"(Special) schools" and "(labour) camps": On the question of (dis-)continuities in Czechoslovak anti-Gypsy measures, 1918-1958
Abstract
On November 28, 1946, a meeting of Czechoslovak officials took place in Prague. The representatives of various ministries, different expert bodies and even of itinerant traders shared their anxieties of the dangers that the "Gypsy population" posed to the public order of the newly (re-)established Czechoslovak state.
Only one and a half year after the end of the Nazi occupation they formulated together the "solution of the Gypsy question in Czech lands": The so-called Gypsy families should be classified into two groups. The so-called Gypsy families should have been classified into two groups.
Those who allegedly possessed the potential would have been re- educated in special camps in which adults would have been employed and children subjected to special education. The "ungovernable" would be initially moved to forced labour camps and then "displaced".
Such set of ideas was definitely not new neither in the context of post-war Europe nor for the new Czechoslovakia as the successor of the interwar Czechoslovak Republic. Similar classification by Czechoslovak officials and experts of the so-called Gypsy population was put forward in the beginning of 1920s.
Although, both of these suggested solutions from early 1920s and 1946 were not directly implemented into state policy, they, at the very least, shaped the recurrent debates on the "Gypsy question" and sparked off a development of some locally-based practices. Such as was the creation of the so-called Gypsy schools, in fact special segregated classes for Roma children, in interwar Czechoslovakia (and later in the Protectorate Bohemia and Moravia) as well as in the Stalinist Czechoslovakia, and also the internment of Czechoslovak citizens labelled as Gypsies in Ústí nad Labem/Aussig in 1946.
By focusing on the bureaucratic debates within the central state institutions on one hand and the local experimental practices on the other I will outline the (dis-)continuities in Czechoslovak anti-Gypsy measures in the long period of the first half of the 20 th century. This approach enables me to contest the notion of implementation of anti-Gypsy measures as a solely top-down process and at the same time to deal with the question of consequences of the Romani genocide in Czechoslovakia.