The Czechs in a Nutshell

Fortunately, the shameful court ruling caused a wave of angry protests in the national press, a spokesman of the Czech government publicly questioned the judge’s competence, and even good Jeseník burghers expressed their solidarity with the Roma couple, rejecting the city’s image as a racist haven. Ultimately, the young hooligans were re-tried by another court, and one of them was sentenced to prison.

Still, the co-habitation between the Czech “gadja” majority and the Roma (meaning “human being” in Romani, a term which has replaced the old “gypsy”) is strained and their communication is full of misunderstandings.

Take for instance the fact that nobody knows for certain how many Roma there are in the Czech Republic. According to the national census in 2001, only 12,000 Czech citizens declared themselves as Roma (the law prohibits officials from deciding a person’s nationality) while Roma organizations, obviously eager to look as big as possible, boost the number to more than 300,000 individuals. Sociologists and field workers, however, estimate that there are about 200,000 Roma, which in a relative ranking (two percent of the population) places the Czech minority among the larger ones in Europe.

To make the picture even more complicated, the overwhelming majority of today’s Czech Roma minority have roots in Slovakia. Prior to the Second World War, only some 6,000 Roma were living in Bohemia and Moravia, and more than 5,400 of them were murdered in Nazi concentration camps. It says a lot about the communist regime that this Roma Holocaust was officially fully acknowledged only after the Velvet Revolution.

After the war, poor Roma from Slovakia (where no mass extinction had taken place) started to migrate westwards, often to the Sudeten region, which offered an abundance of empty houses, left over from the three million ethnic Germans that were kicked out in 1945-46 (see: Munich Agreement). The increasing Roma migration was speeded up after 1948 by the communists, who needed lots of unqualified labourers for their newly-established heavy industry.

The result of this policy can be seen all over North Bohemia today: large numbers of Roma, who until the 1950s had earned themselves a living as tinkers and travelling craftsmen, were moved together in towns and cities that were completely foreign to them. Still, after half a century in the area, many Roma feel that their roots are in the hilly landscape of Eastern Slovakia, and not in polluted North Bohemia’s industrial ghettos.

Pavel Říčan, a researcher at the Czech Academy of Sciences, depicts the communist era as both a curse and a blessing for the Roma. Among the nice aspects was a regular wage for unqualified work, a place to live, free health care, schooling for children and a wide range of social benefits. But they paid a high price: indigenous Roma culture was almost totally eradicated, their language was banned (most young Roma don’t speak Romani, yet their command of Czech is often far from flawless), their traditions were ridiculed and their old crafts forgotten.

“Throughout their forty years in power the communists taught the Roma that it paid to lie and steal,” Říčan concludes. That verdict may be a bit too harsh, but it’s undisputed that the Roma, who always had relied on themselves, became totally addicted to help from the state.

Not too surprising, then, that the transition to a market economy has been especially difficult for the Roma. Official figures are hard to come by, but according to the researcher Říčan, some 60 percent of children in Czech orphanages are Roma, and more or less the same ratio applies for inmates in Czech prisons. The average Roma is in substantially worse health than the average “gadja”, the great majority of Czech Roma are jobless (here, widespread discrimination also plays a certain role) and only one in five adult Roma has completed elementary education.

Photo © Jaroslav Fišer

These facts are certainly not too encouraging, but Milena Hübschmannová, the Czech Republic’s most renowned expert on Roma culture, is still quite optimistic. In her opinion, it’s obvious to everyone that the Bolsheviks’ forceful integration — an attempt to turn the Roma into dark-skinned Czech proletarians — was a complete fiasco. Now, voluntary assimilation has become the new gospel, and if this is to succeed, the Roma need to establish their own intellectual elite — which is currently emerging.

“In the last years, our Roma have been undergoing a cultural revival, and I’m curious what social impact this will have,” Hübschmannová recently told Reflex magazine.