Hello!
Welcome to the eugenics podcast. I'm
Patrick Merricks.
I'm Marius Turda. Good morning, Marius. How
are you?
Good morning, Patrick. I'm very well. I
hope you're well too.
Very good thanks. I'm all ready to talk
about eugenics, history of eugenics. So it's good we have
a podcast.
Today we'll be talking about racism and
the Roma minorities.
So recently I've noticed this trend
in Eastern Europe so this article
says police are using the Covid 19
pandemic as an excuse to abuse Roma.
So what's going on here, Marius?
It's quite worrying!
Well we can see it's
a racialization of the pandemic
in East Central Europe with a particular
group being targeted
as vectors of disease now that ties in,
regrettably, with a long process of
discrimination
against the Roma. Racism
and other practices that
are characteristic, in a way, of the Roma
history in East Central Europe.
So what we could see at the moment is a
combination of factors: some of them are
historical; some of them are social; some
are economic,
and they all conflate to articulate - or
rearticulate,
better to say - a new form of racism
against the Roma in East Central Europe.
But discrimination of the Roma is
nothing new
and so 100 years ago here almost we
have
we have research that was going on
into this specific minority.
So what's this about? Research
about the racial characteristics of
the Roma started
early on during the the first decade of
the 20th century.
We have developments in medicine,
physiology and immunology
trying to help anthropologists
identify
better certain racial characteristics.
So what we have here, we have the Polish
immunologist
Ludwik Hirszfeld, who applied
blood group research to
anthropological,
ethnical origins of various people
across
East Central Europe and here on my left
or the left of the slide we have the
first example coming from Hungary, in the
1920s where two very important Hungarian
scientists applied blood good research
to see
whether there is a difference in terms
of the racial characteristics of the
Roma comparing to the Hungarian and
the German populations.
And these studies accelerated
quite rapidly during the Nazi
period.
So what happened during this period,
Marius?
The racial research about and on to the
Roma
continued throughout the 1920s and 30s
across East-Central Europe,
but of course it reached a certain
intensity in Nazi Germany, as we know,
so, on the one hand, you have the entire
eugenic rhetoric about
the Roma as asocial elements, as negative
dysgenic
members of society that have to be if
not sterilized
at least put in into colonies and
separated from the majority and that is
in combination with
the racial research that tried to
find whether is something specifically
'Roma'
about the Roma. Can we find not only
something about their origin
but what makes a Roma Roma? What makes a
Jew a Jew? So they
employed the entire arsenal of racial
science available at the
time
to try to identify that, leading to human
experiments in concentration camps
carried out by Mengele, to measurements
of their skulls,
of their heads, as we can see in this
image by
Eva Justin
and finally to the extermination in
in the Nazi concentration camps.
So you mentioned the extermination and here we have a
specific camp, so where is this
and who are these people?
That's a Nazi extermination camp in Nazi- occupied Poland
and these are Roma prisoners from
Eastern Europe. 
By 1940s the Nazi regime is
orchestrating a a full-fledged
program of annihilation examination of
the Roma alongside the extermination of
the Jews and
other 'inferior' people, the Slavic nations,
and so on so forth, but this is something
that goes on in other countries in East
Central Europe
and of course we have the example of
Romania and the deportation of the Roma
to Transnistria and
it is extremely worrying to remember
the figures: in Romania we have over 12000 children being killed
during the deportation in
Transnistria and
this image, too, is very evocative because
you have so many
children taken into extermination camps
in Germany and it is important to
remember how the Roma themselves refer
to this moment
in their own history they used the term
Porajmos or Samudaripen, basically trying to
emphasize
both the profound
shame and suffering, the traumatic
experience that comes with it,
but also how it ripped apart the entire
community.
So unfortunately the discrimination
continued after the
Second World War. So what was life like
for the Roma under communism? Officially,
of course, there was no racism and
discrimination
against any citizens of the new
republics,
popular republics, established after
1945. In practical terms,
a lot of the social engineering that
started in the 1930s and 40s continued
in terms of access to health social
welfare,
the way certain groups were being
targeted by
health policies and the Roma were
always central to
any social and public health policies
introduced in communist Eastern Europe,
because of their fertility, the way they
chose to live -
nomadic or sedentary - so
regrettably a lot of these factors uh
contributed to perpetuating forms of
discrimination against the Roma and forms of racism against the Roma
that by
by the end of the 1980s led to images
such as the one we have here from
northern Romania,
where we could see exactly the
absolutely
horrible conditions they lived in.
So it's not just um social engineering
but there are elements of
reproductive control
which we have recently seen brought
to light.
So what can you tell us about the
sterilization of
Roma women?
Certain eugenic practices,
including sterilization, continued
unabated
after 1945, not only in
in western Europe - so we have the cases
of sterilization in Sweden,
the cases of sterilization in
Switzerland - but also in East Central
Europe and the case of the Roma women
in the Czechoslovak
republic is quite poignant
because
there are many women who were sterilized on the premise that a their fertility
represents a threat
to the majority and, secondly, the old
eugenic arguments about
protecting the majority from the
minority.
The health of the nation was designed
and described in very powerful
eugenic terms that
actually eliminated the Roma
or kept them at the margins of the
canonical definition of the nation.
So um now we know more about these cases
and it's good today finally coming
forward
and we could hear their stories.
So this article mentioned some
women specifically, but
were men affected by these practices at
all?
Men were affected as well and we don't
have
very well documented cases because the
Roma men do not
want to come forward and discuss, this
being extremely
shameful. In general, it is very shameful
for them to accept they've been
sterilized
but I think it is particularly a problem
for a Roma man
to come forward and admit that he was
sterilized and
as a result he could not have children.
Children are so important to the Roma
community and having children
is seen as one of the important markers
of a complete individual,
and to admit that actually you
are unable to do that,  it reduces
you
in a certain way. So Roma men are very
shy but also in a way
reluctant to come and talk to us about
what happened to them.
So returning to northern Romania here
what does this image mean here?
We see a a wall being built in
in this city, in northern Transylvania
and basically it illustrates again
how currently the Roma are segregated,
mistreated,
and the entire discussion about
disease
and social welfare is being, on the one hand,
discussed in eugenic terms; on the other
hand it's being
racialized during the pandemic
crisis. So it is very interesting how
racism
and Covid 19 and
long embedded eugenic
language and practices continue to work
across the region to marginalize,
segregate
and mistreat the Roma people.
Well it's been a very sombering, but no
less important
episode today and I want to thank you,
Marius
for joining me in this engaging
discussion. Also thank everyone for
viewing and listening to this. So once
again, thank you Marius
and see you next time. Thank you, Patrick.
Until next time.
