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The Degesi of Slovakia
By Karl-Markus Gauß

The Roma are the largest minority living in the European Union. At the same time, they are the one minority whose standard of living is furthest away from that which the European Union would like to ensure for all of its inhabitants. In some EU member states – in Germany, Austria and France, for instance – The Roma managed to improve their situation over the past few years. In others the situation deteriorted, also due to the demise of the communist bloc.

Ironically, the Roma – who come from India and are pejoratively referred to as 'gypsies' - could be regarded as the prototype of a European people which is particularly significant to recall today, when in many places, Roma are subject to repression, social isolation and prejudice. Roma can be seen as the prototype of a European people because they never aspired to a nation-state of their own and have always been known for living their life in clans across the constraints of national borders. Over the centuries, Roma were over and over again subject to genocide, yet also a social group whose role in certain professions within individual national economies was not insignificant.

Nazism murdered hundreds of thousands of Roma. During the communist period, the oftentimes racially charged prosecution of Roma was formally forbidden, but the system nevertheless contributed to robbing the Roma of their identity through forced relocation and deliberate destruction of their traditional clan-like social structures. Furthermore, there exist hundreds of documented cases of forced sterilisation among the Roma population from this period. The desintegration of communism, however, further worsened the situation of the Roma population in two ways. The Roma were the first to loose employment in the no longer profitable social enterprises, while at the same time, they became subject of hatered of all those who in their own eyes became loosers in the ongoing process of social change.

There are between 400.000 and 500.000 Roma living in Slovakia today and in many localities, their communities are close to a stadium of self-destruction. Within a general social system which puts the Roma at the bottom of the social ladder, the Roma community itself remains structured accordingly to a cast system. The Degesi – a Hungarian term for „Dogeaters“ – are the lowest ranking contingent on the Roma social scale. They commonly live in isolated slums and have in many places lost touch with their cultural heritage and family history. All well-meaning aid projects, initiated by active Slovak citizens and oftentimes funded by the European Union, stand a chance of success only insofar as these projects are not designed for the Roma population, but in collaboration with the Roma population and include the Roma in the implementation stage of the projects. There are several such projects underway in Slovakia and they deserve our respect in the same way as the habitual despising of the Roma deserves to be criticised and revealed as oftentimes subconscious racial hatred of the Roma. Karl-Markuß Gauß in his internationally acclaimed book on the Degesi from the East-Slovak region of Svinia expressly states that the Roma question is not an internal Slovakian, but a European-wide problem. Its solution lies not in the trivial questioning of who is to blame, but in a long-term political and educational effort which will bring to the test the humanist quality of the European Union as a whole.


Sephards of Sarajevo
By Karl-Markus Gauß 

In the year 1492, Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain decided to initiate a systematic exodus of Jews, who have inhabited the Iberian peninsula for centuries. The Jews were allowed to take with them into exile only as much as they could carry. The most valuabe asset of them all proved to be their language which the Jews carried with them all the way to Amsterdam and London, to Northern Africa, to port cities of Italy and the Balkans. The language which soon became the lingua franca of the entire Medditerranean basin, is known under differet names. The most common one is „Ladino“, also „Judeo-Espanol“. Terms „Romance“ and „Gudezmo“ remain in common use, too. Here and there the meoldious sound of this near-extinct language which poets and linguists appreciate as „a living museum of the Spanish language“ can still be heard.

Many of the exiled Sephards followed the call of an enlightened sultan, settled in the Ottoman kingdom and spread their culture in Sofia, Ruschuck, Istanbul, Izmir and Thessaloniki. One of the most important sephardite cultural centres, however, became Sarajevo, or as the Sephards reveringly referred to it „Yerusalem chico“ or „Little Jerusalem“. It was there that the Muslims, orthodox and catholic Christians as well as sephard Jews more or less peacefully coexisted for over 450 years. At the hight of prosperity, the Sephard community maintained eight synagogues and kept business contacts around Europe and beyond to the benefit of all ethnic and religious communities living in Bosnia. Untill the Austro-Hungarian occupation in 1878 the sephard culture was the only form of Judaism known in the Balkans; it was only after the Austro-Hungarian occupation that Jews from Central Europe – the so called Ashkenazi - moved to the country, primarily as Austrian bureaucrats.

During World War II, legislation was passed under German-Croat occupation which revoked Bosnian Jews' legal rights and enabled confiscation of their property. As a next step, Bosnian Jews from all parts of the country were brought to Sarajevo and deported to the Croatian concentration camp Jasenovac or further on to Germany. The hopes of many Sephards that they will be returned to their mythical motherland Spain and that noone else but General Franco who will protect them from destruction, did not materialize. Only a little over 1000 Jews returned to Bosnia from the underground and the concentration camps after the war was over. Nevertheless, they still managed to leave their mark on the cultural diversity of Sarajevo, a city which in the former Yugoslavia embodied the concept of urban civilization.

After the bloody demise of Yugoslavia and the siege of Sarajevo in the nineties, many Jews decided to leave. Seeing that nationalism triumphed, the Jews who oftentimes acted as messengers and mediators between the three national groups, no longer saw a future for themselves in Sarajevo. In a single large convoy 400 people left the city to immigrate to Israel, Canada and the USA, leaving behind what remains of the Sephard community in Sarajevo today. A group of people counting – according to different sources – anywhere between 700 and 70 people, most of them old and knowing that they are the last; the last witnesses of the sephard culture in Sarajevo which along with them after 500 years is now irrevocably nearing ist end.