Roma in Canada (1997-2020)

By Paul St. Clair

If you’ve ever been curious about the mystique of the Roma, pejoratively called Gypsies, this book is an excellent guide to their culture and customs as well as explaining the difference between the various Romani groups, their fascinating origins and their precarious place in society.

Focusing on the Roma’s experiences with the Canadian immigration and refugee process, the author, an immigration counsellor, tells a riveting story, using many of their personal anecdotes of why they came and how they were treated. Despite being one of the most welcoming countries for refugees in the world, this book explores a somewhat secretive system of determining who deserves Canada’s protection that puts into question the system’s reputation for equality. Canada’s fairness and compassion has let the Roma down, leading to many failed claims and deportations that were later found to be unjustified and in some cases, illegal. Facing a life of brutal prejudice and even violence, if returned to Europe, the Roma’s heartbreaking story is a glimpse into the complex world of refugees.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Release date: Apr 28, 2023
• ISBN: 9781638294351

Paul St. Clair

Paul St. Clair, Ph.D., was the executive director of the Toronto Roma Community Centre from its inception in 1998 until November, 2010. As an immigration counsellor for the last 23 years, he continues to assist Roma refugees with their immigration and settlement needs at a Toronto NGO, called CultureLink. He has been a pro-bono counsel at many Immigration and Refugee Board hearings. In addition, he is a past chair of TRAC, a Toronto organization assisting refugees in detention, as well as the past President of the Board of Sojourn House, a refugee shelter in Toronto. When the shelter received an eviction notice, this potentially disastrous situation became an opportunity to expand the 50-bed shelter into an 8-story new building with temporary accommodation for newly arrived refugees as well as 40 apartments for past refugees who require some further assistance in successfully settling in their new country. He grew up in the Slovak part of Czechoslovakia (1947–1968) and came to Canada as a refugee after the Soviet invasion of his homeland, in 1968. In 1982, he obtained a Ph.D. from the University of Toronto in sociology of education.

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About the Author

Paul St. Clair, Ph.D., was the executive director of the Toronto Roma Community Centre from its inception in 1998 until November, 2010. As an immigration counsellor for the last 23 years, he continues to assist Roma refugees with their immigration and settlement needs at a Toronto NGO, called CultureLink. He has been a pro-bono counsel at many Immigration and Refugee Board hearings. In addition, he is a past chair of TRAC, a Toronto organization assisting refugees in detention, as well as the past President of the Board of Sojourn House, a refugee shelter in Toronto. When the shelter received an eviction notice, this potentially disastrous situation became an opportunity to expand the 50-bed shelter into an 8-story new building with temporary accommodation for newly arrived refugees as well as 40 apartments for past refugees who require some further assistance in successfully settling in their new country.

He grew up in the Slovak part of Czechoslovakia (1947–1968) and came to Canada as a refugee after the Soviet invasion of his homeland, in 1968. In 1982, he obtained a Ph.D. from the University of Toronto in sociology of education.

Dedication

This book is dedicated to all the brave Roma who, by coming to Canada, tried to escape persecution and discrimination in Eastern Europe, and who despite many obstacles, managed to build a life here. Plus, to all those who did not make it and were either deported or decided to leave on their own.

Copyright Information ©

Paul St. Clair 2023

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher.

Any person who commits any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

Grateful acknowledgement is made for permission to re-print an excerpt from a book by Mario Bolduc, The Roma Plot, (Dundurn Press Ltd., 2017) by permission of Dundurn Press Ltd.

Cover is from a 1924 poster of Roma dancers and musicians taken in Colombia.

Ordering Information

Quantity sales: Special discounts are available on quantity purchases by corporations, associations, and others. For details, contact the publisher at the address below.

Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication data

St. Clair, Paul

Roma in Canada (1997–2020)

ISBN 9781638294344 (Paperback)

ISBN 9781638294351 (ePub e-book)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2023900690

www.austinmacauley.com/us

First Published 2023

Austin Macauley Publishers LLC

40 Wall Street, 33rd Floor, Suite 3302

New York, NY 10005

USA

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Part I

Neither Goy nor Gadzo

What is the worst thing that can happen to a Czech going down the stairs in his Prague apartment building? To meet a Roma going up saying: Hello, neighbor!

This introduction is an attempt to answer a question I have been often asked, namely, why did I, as a Gadzo, get so passionately involved with assisting Roma refugees to find a solid foothold in Canada. Gadzo or Gadjo is a Romani term used to describe a person who is not Roma. It is used in the same way as the non-derogatory Jewish term ‘Goy’ that designates people who are not Jewish.

The terms, Gadzo and Goy, are two examples of how a persecuted minority identifies members of the majority. These two expressions are usually not meant as insults; they are simply used to describe an outsider. In the Romani language, the term Gadzo means a farmer, but anyone who is not Roma could be called Gadzo. For example, when I called a Roma family and a child answered the call, I could hear him yelling for his parents to come to the phone by saying: A Gadzo is calling!

In what follows, we will be using this particular spelling of the term Gadzo and plural Gadze, mainly for consistency and because this is the way the Czech and Slovak Roma pronounce and use it. There are many other ways to spell this word, such as Gazho or Gadjo, but here I will only use this term as I got used to hearing it from my Czech and Slovak clients.

I am not strictly speaking a Gadzo either because as a Jew I am not considered to be Gadzo by the Roma. The Roma consider Jews in a separate category, simply because of their shared history of persecution before and during WWII, and because both groups suffered terrible persecution by the majority over the centuries.

Since there is no one simple answer to this question of why I got involved with the Roma, let me tell you something about my past. If your interest is strictly about the Roma and how did they fair in their effort to find a new life in Canada, and not in how and why did I end up assisting Roma refugees, you should skip this section. The following few pages are about my personal journey, where I try to explain how I, as a non-Roma, became the Executive Director of the Roma Community Center (RCC).

Since childhood, my old friends tell me, I had the propensity to defend the weak and stand up for the underdog. Perhaps having a younger brother, who often needed protection, had something to do with it. And, after centuries of persecution, who would be more deserving of assistance than the Roma, whom everyone ignored, even despised? Even though I was already in my fifties, I was still looking for something meaningful to do when this opportunity to use my various skills presented itself.

***

I am a sort of a reluctant Jew but definitely not a Goy, simply because both of my parents come from Jewish families. My reluctance comes from growing up in the anti-Semitic environment of Slovakia, where as a child, before learning that I too am Jewish, I would join the other children on our street and chase the two Jewish girls who lived in our apartment building. I had no idea what it meant to be Jewish. I had no religious upbringing and knew even less than the Slovak, mostly Catholic, children who may have heard of Jews as Christ killers. We would shout at these girls using vile and derogatory expressions and chase them until they ran home in tears. We were cruel in a way only children know how.

Their mother came to complain to my parents and from that moment on my mother would tell me stories about how they survived the war, but she kept her word to my father and never told me that we were also Jews. Only in my mid-teens did I discover on my own that I am Jewish. I have cousins who did not find out about their Jewish background until their late teens or early adulthood when their parents felt that as young adults, they would be better able to deal with this kind of revelation.

Like these parents, who did not practice their Jewish faith or any other religion, my mother was afraid to reveal this secret to me because she knew of one case where the child actually killed herself upon learning that she was Jewish. The child could not deal with suddenly belonging to the group she has learned to hate. In our family, there is even a woman born to Jewish parents, who was baptized as Catholic, and who eventually became a nun.

To answer this question of why I got involved in assisting Roma when the Czech Roma started to arrive in Canada in the summer of 1997, more than 50 years after the end of World War II, I have to begin with the events of WWII that profoundly and tragically affected the lives of Roma just as much as that of my own family.

My parents survived World War II. Only just!

They lived in the Slovak part of Czechoslovakia, where I was born in 1947. After the Munich agreement between Chamberlain and Hitler (1938), Germany occupied the Czech part of the Czechoslovak Republic, thus creating a German Protectorate in the Czech part of the country. In the break-up of the Republic, Hitler was partly aided by Slovak nationalist leaders who requested his assistance in creating an independent Slovak state. This led the Slovaks to a close alliance with Nazi Germany and the Slovak government joined the Nazi war effort.

The long-simmering antisemitism of the Slovaks and their racist attitude toward the Roma were well aligned with the German persecution and extermination of the Jews and Roma. If, instead, Czechoslovakia with its well-equipped and well-trained army had any support from the West, and fought the Germans in 1938, the whole of WWII could have had a totally different outcome or could have been avoided altogether.

After the break-up of Czechoslovakia, in 1938, the Slovaks became willing collaborators in the German effort to rid the world of Jews and Roma. Antisemitism among the very Catholic and mostly agrarian poor Slovaks was perhaps more virulent than among the Germans. It was not difficult to convince the Slovaks, Poles or Ukrainians to assist in rounding up and deporting Jews and Roma into the concentration camps.

As an engineer, my father worked on refurbishing old locomotives for use in mines and my mother worked for a wholesale company that distributed all types of metal products for industrial use. Through most of the war, both of my parents worked in what was called ‘war-essential industries’ and, even though both were Jewish, they were exempt from deportations, as long as Slovakia was the trusted ally to fascist Germany.

But toward the end of the war, as the Soviet armies were entering Central Europe, there was a Slovak uprising against the German occupation. With the arrival of German troops in Slovakia, to fight the uprising, all exemptions were canceled, even for people like my parents. Purely by chance, my parents found themselves in the middle of the mountainous territory claimed by the partisans while on holiday.

The German army pushed the partisans high into the Tatra mountains and before the arrival of the Soviet troops, decimated their resistance. Despite the encouragement to stage this uprising and getting various promises of assistance from the Soviets, Stalin stopped his troops’ advance just long enough for the Germans to wipe out those who opposed them. Just like in Yugoslavia, this delay in the advance of the Soviet armies toward the territories held by the partisans was meant to eliminate any independent-minded democrats and leftists.

Stalin feared that if these independently-minded people survived and became part of the liberation force, they could oppose his style of dictatorship. While Stalin failed in this effort in Tito’s Yugoslavia, he certainly succeeded in Slovakia. When the Slovaks and Czechs came into the Soviet orbit they gradually succumbed to Stalinism, without any local leadership that could have opposed the Soviet brand of ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’.

During the last months of the war, my parents, with a number of other Jewish families, hid in the mountains. They moved from dugouts to abandoned cottages, often just before someone told the Germans where they could be found. For their provisions, they had to rely on not always trustworthy people in the surrounding villages. This posed a serious danger to them because the Germans offered good money for the betrayal of any hidden Jews, Roma or partisans.

After many months of hiding in the mountains, in the early part of 1945, they finally heard the artillery from the eastern front, signaling the advance of the Soviet forces. Unable to wait any longer, they decided to walk over the snowed-in mountains, toward the advancing Russian army. With only a compass, my father managed, in a few days, to lead this exhausted group through the deep snow, toward the front, and eventually over to the Russian side.

One of the most harrowing experiences they had during the time they hid in the mountains was an encounter with a group of Russian and Slovak partisans. In anticipation of being searched, my father put his watch on my mother’s arm, hoping that they would not search the women. They knew that the Russians were very keen on watches and they did not want to lose theirs. But the partisans did find both watches and demanded that my father give them the other two watches they expected him to also have.

The partisans also came to suspect my parents of being German spies because both had German names, his being Bruder and my mother’s Steiner. Luckily, the partisans decided not to shoot them right on the spot as they threatened to do. Instead, they brought them to their commander who was to decide their fate. When they entered the partisan’s camp, my parents were relieved to find that the commander of the partisan’s group was an old university friend of my father. Thus, instead of the expected execution, they shared a meal and a drink with this resistance group.

One thing that made a lasting impression on me was my mother’s stories about their time in the mountains and how she had to learn not to fear the dead bodies they came upon. It was the living, she said, that she learned to be afraid of!

Not surprisingly, my father did not want any children. Having lived through World Wars I and II, and since all his family members perished in the holocaust, he told my mother that he did not want to have children. But my parents must have succumbed to the postwar euphoria when everyone was having children.

My father joined the Communist Party right after the war, even before Czechoslovakia turned communist in 1948. Already as a student, he had many progressive friends and during his studies he became an atheist, abandoning the Orthodox Judaism he grew up with. Some of his Jewish friends were joining the new Slovak government, as they were among the few educated Slovaks who were clearly not Nazi collaborators. Many of his friends suddenly became part of the new government.

My parents faced a big dilemma. They were torn between leaving anti-Semitic Slovakia or staying there to build a new Communist-inspired future. They had already sent some of their furniture to Israel when a good friend of my father convinced them to stay. Once they made the decision to stay, sometime early in 1949, my father became an assistant to the Slovak Minister of heavy industry, for which he qualified because he was a mechanical engineer. This position came with a nice apartment, a chauffeur-driven car, and other perks. This decision to remain in the now reconstituted, communist-led Czechoslovakia, brought my parents to another major crossroad: changing their surname.

My father’s family name of Bruder did not suit the new postwar realities, when just speaking German or even English, was suspicious or downright dangerous. So, they changed their name to a Slovak one, by taking the name Dub, meaning oak, after surviving much of the war in a town called Dubova, which could be translated as Oakville or Oakland. Other Jewish families with German-sounding names also took names less clearly identified as German, such as Ragaz, Gregor, Kubes, Galas or Govan.

However, these optimistic, good times did not last for more than a few years. Sometime in the early ’50s the Stalinist purges caught up with my father. Suddenly, all Jews, especially those in prominent positions, started to be accused of bourgeois leanings, of collaboration with the world Jewish conspiracy, spying for the West or other made-up charges. Gradually, Czechoslovakia became perhaps even more Stalinist than the Soviet Union.

Many communists were arrested, sentenced or demoted. Fourteen top Communist leaders were put on trial and found guilty in the Slansky ‘show trial’. The court proceedings, detailing all the made-up charges, were broadcasted over the national radio. Eleven of the 14 accused were Jews, including Rudolf Slansky who was the head of the government and of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. Out of the 14, 11 were executed. The purges were extensive and looking for ‘the enemy within’ became an opportunity for making false accusations, getting rid of competent and educated managers, settling old disputes, and obtaining coveted positions often held by ‘those cosmopolitan Jews’.

My father’s friend, who convinced him not to leave Czechoslovakia and remain to build a new communist-inspired future, became a Minister in the Slovak Government but during these purges was also arrested. He was jailed for nearly 10 years and remained incarcerated long after Khrushchev denounced Stalin, in 1956, as a paranoid dictator. Though my father was never arrested, he kept a small suitcase by the front door, just in case there was a late-night knock on the door by men in long trench coats.

All this I learned only much later. As a child, I remained unaware that something may be amiss in our progress toward the socialist utopia. I was only vaguely aware that people feared their neighbors who could denounce them for what they said or did not say. Children could denounce their parents and be rewarded for it. Friends only whispered together and used various euphemisms to hide the true meaning of what they were saying. For example, the Czech town of Liberec, in my parents’ circle, stood for Israel.

The whispered German phrase: ‘unser eine’, meaning one of us, was used when Jewish adults wanted to surreptitiously indicate that a particular person was also of Jewish origin. Children, like me, grew up without any religious education. Expressions of religious feelings were discouraged. Any person holding a responsible position, such as a teacher, would be fired if it came out that they attended church services. If people wanted a religious wedding or christening, they would go to a village, perhaps where they had some relatives and quietly get married there. Then they would have another, civil ceremony in town. But the few functioning churches were full to bursting every Sunday.

I remember crowds that spilled out into the public squares during Sunday services. Somehow, it did not bother anyone if workers, farmers or the poor participated in religious ceremonies. Religion was supplanted by the communist ideology taught to us in schools. At work, people had to denounce themselves through ‘self-criticism’ at public gatherings if they were suspected of anti-communist feelings. In this way, they could show their allegiance to the communist ideals. At these meetings organized by worker’s unions, that no longer supported workers’ rights as the unions became totally dominated by the Communist Party, the employees had to sit through hours of propaganda lectures.

I did not find out that I and the rest of my family were Jewish until I figured it out at the age of 13. In her stories, my mother would hint at it but never said openly that we were Jewish. After they decided to remain in Slovakia, my parents made a pact to hide their Jewish background, to protect as long as possible my brother and me from the rampant anti-Semitism. My brother and I were baptized in a Calvinist Church and were not circumcised. When asked by other children what was my religion, my parents told me to say that I was a Protestant.

And, according to my baptism certificate, I am a Protestant. My mother kept quiet about all of this until our Jewish neighbors complained of my anti-Semitic behaviour. It was my mother who led me to read her favorite books, which we discussed together. It was through these discussions and discussions about radio plays we listened to every week, that I finally realized we were Jewish. This is when I ceased to be a ‘goy’!

My father came from an orthodox Jewish family, who lived in a small town called Humenne, in the far eastern part of Slovakia. Incidentally, this is the same region where most of the Slovak Roma seeking asylum in Canada also come from. Unfortunately, from his five siblings, he is the only one that survived the war. Toward the end of the war, his parents and siblings perished somewhere in Hungary. They went to Hungary where the deportations did not start as early as in Slovakia. However, toward the end of WWII, most Jews were deported from there as well.

My mother came from a large liberal Jewish family from central Slovakia. They lived in the village of Bolesov, close to the town of Trencin. Her parents were shopkeepers with a lumber side business. Two of her brothers became professionals, one a dentist and the other a lawyer. Out of eight siblings, only two of her brothers and her mother survived WWII. One of the brothers who survived the war was sent to Austria as a teenager and before the start of the war moved with his wife to England, where they had two sons. He lived in London until the ripe old age of 101. Her other brother moved to Australia where in the 1950s he died of a heart attack.

My grandmother and two of my mother’s cousins survived Terezin, a concentration camp near Prague. They survived because this was not an extermination camp but actually a ‘show camp’ that the Nazis used as an example of how humanely they treated Jewish detainees when challenged by the Red Cross. The camp had an orchestra, composers, children’s theater, and the inmates were fairly well treated. This camp was located in an old Austro-Hungarian jail where the Serbian assassin of Austrian Grand Duke Ferdinand, Gavrilo Princip, was also detained, after shooting the Grand Duke in Sarajevo, thus sparking WWI. The Nazis used the rest of the town to gather Jewish children who were eventually shipped to other extermination camps.

I was born in 1947, after this terrible war came to an end, and grew up in Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia, which by then was again part of Czechoslovakia. To start with, both the Czech and Slovak parts of the country had their own national governments and there was a central government in Prague. But sometime in the early ’60s the Czech regional government was gradually incorporated into the Czechoslovak one and the Slovaks ended up with a hobbled local government with reduced powers. Eventually, in 1993, this led to separation of the two nations into two countries.

This was one of the rare peaceful break-ups of a country into two parts, at least partly because the two nationalities remained in their own Czech and Slovak parts, without much intermingling. They maintained their two distinct, even if quite similar, languages. The other probable reason for the peaceful separation was that it occurred after only 40 years when the two parts of the country were united following WWII. The separation was never put to the vote, it was simply agreed to by the political leaders of the two sides.

Located on the border of Austria and Hungary, the people of Bratislava where I grew up, were traditionally trilingual. Like most places in that part of the world, the town also had three names. Aside from Bratislava, which is its official Slovak name, it is called Pozsony in Hungarian and Pressburg in German. After the creation of Czechoslovakia, in 1918, the use of the Slovak language increased, but only after WWII did the Slovak language become the most commonly used. My father, having grown up in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, was more fluent in Hungarian than German.

Before WWI, Slovakia was part of Hungary, and in elementary school, he was taught in Hungarian. As a child, he learned some Hebrew and also spoke Yiddish at home. He learned to speak Slovak from interacting with other children. Later, in Bratislava, he studied at a technical high school in Slovak, and he did his engineering degree in Brno where the language of instruction was still German. As you can imagine, after WWII, no one dared to speak German in public and it took quite a few years before people stopped fearing to speak it.

My mother learned Slovak and German at home. She showed me some letters that she wrote as a student to her mother while learning to speak German. Her mother would send her German letters back to her, with corrections. After WWII, she also had to learn Hungarian when she moved with my father to Bratislava because the people there would switch between the three languages in mid-sentence. By the time I started school (1953) German was again becoming the lingua franca of Central Europe and as a 10-year-old, I started to study German with a private teacher. The only foreign language we were taught in elementary school was Russian, which we started to learn in grade four.

My German improved by listening to the news from Austrian radio. For many years, the only way to find out what was really going on in our own country was to listen to the Viennese radio station. The Austrian broadcasts were not jammed in the Bratislava area as the Austrian border was only a few kilometers away and there was an agreement not to disturb the nearby Austrian listeners. Just a few kilometers further from the border the Austrian radio programs were always jammed. We could listen to music from Radio Free Europe or Voice of America but as the news came on in either Czech or Slovak, so did the jamming.

When I started elementary school, there were too many children (baby boomers) and not enough schools. Therefore, for the first two years, we shared our classrooms by alternatively going to school one week in the morning and the next week in the afternoon. The schools provided free lunches and an after-school daycare.

One of the complaints of the Slovak Roma who came to Canada was that their children could use the lunch cafeteria only after all the white children finished. They complained that unlike the white children, the Roma would be given plastic or aluminum cutlery and were often forced to eat off dirty plates, previously used by the white children. When they complained, the kitchen staff would tell them: "What do you expect? You think we are going to wash plates for the dirty Gypsies?"

Essentially, I had an easy childhood, not wanting for much. Our streets had still many bombed-out ruins from the war and there was no better place to play hide and seek or cowboys and Indians than in those ruins. Before starting school, I was cared for by Hungarian-speaking nannies, even though my mother did not go to work until much later. My nannies were village girls who came