COLUMN ONE : E. Europe’s Anti-Gypsy Bias Is Back : As region shifts to a market economy, ethnic group has been reduced to poverty and despair, restoring it to an underclass. EU makes better treatment a condition of joining.

TARNOW, Poland —  For decades, Communist governments tried to suppress the prejudice. Now it’s bubbling up again, whispered in streets and scrawled on walls: “Gypsies go away.” “Gypsies to the gas.” “It’s good the Germans killed you.”

“This is an everyday occurrence. If you don’t hear it from the young boys, you’ll hear it in a shop. If you don’t hear it in a shop, you’ll hear it in a medical clinic,” said Ewa Andrasz, 42, an unemployed Roma woman living in Tarnow, in Poland’s south. “I think this is actually getting worse.”

The resurgence of such abuse is one reflection of the new hardships faced by the Roma, or Gypsies, of Eastern Europe since the collapse of Communist governments, which aimed for full employment and exercised police-state powers against the expression of many types of unapproved sentiments.

As countries of this region have shifted to market economies, most Roma--a romanticized and often-suppressed ethnic group whose ancestors migrated out of India a millennium ago and who were killed by the hundreds of thousands in the Holocaust--have been caught in a cycle of unemployment, poverty, poor education and despair, reinforcing their position as an underclass that draws continued discrimination.

“During the Communist era, the Roma community was a mobile group of people who could be used wherever there was a need for unskilled work, and they were employed,” said Peter Szuhay, curator of the Museum of Ethnography in Budapest, the Hungarian capital. “With economic development, they lost their jobs. The uneducated, unskilled workers were fired, and the majority of Roma fit into this category. They became very poor and miserable.”

In many countries, the widespread unemployment and social upheavals of the transition away from communism also created fertile ground for anti-Roma sentiment.

“The whole Hungarian economy got into a crisis situation, and whenever you have a crisis you have to find scapegoats,” Szuhay said. “So without any basis, Hungarians harassed the Roma people.”

Paths to a Better Future

Roma leaders such as Aladar Horvath, who heads the Roma Civil Rights Foundation in Budapest, see education and organization as two key paths to a better future for their people, but neither is easy. Use of the word “Roma” is another part of the effort to promote a stronger and more positive ethnic identity. The word “Gypsy,” and especially its equivalent in local languages, is often seen as carrying a negative connotation.

“I prefer the expression ‘Roma,’ because ‘Roma’ means ‘human being,’ ” said Jozsef Krasznai, president of the Roma Minority Self-Government in Szekesfehervar, Hungary, a virtually powerless position but one meant to promote grass-roots leadership. “The meaning of ‘Gypsy’ is ‘He doesn’t work’ and ‘He’s not a decent person.’ I use both words because I hope in the future ‘Gypsy’ won’t be a pejorative word, that it will have a positive meaning.”

Horvath said that one of the key problems is that “children get into a dead-end educational situation.”

“In Hungary, 30,000 children go to special schools [for children with physical handicaps and learning disabilities]. Half of them are Roma children. Seven percent of the primary school children are Roma children,” Horvath said. “That means, according to the Hungarian educational system, Roma children are seven times more stupid than Hungarian children.”

Maria Olah, 13, who started first grade in the regular school system in Szekesfehervar, is one of those who has already fallen behind. Her mother, Maria Varga, 28, blames it on prejudice.

“My daughter was the only Gypsy in the class,” Varga said. “Then the teacher said my daughter is handicapped because she’s too slow to learn. She was sent to a psychologist, who said she is normal and can learn like other children. The school said she could stay but that she wouldn’t pass out of first grade.”

Varga said she feared the school would keep her daughter in first grade for years, so she moved her to a school for disabled children.

“The teachers are very good at that school,” she said. “The teachers like the Roma children as well as the non-Roma children, and they don’t differentiate between them. She reads very well.”

Horvath, however, said later that even if the children are learning to read, “I’m afraid that because of going to the special school, their future will be blocked.”

While the transition to capitalism has so far brought mostly pain to the Roma of Eastern Europe, the spread of democracy and growth of international ties may also bring benefits in the long run. This is especially true for the Roma of Hungary, the Czech Republic and Poland, countries that are seen as front-runners for European Union membership.

European Union states are making better treatment of the Roma a condition for new members, and are providing some aid for this effort. Their hope is that if conditions for Roma in their own countries improve, that will reduce prospects for massive migration by members of this long-suffering underclass to the more prosperous nations of Western Europe.

“Let’s assume one of the things that happens from Day One [of joining the European Union] is there will be free movement of labor,” said a Warsaw-based diplomat from a European Union country. “Whether or not massive groups of poor Roma decide to take themselves off to Western Europe remains to be seen. But the possibility would be there.”

Estimates are that slightly more than 5 million Roma live in the former East Bloc, 2 million more in Western Europe and about 2 million in the rest of the world, mainly North and South America and North Africa. These figures do not count ethnic groups of northwest India with similar languages and apparent historical links.

“The problems of Roma should be solved in the countries where they were born, and the European Union should really pay a lot of attention to it,” said Roman Kwiatkowski, 39, president of the Roma People Assn. in Poland. “Now it’s a problem of Central Europe, but very soon it will be a European problem.”

Throughout Europe, leaders such as Horvath are trying to build up Roma organizations and link them.

“After the change of the system [away from communism], the international Roma political elite met in 1990 [in Amsterdam] and raised their voice for the Roma,” Horvath said. “We decided our identity was a transnational identity.”

What the Roma are trying to do now is not so very different from other nation-building efforts, said Adam Bartosz, director of the Ethnographic Museum in Tarnow.

“Nations such as the Italians and the Americans, as nations, were born just a couple hundred years ago,” Bartosz said. “For Gypsies, of course, it is different because they are dispersed. But among Gypsy intellectuals, for some time now, there is a feeling of national unity.”

Shared traditions and culture, the existence of a common language still spoken by a significant minority of Roma, and remembrance of the Holocaust--known in the Roma language as porraimos, or “the devouring”--are among the key building blocks by which Roma leaders hope to cultivate a far stronger Roma identity throughout the world.

Prejudices Resurface

The resurgence of old prejudices in the region came after many Roma lost their jobs in the post-Communist restructuring, Szuhay said.

As the Communist system fell, many Roma who had been factory workers in the 1970s and ‘80s fell back on other ways to survive, some of which contributed to the renewed intolerance, Szuhay said.

“These people who didn’t have jobs tried to go back to their old professions like collecting things left around--food from harvested fields, or things from garbage bins,” he said. “Or they tried to get agricultural daywork. Some Gypsies collected metal. Of course, it could happen sometimes they took wire that was being used. But they wanted the metal. Some stole things like chickens to eat.”

Roma have faced fear and discrimination since not long after they first began to arrive in Europe in the 14th century, after a centuries-long trek from northwestern India that took them through Persia, Armenia and the Byzantine Empire.

“The first who arrived in Europe were greeted with a good deal of curiosity because they pretended to be a nation which was doing penance for their sins against the Christian commandments,” Bartosz explained in a museum brochure. “They excited the curiosity of other people by their different clothes and their strange way of life, by their fortunetelling and by trained animal shows.”

But society rather quickly turned against these wanderers.

“The Gypsies began to be regarded as tramps, and were often accused of thefts and robberies,” Bartosz wrote. “Legal instruments were used against them more and more often. The Gypsies, however, leading their nomadic way of life, were dependent on local society. So, if they couldn’t support themselves by fortunetelling, traditional crafts or begging, all that was left was thievery.”

Frequent attempts to forcibly assimilate the Roma people, including efforts to make them settle down and to ban their language, date from the beginning of the 17th century.

“Maria Theresa [empress of Austria from 1740 to 1780] forbade Roma to speak their own language,” said Krasznai, the Roma self-government head in Szekesfehervar. “For centuries, they wanted to educate us to lose our identity, but as they couldn’t take away our identity, they decided to exterminate us in World War II.”

Efforts to force the surviving Roma to conform continued right up through the Communist period. In Poland, for example, authorities banned the nomadic way of life in the early 1960s.

“For me, it was a shock to be in the building because you were used to one year here, one year there,” said Sara Andrasz, 63, who was forced with her family to settle in Tarnow in 1963. “At first, they gave horrible apartments to the Roma because they didn’t know how the Roma would behave--whether they would light a fire inside.”

Two of her grandparents were killed by Nazi extermination squads in World War II, her grandmother burning to death when the family’s home was torched, Andrasz said. Now Andrasz just wants to forget about all that.

But her son, Adam Andrasz, 43, head of the local Roma self-government in Tarnow, thinks it would be a mistake to allow the Roma who died in the Holocaust to be forgotten. “The Jews always demanded remembrance,” he said. “They have intellectuals who push their views there. But only in the past few years have the Roma started talking about it.”

Sara Andrasz still looks back fondly on her wandering days: “My husband was making good money as a pan maker. He was the foreman for the other people. If it was warm, you’d sleep in a tent or sometimes in a car. In the winter, you would rent something for three months. I liked the different surroundings, the fresh air. There were no duties and obligations--no needing to be at a certain place at a certain time. The road was open.”

Rozalia Siwak, 47, a Roma woman who lives in Tarnow, also expressed nostalgia for old times.

“Before, it was easier,” she said. “For example, a Roma woman could go around and tell fortunes. Now it’s very difficult. The past five or six years, people are not so eager. The old people believed in it. The young ones say it’s not true.”

Still, in her family, traditions refuse to die. Her husband, Teodor Lolo, earns money mainly by playing the guitar in a Roma band. “If someone wants to have their fortune told, then I do it,” she added. “What kind of Roma woman would I be if I didn’t tell fortunes?”