During the summers, my parents sent me to breath fresh air in Pilisborosjeno, in the mountains near Budapest, in the house of a German farmer. They had two or three enormous cows in a windowless building, with dry hay packed in the gallery. I liked the smell of the melancholy monsters, always ruminating patiently till they were milked at the early morning. One night a homeless man asked permission to spend the night in the hay and the son of the German and me went to see him. I had never met a Gypsy. I had never even heard about gypsies. The regime had abolished national and religious minorities, and officially there were no gypsies in socialist Hungary.
But there he was and not alone but playing in the hay with a girl. They had numbers tattooed in their forearms like my mother: they said they had been in Auschwitz. That made a tremendous impression on me.
My next "contact" with the gypsy "problem" was when I was asked by my boss to escort Hungarian dignataries visiting Israel. Without prompting, they spoke passionately about the terrible gypsy problem of Hungary, and lamented they were not all exterminated by Hitler. The chief said that he would donate his salary to rebuild Auschwitz and solve the gypsy problem. They were not drunk. The presence of Jews (in those times there were no openly identifiable Jews in Hungary) somehow made them extremely nervous, the Jews and Auschwitz were such powerful emotional issues in their minds that somehow they felt the compulsion of draining the stress out from their systems. I was shocked and told them that Auschwitz was not a good subject in Israel.
The gypsy issue is central in the Hungarian debate, it jumps up in every conversation and the media. They are obsessed with it. There is open nostalgy for the Fascist regime because concentrated the gypsies in large camps and forbid their nomadic way of life, ultimately delivering them to Auschwitz to be destroyed. BTW, gypsies were "racially" Arian, so the Germans didnt want them and only under pressure they were accepted in Auschwitz, where they were not gassed but housed in special family camps under the category of "antisocial elements" (marked with a downward triangle - see pic).
When the Hungarian Jewish transports started arriving at Auschwitz Birkenau, the overcrowding became dangerous (typhus and cholera) so on one memorable day the whole gypsy family camp was liquidated. The Gypsies had been living in Auschwitz for more than a year and knew exactly what was happening. My mother remembered the day because of the terrible crying and shouting, as the gypsies did not walk disciplinedly into the gas chambers as the Jews did, they resisted and had to be subdued with dogs and taken away by lorries. About 4000 gypsies were killed that day.
Paradoxically, Hungarian media also remembers fondly the Communist dictatorship which did not recognize the existence of gypsies but dispersed them in public housing and forced them to work like everybody else. The word gypsy was erased being a capitalist remnant, and no one heard about them anymor. But they did not disappear but were very much alive as I saw them in the hay over the German farmer's cows.
The gypsy problem emerged only in the last decade and is driving crazy the Hungarians. The Jobbik party is riding on it and conquering seats in the parliament. Why this virulent hate? Gypsies in Hungary are an isolated and marginal minority, they do not mix nor marry Hungarians, they do not demand social assistance or pensions. They hide from the State (and the police), living from the Hungarian's garbage and occasional petty crime. What really drives crazy the Hungarians, I believe, is that the Gypsies are having children, while the Hungarian nation is rapidly dying off.
I offer no opinion. Thanks God I am not Hungarian anymore but an Israeli Jew.
