ROMANO CENTRO Nr. 32, 03/2001

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My Romano Centro

In 1996 I was picked up and thrown into the Romani movement and the spot at which I landed was Romano Centro. It must have been March or early April. I had just been hired by the newly opened European Roma Rights Center (ERRC). The first goal of the ERRC was to engage in research toward publication, in order to get a rudimentary documentation program underway. I was packed off to Austria, and my first stop was the basement at Urschenbockgasse.
I had had some experience with the issue before, in the Czech Republic, where I lived from 1991 to 1993. There people hated Gypsies openly. Gypsies stood for everything bad about the changes of 1989. In the Czech Republic, the sympathetic people said I didn't understand and the unsympathetic ones spoke of "trimming a few branches so that the tree might grow healthy." One day, during my umpteenth conversation with a good friend of mine, a woman who had been a prominent dissident, on whether it was acceptable to despise groups of people about whom one knew little and with whom one had had no contact, she asked me to describe what a racist was. When I finished, she said, "OK, yes, I'm one of those."

But my contact with Roma in the Czech Republic had remained superficial at best. Romano Centro offered me my first glimpse of the medium in which I have spent most of my waking hours for the past five years. I met people in various states of duress and confusion, trying their best to navigate the Austrian administration, an organism cold, hostile, corrupt and endowed with a bewildering set of regulations designed specifically to allow as few people like these to live with dignity in Austria as possible. Among other things, one was required to have an "ortsübliche Unterkunft" in order to secure legal status, a provision which provided the trigger mechanism for graft in large sums. I met people who lived in damp cellar rooms, irregular parts of buildings, people who were sick or dying uninsured, and who were in many cases paying regal sums of money to members of the public administration that they might allow their file to pass one more step up the line.
And I met the people trying to assist them, a bewildering set of unlikely characters thrown together by the accident of having arrived at the importance of the Romani issue. I met non-Roma engaged in mediating between arrogant and ignorant people who didn't understand on the one hand, and arrogant and ignorant people who didn't understand on the other. I met specialists of several stripes (and have become one on occasion). I met missionaries of several stripes (and have become one on occasion). I met foreigners who had dug their nails into Austria at one point or another and, despite hostile surroundings, had mustered one or more tenacious qualities, hung on for a better life and decided to help others like them. And I met my first Romani activists: broken-hearted people operating in the utopian medium where Romaniness is just another species of normalcy.

It was at Romano Centro that I first grappled with the questions which are the meat and potatoes of the Romani issue: Who are you? Why are you here? Who pays you and how much? What have you done? How can you help? I began to learn about the importance of money. I began to learn about the importance of who speaks. I began to learn about the importance of listening. I met the defenders of the ethnic line. I met people engaged in a frenzy of questioning. I met people who had married into the Romani issue. I met people addicted to the Romani issue and unable to peel their lives away and return to the world of, as a friend of mine put it, "selling furniture". I first met at Romano Centro the sea of hurt feelings and broken hearts clustered around a topic to which few other people will ever give more than a passing thought.
Beneath all that, though, I met a small group of incredibly generous people who have never failed to show me some of the most remarkable hospitality I think I have ever received anywhere. Whenever I have a chance (it is so seldom!), I get on a train and go and visit. There are few activities so pleasant or entertaining as spending a day with a Romano Centro person.
Several years ago I purchased a CD produced in Vienna of a Serbian Romani musician. I brought it home, put it on, flipped open the dust jacket and on the inside found a text about Romano Centro, written in the voice of the musician. It was part tribute, part advertisement. He spoke about Romano Centro as "a place for Roma" in a mode of language which made me understand that he was speaking from his Romani heart. The Romano Centro I have written about above is the one I know. But I realized after reading the words of the Serbian Rom on the CD cover that to the many people in its orbit, Romano Centro probably means something slightly beyond my grasp.

Claude Cahn, research and publications director of the European Roma Rights Center, Budapest

Wir haben den Artikel wegen seiner poetischen Qualität ausnahmsweise in der englischen Originalsprache veröffentlicht.

Foto: R. Erich

ROMANO CENTRO Nr. 32, 03/2001