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The downfall of the Third Reich, however, did not halt the devaluation of gypsy lives. Though West Germany paid nearly $715 million in reparations to Israel and various Jewish organizations, gypsies as a group received nothing. In 1952, when the new West German government offered to pay survivors five deutsche marks (worth roughly $1.20) for each day they had spent in the camps, many illiterate gypsies simply signed away their claims for compensation in exchange for trifling sums. Gypsy activists have uncovered a case of a woman who received $10 for the death of her baby in Auschwitz.
West German officials have rejected the efforts of several thousand gypsy survivors of the war to establish citizenship in the Federal Republic, even though their families have lived in Germany for generations. What particularly galls gypsy leaders is that these rejections seem to be based on Nazi records of alleged misconduct. Says Rose: "No postwar German government has acknowledged our suffering. They agonize over the Jews, and rightly. But they have ignored us."
Joined by Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, gypsies have begun to press for rights and recognition. Last month 2,000 gypsies marched to the stone marker at Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where thousands of Jews and gypsies were killed.
In a brief but moving talk, Simone Veil, a French Jew who survived Bergen-Belsen and is now President of the European Parliament, recalled how the music of gypsy fiddlers had bolstered the morale of the camp's prisoners, until one day the music stopped. She pledged her support for a ten-point list of demands that gypsy leaders presented to Chancellor Helmut Schmidt last week. It asks, among other things, for an official acknowledgment of the Germans' responsibility for the gypsies' wartime persecution and an end to discrimination in jobs and housing, free access to campsites and a "reeducation program" for prejudiced police. Gypsy activists are also negotiating with the government for a reparations payment of $365 million that could be used to pay for educational and cultural programs benefiting all of Western Europe's gypsies.
Schmidt's government has expressed sympathy for the gypsies' cause; one official has urged it to settle the compensation issue "promptly and generously." If that does not happen soon, some gypsies are prepared to take further steps to underscore their grievances. One tactic under consideration: inviting arrest by tearing down signs barring gypsies from campsites in the hope that it might lead to a court ruling affirming the full equality of a people still searching for a place to call home.