the official discourse, but it was—probably—filtering into everyday perceptions of Roma–non-Roma ethnic boundaries. In the above-mentioned intellectual’s view, the colony was “a disgrace to Várad (Oradea),” 77 as “the reader cannot imagine the misery of the place.” 78
In Ottó Indig’s memory, There was a grammar school there with I-IV classes [facing the street line], its fence eroded by the kids, who were short of firewood. The high fence failed to protect the three buildings from unwelcome visitors, and thus all removable things in there were removed after a while. . . . Only the “better-off” families built a toilet near their houses, and the kids imitated what they’d seen from their parents, so they did their “needs” on the narrow strip behind the houses. . . . There was an unbearable stink when one entered the house—and going in was inevitable because of the kids. Puppies were let to live in the room and so were the poultry during winter, and I remember even a grunting pig tied to the door! . . . Two or three generations were living together in these cottages. Due to bad nutrition and slovenliness, the 35-40-year-olds looked like wretched old ones, with their grandchildren and great-grandchildren, who gathered around them according to Gypsy traditions. The “family life” of the grown-ups took place under the eyes of the little ones; thus, the sexual education offered by the school was useless for these kids.
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The Roma about Themselves
The memories of the colony are central to all my Roma respondents: they recall it in long, rich narratives.
In contrast with the poverty and misery described by Indig, memories of the local Roma preserve colony life as a positive experience: “We were not short of anything.” “Everybody loved each other there, we were visiting each other. Everybody was taking care of each other. The Gypsies were cooking, cleaning, building houses, anything that was possible.” “Yes, I repeat, those were good times. Living there was good. We had nights of dancing as there was a community centre and there were film screenings. This was the venue for the balls, where older Gypsy musicians came and played.” “There was the well-known Gypsy folk music singer, Apollónia Kovács, who was from Oradea. She came to us, to my aunt, and she taught her Gypsy songs, together with other women.” “And there was love and togetherness. They made a fire outside to cook a meal which everyone was helped to. And if a drunkard came and started to sing, the others sang too, accompanying him on the violin.”
When recalling it, Roma see the colony mostly as an economic unit. In their view, it was not just a place but also a treasure house of precious resources. Above all, there was the land that enabled the free extension of each house and helped the Roma to improve their living conditions: “If we could have remained there, we would have had room for everyone, as we would have made some extra rooms, but here in the block we cannot do this. We could build whenever we wanted to as we thought the land was ours. We, the Gypsies, thought it was ours, but it belonged to the council. But when we had to move out, we found out we were wrong. It was not ours since we were forced to move.” Apart from the land, and the possibility of raising animals, the idea of ownership also appeared as a reference to the courtyard: “There everybody had their own courtyard, everybody had their fence. Everybody knew what was theirs. We were not making any mess there as everybody knew that was somebody’s courtyard.”
Adjacency to two major factories, the oil factory and the timber yard, appears in almost every narrative. It is not just a source of supply but also a social scene for purchasing goods through informal contacts. Being on good terms with factory workers and—as they say—with the director was also a sign of trust and reliability of the Roma in non-Roma eyes, and also a way of purchasing oil, wood, or other products. Although Ottó Indig sees this process as begging (“they liked sawdust-burning stoves, the necessary heating being solicited from my younger brother, who was in charge of the timber yard”),
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the Roma have different interpretations: It was good living in the colony as we had a garden, we had animals, and we had everything. We did not need wood as there was a boss there in the timber yard, and he was a good man. He let us pick up the waste. And we stored it for the whole winter. We were lucky because of the house and we were lucky with the timberyard, as the boss told us “come and take some if you want,” as he was a good man. I picked up the wood in the colony to bring it home. I was allowed to do so as there were some small branches of trees, and they let me take them home. And I left there, and took them home. I was there and took home some wood, but I did not steal because there was the boss. And the boss let us take the branches home. In the colony we wanted for nothing, neither wood nor money nor anything. We were given oil from the factory, which was a scarce commodity as others had to queue up for it. But we were given oil as the people from the factory knew us. So, we took it home and made food with it. When it was finished, we returned and asked for more. And we were given it. They knew us as we were living in the neighbourhood. On the timberyard, there was everything, all sorts of materials for constructions. There was that thin parquetry, you know, which was in communism. But the Gypsies did not touch anything.
Memories of Relocation
Although an actual estimation of the conveniences is not possible, the different interpretations of the new place are still noteworthy. The above-cited engineer argues in the spirit of the law, in accordance with the above-mentioned party document. In his view, the aim of this relocation was to deal with the tumbledown hovels, “and these [new] apartments were one or two classes higher, even more civilized than the Gypsies’ previous houses.” In opposition, members of the Colony saw the old place as ideal, and perceived the relocation as a traumatic event: One morning, when we were still sleeping, my cousin knocked at the door heavily. He said: wake up, we have to move out! I asked, “Why should we?” But the police came and shouted at us to go out. My little daughter was two years old then. We could carry out some of our things, the wardrobe, but the chairs were left inside. Me and my daughter were crying, but the carriers and the police took our things, broke many of them and put them on the carriage. Everything was taken from here to the block. But it was a misery. There is nothing here, nothing at all! No electricity, no water, just shit, I mean shit. My mother could never get over it; she soon died. I was forced to leave with the small children. The first to come have found everything ok: doors, windows. But when we arrived there, there was nothing left. So it was. We were moved in by force by the police. They threw our things at us. We had animals that had to be killed as we could not take them with us.
True, this nostalgia is not the only way to remember the past. The leavers, the better off, do not present it as a negative event: “This is how we collected money and moved out”—according to the most frequently occurred narrative trope.
But this subgroup, the “lowest of the low,” permanently contrasts colony life in the past with the hopelessness of the future: “We were happy in the colony, as we had everything. But look, how this place is, we have nothing here.” This category has no stories about degradation, no causality occurs in their narratives. They only keep repeating that people were much better then, during the colony life; meanwhile here they have to live with “evil men.” This permanent present since the relocation can be grasped through the lack of time indicators. The leavers sometimes use words like “the turn” (a common term for the Romanian revolution in 1989), but these Roma cannot tell even at my request whether the recalled events took place before or after 1989.
Unfolding Roma Memories of Nostalgia
In order to understand the strong feeling of nostalgia that dominated the memories of this Roma subgroup, work opportunities before and after the relocations have to be compared. Work opportunities on the colony can be divided into certain types: apart from full-time, paid work at factories and plants—less investigated in this actual stage of research—there was a variety of other possibilities.
As mentioned above, day work was an occasional occupation more or less common among colony dwellers. Carriers were typical of the colony, some having horses and carts, but others, the less well-off, collected waste and took it to the carriers, especially boys of age twelve to fifteen, who were employed by them, and helped the former to process and transport wood: “After leaving school, I was working with the carriers when I was fifteen. We were chopping wood in the town for the Hungarians and Romanians. If they were contented, we were given money, and not just money. They invited us for lunch or something.” Other colony dwellers carried on small trade with goods from Hungary (earning a considerable amount of money) or sold sunflower seeds in the city. This latter occupation “was good, we loved it a lot. We were selling the seeds during the football games close to the stadium. I remember the men helping and hiding us when the police came, as this was forbidden. But they were nice and hid us.”
These above-mentioned jobs were usually temporary ones or had a flexible schedule. Success in these activities was up to personal skills such as making contact with the non-Roma, developing a non-Roma clientele and persuading them to buy the goods; each activity needed an extended personal network and was performed via face-to-face interactions with the non-Roma; all jobs were immediately rewarded (invitation for meals or refreshments). Payment was also immediate, while the skills necessary for these jobs were transmitted through personal contacts and learning, instead of an institutionalized form of knowledge transmission. Thus, the majority of work opportunities conferred a certain status on their performers, a status acknowledged among the non-Roma as well. Such activities conferred economic independence and belonged to the realm of the informal economy. These were radically different from the dominant types of occupation in state socialism; the latter required a rigid time table, economically subordinated status, controlled access to resources, and a formal and prescribed order of performance. This is why there was only one officially recognized full-time employment that had similar features to these informal occupations: work in public sanitation. As many Roma recall, “I liked cleaning the streets. I had been doing it for four years, and then I got ill. But I liked it; two sons of mine were doing this, too. I think it is a good job to make the streets clean. Everybody had its street, a street of their own. And at least we were outside, not in a polluted hall, like those in the factories. We were out and nobody told us what to do. My husband was employed in the factory, but he did not like it; he quit and started to work as a street sweeper.”
The legal status of these activities varied. Waged work was, of course, legal, so was carting (if done with credentials), but helping the carriers and small trade was illegal; day work was somewhere between these two. According to the Act of Labour enacted in 1976, day work was also a recognized type of economic activity: its working time was officially registered and acknowledged to be an employment relationship entitling to certain social benefits. Moreover, the working age limit for day work was lower (fifteen or even fourteen years) than for full-time employment. That is why many Roma stress the fact that they were hired only by certain plants and factories, the ones that “could hire minors.” The legality of employment was of high importance in the socialist state—mainly because unemployment was considered “parasitism” 81 and punished by law. Under the age of fourteen or fifteen, children were forced to stay at school, while over that age, everyone had to be at least temporarily employed to avoid legal penalties. Thus, doing day work helped many Roma to carry on with illegal activities, such as small trade, and it offered them some protection against the police.
The generation of those born in the 1950s and the 1960s seem to have many similarities in their biographies. Many left school quite early, after graduating three of four classes, as they were unsuccessful with learning: “I left school as my head was not good for this,” one said. Girls usually helped their parents with housework and looked after their younger siblings, while boys helped the carriers. Both performed jobs in the informal economy (selling sunflower seeds, collecting waste, and doing trade with Hungarian goods) or day work at factories and plants. In doing so, this generation unconsciously reinforced the pattern of the pre-communist way of life: temporary employment, day work, and positions in the informal economy.
The forced removal hastened the disappearance of previously accessible resources: It cut off the Roma from purchasing oil or wood; it ended the possibility of extending the living area by attaching extra rooms to the previously existing building as well as the possibility of raising animals, which provided food for Roma families. Moving away also made it impossible to carry on many previous jobs: carrier work, including transportation and processing of wood, and carting waste—as the new living conditions offered no room for horses and carts. It was simply impossible to raise animals in the blocks of flats.
The relocation also engendered a deterioration of living conditions and the lowering of living standards. When transporting became impossible, only the lower strata of this set of informal activities remained: collecting scrap iron and paper, and carrying them with small handcarts. Trading with goods from Hungary or selling sunflower seeds was popular; still, its purchasing of sunflower seeds was no longer for free. This relative increase in the level of poverty may explain why many from the second generation, the ones who were born in the 1970s and 1980s, left school early and started to work. As minors, the members of the second generation “automatically” headed for the black market, doing jobs illegally and undertaking temporary ones such as helping the adults carry things in the marketplace. This kind of work was not just an imitation of their parents’ lives, but it also became a personal experience and a source of success: “My son was helping people to carry things in the market. When he succeeded in getting some food, he was very happy. He brought it home, and said: ‘Look, what I have got!’ He knew he was helping us.”
Conclusions
As it may be apparent from the previous sections, Roma memories of the one-time colony are reminiscences of a muted group, overshadowed by the local Hungarians from Oradea, the biggest ethnic minority in the town. Silencing and misrepresenting is more salient when compared to the broader context of the Hungarian remembrance of communism, which focuses on complaints about the nationalizing projects of Ceaușescu, intended to erase the presence of ethnic groups other than Romanians. When remembering the Olaszi cemetery with its Hungarian tombs, wound up by the communists in power during the 1970s and 1980s, a Hungarian newspaperwoman from Oradea wrote: “The Olaszi cemetery became a taboo as . . . after a provision enacted in 1977 its territory became a greenbelt, thus burials had been banned from then on.” 82 “The cemetery practically closed its gates in front of the dwellers of Olaszi district. It was not easy to overcome this.” 83 Still, as Hungarian memories of the colony show, there is no such plight and grief when the history of Cinka Panna is remembered; the one-time Roma colony does not seem to be part of the town’s Hungarian landscape of memory.
Although we have no data to compare this relocation with others elsewhere in Romania, it is very likely that liquidation of this particular Roma colony was initiated by non-Roma economic leaders, who—because of the already well-developed discourse of official policies for Roma—could easily articulate their interests by stressing the necessity of improving the living condition of the colony-members and civilizing the Roma in Cinka Panna. This type of relocation shows some similarities with those documented in Czechoslovakia and Hungary, where the apartments newly allocated to the Roma were of poorer condition than the ones given to non-Roma. Thus, as may be evident from the previous sections, the intention of improving Roma living standards seems quite an ambivalent phenomenon. Being allocated an apartment instead of a hovel, having running water instead of a communal fountain, and a sink and a toilet inside and not outside the house may be regarded as an upgrade, but without additional facilities, such as central heating, large living spaces, parquet, wall-tiles, or separate meters for water consumption, the living conditions of the Roma were not markedly improved. True, the Roma were subject to the paternalistic system of allocating blocks of flats, 84 as were their non-Roma fellows, but the former were given lower-quality apartments and a restricted set of facilities. Inequalities were intensified after the degradation of the flats, when the better-off, those with full-time employment, or those good at trading on the black market—left the block, leaving behind the poorest of the poor, who were not able to stop the further deterioration of the area. Such policies, to follow Iván Szelényi, indeed went against the officially promoted egalitarian aims of East European socialism, and by enabling such differences in living conditions, endorsed the inequalities of post-socialist times: “So, whereas under socialism housing is supposed to have a special significance as an equalizing element of state provision, received as a nght and not as a reflection of income, … it was found to be a source of inequality compounding other inequalities arising from occupational status.” 85
The many decades that have elapsed since the fall of socialism may help to see the long-time consequences of state interventions: with the lack of carefully drafted and implemented housing policies, the deterioration of the block has been aggravated, turning the place into a “Gypsy block of flats,” an urban ghetto known as a no-go area all over the town. And not just this. As an outcome of such measures, this negative label that persists even today re-introduces both the Roma and the non-Roma into a vicious circle as this label not only describes but also explains the conditions of the former: the Gypsies do not deserve anything more. A permanent deterioration of living conditions linked with the lowering of economic possibilities have become mutually influencing factors, which have contributed to the impoverishment of many ex-colony dwellers, pushing them towards the fringes of the social structure. This began as the relocation cut off the colony members from their previously existing resources such as purchasing oil or wood; it stopped the possibility of extending their houses according to their needs; it did not allow raising animals or using their carts, which enabled them to provide services such as transporting and processing wood. And relocation also damaged the status of these community members: it took away the dignity of having an estate perceived as their own, built with the family members’ own hands and self-made adobe. It also deprived these Roma of the pride of a courtyard, seen as private property they could take care of. And—last but not least—the relocation narrowed the niche of trading with the non-Roma, who—as a sign of acceptance—gave the former the goods they sought.
This experience of progressive economic and social marginality can also be grasped in the memories of those Roma who have not succeeded in moving out. According to their remembrances, colony life was a source of happiness and joy, in contrast to the dark times of relocation and the difficulties of the present; living in the colony was a source of economic well-being, and the sense of belonging to a higher social category. Regarding these memories as social construction, their selection and combination become salient. These Roma mention colony life as the heyday of their lives, and name the forced relocation as a turning away. To follow this line, they see no break between the pre-1989 and post-1989 periods of time, being unable to discern these two in their narratives, even when asked to do so.
But, to return to Todorova, such features of Roma memories can be used as valuable information, as they nuance the existing models of the transition from socialism to post-socialism. As was mentioned in the first sections, one dominant perspective on the pauperization of the Roma (tacitly) acknowledges this to be a result of the collapse of East European communism, which—in this particular case—seems to be less relevant. As these memories show, the social and economic marginalization of the Roma took place gradually, beginning in the 1970s, with no coincidence between the deterioration of living conditions and the structural changes post-1989; instead, these took place during the “good” years of Ceaușescu’s times, perceived by the non-Roma as a period of economic well-being and relative political liberalization.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
Before submission, this paper was presented at the DICE ROMA workshop series held at ISPMN (The Romanian Institute for Research on National Minorities), where the comments and critics of my colleagues László Fosztó, István Horváth and Stefánia Toma seriously improved my work. Zsombor Bartos-Elekes (Faculty of Geography, Babeș - Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca) helped me with issues of cartography and local history; enterring the field was unburdened by Márta Bárdi, Izabella Mihály and Rozália Románszki. I would like to thank them all.
