European Gypsies Forgotten Victims in Story of Nazi Genocide : Holocaust: Germans targeted them, along with Jews and others, for elimination. They were rounded up, brutalized, interned, deported. But Gypsies are unsure of their history and reluctant to discuss the horror.

Fifty years ago, Karoly Lendvai was caught up in the Nazi horror, and narrowly escaped becoming one of the millions who died. But he still doesn’t know what happened or why. He isn’t even familiar with such terms as Holocaust.

Lendvai, a 65-year-old Gypsy, lives in a hut built of bricks, mud, a little of this and a little of that. He is a survivor of a largely overlooked chapter in the history of Nazi genocide.

“Why did they do it?” he asked an interviewer poking into a trove of memories a half-century old. “Because I’m a Gypsy? That can’t be. That’s no reason.”

It could be, and it was.

Gypsies were rounded up, brutalized, interned, deported. Nazi doctor Josef Mengele conducted medical experiments on them.

Sybil Milton, deputy director of the U.S. Holocaust Museum and the author of a study of Nazi policies toward Gypsies, cites high-ranking German officials in the 1930s as concluding that “the national socialist state will have to settle the Gypsy question just as it has solved the Jewish question.”

Thought to have descended from a tribe that left India in the fifth century, Gypsies have suffered prejudice and defied assimilation in Europe for centuries. The Nazis considered them an inferior race. Just like millions of Jews, Gypsies were designated for liquidation.

Eleven million people--6 million of them Jews--are thought to have died in Nazi death camps.

Determining the number of Gypsies killed is difficult because they were not registered, and many died in transit and were buried in unmarked graves, said Waclaw Dlugoborski, curator for scientific research at the Auschwitz Museum and historian at Poland’s Wroclaw University.

He said estimates for all of Europe range from 200,000 to 500,000 dead. In Poland, an estimated 70% of the Gypsies died. French Nazi hunter Serge Klarsfeld said no French historian so far has taken the time to search French or German archives carefully for material on the Gypsy Holocaust.

In an effort to draw attention to the question, Dlugoborski is organizing an international commemoration of the Gypsy Holocaust Aug. 2-3 at Auschwitz, the infamous extermination site.

Today there are an estimated 15 million Gypsies in Europe, a half-million of them in Hungary. They are Hungary’s largest minority.

No one had ever asked Lendvai what happened to him, and he had not spoken of it outside his own family. Given his people’s oral tradition and a longstanding climate of prejudice against Gypsies, little was said--much less written--about their suffering.

“Of course, Gypsies do not know their own history,” said Gypsy author Menyhert Lakatos. “It was not in anyone’s interest to enlighten them.”

Hungary was allied with Germany but generally did not transport its Jews, Gypsies and others to Nazi camps until German soldiers came in 1944.

Fifty years ago this summer--Lendvai cannot remember the month--Hungarian police descended on the town of Szentgal 75 miles southwest of Budapest where he grew up.

They began forcing a dozen Gypsy families to walk 45 miles north to Komarom, location of the notorious Csillag internment camp run by Hungary’s variant of the Nazis, the Arrow Cross.

“As we were marched through villages, others joined our group, more Gypsies and more gendarmes,” recalled Lendvai in a soft, hoarse voice. “Some babies died along the way, and some would-be escapees were shot, left by the roadside. No one knows who they were.”

“We were in the camp about two weeks with hardly any food, and even water was scarce,” he continued. “More people died as typhus broke out, and others were killed.

“The dead were thrown into a huge pit, covered with quicklime. There were layers upon layers of dead. I do not know when the pit was finally filled because one day we were herded into cattle cars, to be taken I don’t know where.”

“Rot, you Jew-Gypsy!” he recalled an Arrow Cross gendarme screaming at him as they were shoved onto the train.

A wiry man with hands gnarled by years of dawn-to-dusk work and a tanned, lined face, Lendvai does not give the impression of one open to many doubts. But today he still wonders: “Why did he call me a Jew?”

He was saved by an air raid. “Suddenly, there were sirens, and bombs were falling. The car I was in was damaged, and some of us escaped. We hid in the woods for about a year. . . . I never saw the others again.”

Erzsebet Kolompar of Sorokpolany, 120 miles southwest of Budapest, recalled similar scenes. She was saved when Arrow Cross guards fled the advancing Soviet army.

Lendvai did not know the word “Holocaust,” but he does know that many of his people suffered from it. His own family perished.

Records indicate that people from the Komarom camp were shipped to Auschwitz.

“There is every reason to believe that had the war dragged on or had Hitler won, all Gypsies would have been exterminated,” said Agnes Daroczi, an activist who anchors a weekly program on Gypsy affairs on Hungarian state television.

Not only is the public largely unaware of the Gypsy Holocaust, but many Gypsies themselves know nothing about it, she said.

“Ours is an oral culture, and there is low contact level among the various Gypsy communities,” she said.

She is seeking survivors for a feature-length documentary to mark the 50th anniversary of the extermination of a Gypsy camp at Birkenau, otherwise known as Auschwitz II because of its proximity.

Mengele conducted medical experiments on Gypsy children, including twins. Most of them died, wrote Hermann Langbein, a prisoner-doctor at Auschwitz, in a 1975 book. U.S. journalist and historian William Shirer wrote in “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich” that Gypsies were selected at Dachau and Buchenwald to see how they might be able to live on salt water.

Andras T. Hegedues, a Budapest University professor and expert on minority affairs, said 50,000 to 60,000 Gypsies were deported in 1944-45. He cannot determine how many were sent to Hungarian camps and how many went to Nazi camps.

“I am also aware that many people were killed on the spot as they were rounded up, and no records of those killings exit,” Hegedues said.

Franciszek Piper, head of the Auschwitz Museum’s historical department, said 23,000 Gypsies were taken to Birkenau, and nearly 21,000 died there.

“The ratio of Gypsies killed was as high as that of Jews,” he said.

Survivors like Lendvai and Kolompar welcome the effort to tell their story to Hungarians and the world at large after a half-century of silence. But Daroczi, the TV journalist, said younger Gypsies are suspicious and largely hostile.

Their view, built on a history of repression, is: “No need to give them ideas,” she said.

Istvan Tauber, a Budapest University professor, said his doctoral study of recent attitudes toward Gypsies found that almost 40% of more than 800 people interviewed still favored some sort of discrimination against Gypsies. About 2.7% said they supported physical liquidation.