goncalves-gypsy-blog
Goncalves Gypsy
Finally found the courage to talk about my heritage
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I’m due to get married this year. My future husband is also Roma but his story is very interesting.
My Roma surname is Goncalves. This is sort of our family name, however only about half of us have it on our documents, as we keep our Romani hertitage a secret for fear of persecution etc. My grandmother married a gorja (non-Romani) so we use his surname on our documents (though traditionally he should’ve taken my grandmothers name but she didn’t want that). My dads surname was also Goncalves (though he is a very very very distant relation - like him and my mother are probably an 1/100th related) but my mother was scared as was my gran so again we used my grandfathers surname. Its a bit common around were we live to know or know of certain Roma surnames (this also helps to keep out ‘white girls’ that think its cool and edgy to pretend to be/use Roma (eg. Kesha and Lady Gaga))
When I met my boyfriend he told me he was Romani. I was excited but I didn’t know his surname so didn’t share my heritage with him because to be honest I didn’t believe him. That aside, he was a really amazing person so I sort of brushed it off. He very quickly met my family which led to a bizarre interaction. Basically, one of my uncles is a photographer. When he started out his only customers were Romani. When he met my boyfriend he recognised him because he apparently looks the spitting image of his father. My uncle immediately said this to my boyfriend which caused him to burst out crying and run out of the room. My boyfriend was put into care at the age of 7. The only information he remembers is his real first name and his parents first names. When he was taken into care he had no birth certificate so they gave him one - just not with his real name. He has not been given any information about his real parents and is met with ‘the documents were given to you’ any time he asks for information (they were never given to him). This of course explains why I didn’t recognise his surname but the worst part of his story is why his was taken from his parents.
He was old enough to remember. His dad ran a tree surgery company and his mother was a nanny for this really rich family in the next town over. They had a house, my boyfriend went to school and was fed, washed and clothed properly. One day while his dad was working in a neighbours garden he got into an accident. His mom drove them all to the local hospital but of course all three of them had no documents. No birth certificates, no passports, nothing. Because of this the hospital insisted on doing health checks on all of them. My boyfriend was sent to the children's ward for his check. There they called social services and my boyfriend was taken away.
There is kind of a happy ending though. While my uncle can’t remember his real surname he has reached out to family and friends who may know (or know someone that knows) and has given my boyfriend all of the pictures he took of them over the 7 years and told him stories about them. When we get married we have both decided to take the Goncalves name because, in my boyfriend’s words “I would rather have a Roma name then a gorja lie”. I hope we end up finding his parents, I would like them to be at the wedding and in their future grandchildren’s lives.
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In light of recent neo-nazi things going on in the US, I wanted to talk about what I did not get taught in school and should have been. This is the treatment of Romani people during and after WW2. I want to talk about this because it effected my family and because it is always forgotten.
I want to preface this by saying this. Before WW2, there were many anti-Gypsy laws around the world and we were chased out and wrongly persecuted for so long. I plan to wrote something about that too but writing this is more important to me today because I talked to my grandmother and she is so scared. She remembers the same sort of racism and just disgusting-ness from the war and she is terrified that members of our family, who keep our heritage a secret, will be found out and punished for nothing, for just being us, she grew up running from being Roma and being ashamed. She set up a life for her children and grandchildren where we could be Romani at home and not have to worry about being punished for it, as long as we were ‘normal’ and kept it a secret in public. Anyway~
During the war, Roma people were forced to do harsh labour, forced into concentration camps but most often just killed on sight. The amount of Romani victims of this vile ‘shoot on sight’ order is one of the largest mass killings in history, and yet we are never told about it. Approximately 50% of our population was wiped out - and that is just the numbers of the recorded killings, I’m sure there are people that were killed or ‘went missing’ that no one ever accounted for. Many of our people were murdered in their homes or out on the street, for just existing. Our people were put in the same classification as Jewish people, the only difference being that no other country was really fighting for our release or for us to be saved. While in concentration camps the Roma were made to wear a brown upside down triangle and our treatment in the camps was either hard manual labour or they funnelled newcomers straight into gas chambers and murdered them. I remember reading about Roma who were meant to be moved from Auschwitz to another camp to be killed and refused and tried to start an resistance of some sort - it didn’t really work, while they didn’t get moved to a different camp most of them ended starving to death, one can only assume as punishment for starting trouble they were denied even basic food. There is even evidence that Anne Frank witnessed the brutal murder of Roma children before she was found and put into a camp. Not only were Roma children killed, our children were more favourable to be used for brutal, and in my opinion unnecessary, medical experiments. A quote about this that actually made me cry so much when I read it I had to walk away from my computer and meditate for an hour, and even then I couldn’t get the image out of my head. “Vera Alexander was a Jewish inmate at Auschwitz who looked after [aprox.] 50 sets of Romani twins: ‘I remember one set of twins in particular: Guido and Ina, aged about four. One day, Mengele [a nazi scientist] took them away. When they returned, they were in a terrible state: they had been sewn together, back to back, like Siamese twins. Their wounds were infected and oozing pus. They screamed day and night. Then their parents—I remember the mother's name was Stella—managed to get some morphine and they killed the children in order to end their suffering.”
(X) A link to a wiki page about this which has further, more in depth links in it.
After the war, some Roma were kept in concentration camps. The longest I’ve heard of was another 10 years but there could’ve been people in them for longer. Romani’s don’t like to talk about the bad things have happened unless they are asked. My family have always said “Why should I show you my struggles when I can show you my achievements.” There was also sterilisation of Roma women to control our population, much of which was done illegally, forcibly or without the women knowing (after being drugged or lied to). This was done by governments until the 90s and I still know it to have happened after this but I can’t say for sure who it was done by. We were denied entry to countries after being released from camps. Countries that we were born in. People always say that Gypsies (even though our name is Roma or Romani) are thieves and liars and beggars. They fail to realise that if they were thrown from their homes, wrongly persecuted and then, upon being released, ignored, brushed under the carpet and forced to go somewhere else (as if we didn’t have a life there before) they would also steal and lie to feed their family. I do not put down on any documents that I am Roma because if I did I know I would be homeless and jobless in less than a week. People do not see us as people. Even with good jobs and homes and being polite and ‘normal’ citizens we are still called scum and chased out of towns. These ideas of Roma started way before WW2 but people know how horrible these acts were towards the Jewish but towards Roma? don’t worry, it’s okay to treat them as lesser people.
I’m going to end this here because I can’t carry on writing it. It’s really upsetting. If there are questions I’m happy to answer them to the best of my ability but please do some research on it because, yes, this is something that hurt the whole world, but Romani people are not widely recognised as victims when they were (and still are).
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First of all I wanna say thanks to @localbadgirl for talking about us and our culture and being proud of it and its time I talked about it too cause having to hide it is bullshit. also sorry for tagging you in this long ass family history post. it was gonna be brief but thinking about it makes me angry af so its a bit of a rant.
My family started to hide our Romani roots when my nana (great-grandmother) and her family got all but chased out of a town mid WW2. I don’t know why, both her and her husband had good jobs and lived in a house with their kids, worse thing they coulda done is have flowers from their garden overflow into next doors garden. When they got to the next town they were hush hush about being Romani and just got on with their lives. My gran was raised Romani and ended up marrying a gorja (non-Romani) however my grandad knew and accepted her roots and let her bring up their kids in the Romani ways and practice her culture but they were still hush hush about it and put ‘British’ down on their kids birth certificates rather than ‘British Gypsy’ (smh that the govt doesn’t even put our real name but w/e). When my mom found my dad (who was also Romani) they went travelling together for a bit but stopped when she got pregnant with me (as my mom wanted to be around my gran to help with me). Growing up I was taught about our culture and also taught that it stays in the house, that no one can know. As I got older I understood why. Cousins who were loud and proud about being Romani got worse treatment than me for doing the same shit. My uncle got arrested and put in prison for a year for breaking apart a bar fight when he didnt even throw hands he just got in between them. Very close friends know the real me but everyone else Im too scared to tell.
So I wanted to sorta educate people on the real life shit we have to go through daily. The lies and blatant racism that is said in the UK about us. I’m gonna stay anon as possible cause Im at uni and I have a job and Im p sure Id lose both for ‘unrelated reasons’ if they found out but you can hmu with question or whatever, I have more stories to tell about my childhood and people that found out.
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