For the last two days I
have been working on the third draft of my novel Mother of
Wolves It’s an alternative history novel. The alternative
history being that of the Romanies.
The idea for the novel
first came to me when I visited a castle in the Czech Republic. As is
often the case in the Czech Republic the only way to visit the castle
was on a guided tour. I was the only English speaker and stood at the
back of the group of listening Czechs, reading a couple of sheets of
A4 that was meant to be a translation of the tour. As the tour took
an hour and I read the sheets in five minutes I spent a lot of time
looking in cabinets and at prints.
In one room as the
guide droned on in Czech and some annoying person kept asking
questions I found myself examining three folk art pictures on the
wall. They were not listed in the translation nor did they have any
label. The guide did not refer to them and the rest of the party
ignored them. They had no significance. But as I looked I was
increasingly shocked by the subject matter. They were primitive but
graphic pictures of the persecution of gypsies from, I guess, the
18th century.
It is two years since I
saw the pictures, but I still remember them in detail. In one a man
is hanging from a branch, while in the foreground a gypsy woman
(perhaps his wife) is holding a babe while blood pours from her head
where her ear has been cut off. As a historian I had known that the
gypsies had been the victims of persecution through the centuries and
that they too had been the subject of Hitler’s extermination
programme. In the Great Devouring as they called the holocaust the
numbers of Romany victims varies but it seems that it was at least
half a million. But as I investigated further I was shocked by the
untold history of persecution over centuries. Gypsy hunts occurred in
many European countries. Very simply gypsies were hunted as vermin,
no different than foxes. In Jutland in 1835 a hunt “brought in a
bag of over 260 men, women and children.” A Rheinland hunter
recorded in his list of game for the day “Item: A Gypsy woman with
her sucking babe.”
It is a sad fact that
no matter how horrific a story one can devise, that reality can
always exceed its horror. The tragedy of the Romany people has in
some ways always been overshadowed by that of the Jews. They were/are
rural, often illiterate, and poor. They also do not have and never
had a state or a leadership to speak for them. But what if there had
been such a leader…
