Aftermath: Accounting for the Holocaust in the Czech Republic Krista Hegburg Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERISTY 2013 © 2013 Krista Hegburg All rights reserved Abstract Aftermath: Accounting for the Holocaust in the Czech Republic Krista Hegburg Reparations are often theorized in the vein of juridical accountability: victims of historical injustices call states to account for their suffering; states, in a gesture that marks a restoration of the rule of law, acknowledge and repair these wrongs via financial compensation. But as reparations projects intersect with a consolidation of liberalism that, in the postsocialist Czech Republic, increasingly hinges on a politics of recognition, reparations concomitantly interpellate minority subjects as such, instantiating their precarious inclusion into the body po litic in a way that vexes the both the historical justice and contemporary recognition reparatory projects seek. This dissertation analyzes claims made by Czech Romani Holocaust survivors in reparations programs, the social work apparatus through which they pursued their claims, and the often contradictory demands of the complex legal structures that have governed eligibility for reparations since the immediate aftermath of the war, and argues for an ethnographic examination of the forms of discrepant reciprocity and commensuration that underpin, and often foreclose, attempts to account for the Holocaust in contemporary Europe. Table of Contents Acknowledgments ii Introduction 1 Chapter 1 18 Recognitions Chapter 2 74 The Veracious Voice: Gypsiology, Historiography, and the Unknown Holocaust Chapter 3 121 Reparations Politics, Czech Style: Law, the Camp, Sovereignty Chapter 4 176 “The Law is Such as It Is” Conclusion 198 The Obligation to Receive Bibliography 202 Appendix I 221 i Acknowledgments I have acquired many debts over the course of researching and writing this dissertation. My time at Columbia was immeasurably enriched by my friends there, in particular Aparna Balachandran, Ruchi Chaturvedi, Deirdre de la Cruz, Yukiko Koga, Nadia Loan, Maya Nadkarni, Juan Obarrio, Serguei Oushakine, Zoe Reiter, Antina von Schnitzler, Jennifer Sime, Emilio Spadola, Ravindran Sriramachandran, and Arafaat Valiani. Karin Zitzewitz has been an abiding friend and colleague. I thank Jonathan Bach for more favors than I can count. I thank Marcela Rýdlová-Erlich for teaching me Czech with such good cheer. Amanda Murphy Frazier’s hospitality upon my arrival in New York made a huge difference. My fieldwork was enriched by so many friends and colleagues in (or passing through) the Czech Republic, including Yasar Abu Ghosh, Michal Burian, Sarah Cramsey, Jakub Grygar, Timothy Hall, Petr Kadlec, Karen Kapusta-Pofahl, Alice Lovejoy, Dana Malková, Lisa Peschel, Maria Radová, Sandra Radu, Marsha Rozenblit, Jitka Ryndová, Kimberly Strozewski, Noa Treister, Czesław Walek, Nancy Wingfield, and Tara Zahra. In particular, I thank Kimberly Elman Zarecor for introducing me to the Czech National Archives and to Ostrava; without her intervention, I wouldn’t have had much of a project. I had the great good luck to meet Raymond June in Prague, and have valued him as a friend and intellectual companion since. Osamu Okamura’s infectious enthusiasm for architecture, sushi, art, filmmaking, abandoned prisons, and pretty much anything was a delight during the years I lived in the Czech Republic. I thank Martin Strakoš for sharing his love of Ostrava with me, and Marek Skovajsa finding me a place to live in there. I also thank Jiří Lewy for his assistance with my research in Plzeň, and ii for his expansive good will and tremendous sense of humor. Elena Koenig was a great roommate and friend. Saska Gerasimova and Václav Zájiček have been steadfast and valued friends, and I thank them for their continued hospitality. The Samko family took me in and made me feel at home, wherever they found themselves. My friends and colleagues at the University of Lower Silesia in Wroclaw – Erik Derza, Aleksandra Duda, Agnieszka Dwojak-Matras, Marcin Gołebniąk, Dorota Gołebniąk, Ula Klobuszewska, and Agnieszka Zembrzuska – provided a welcoming intellectual community during my many stints there. In particular, working with Hana Červinková was more fun than one is supposed to have. My writing group at Rutgers kept me going during a two-year teaching stint in New Jersey, and I thank Judith Gerson, Arlene Stein, and Richard Williams for the many stimulating discussions. Also at Rutgers, I appreciated the support of Ginny Caputo, Francesca Mascia-Lees, and Jeffrey Shandler, and the friendship of Karen Sirota and Robert O’Brien. The intellectual curiosity and engagement of my students there deepened my understanding and appreciation of anthropology. Heidi Echternacht kept me sane during this period. I benefitted enormously from the collegiality of my fellow fellows at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, especially Ralf Banken, Daniel Brewing, Diana Dumitru, Judith Gerson, Christian Goeschel, Julia von dem Knesebeck, Daniel Magilow, Elissa Mailaender, Jennifer Rodgers, Steven Sage, Johannes Schwartz, Simone Schweber, Matthias Tronqual, Christel Trouvé, James Mace Ward, and Suzanne Wiedemann. Michlean Amir deserves special thanks for her assistance with my research. iii Ethel Brooks, Petra Gelbart, Michelle Kelso, Erika Schlager, Andria Timmer, and Shannon Woodcock make Romani studies a collegial and stimulating field, and I thank them for their work, both scholarly and activist. My colleagues at United States Holocaust Memorial Museum were gracious enough to accommodate the final writing stages of this dissertation, and I thank in particular Robert Ehrenreich and Nicole Frechette for the flexibility, as well as Beverly Goines for getting up early to write with me. I thank my dissertation committee members E. Valentine Daniel, Christopher Harwood, John Torpey, and Katherine Verdery for their engaged feedback on this project. Rosalind Morris, my advisor, and has been more patient with me and this dissertation than I deserve, for which I thank her. Her intellectual rigor and generosity is an inspiration, and she has pushed my thinking in more ways than I could list. I also thank Marilyn Astwood for her kindness and assistance during my time at Columbia. For their insightful feedback on various parts of this dissertation, I thank Mireille Abelin, Yasar Abu Ghosh, Hana Červinková, Ryan Chaney, Timothy Hall, Raymond June, Nima Paidipaty, Nathaniel Roberts, Simone Schweber, Vincent Slatt, Tara Zahra, and in particular Karin Zitzewitz. All errors are my own. The fieldwork and archival research on which this dissertation is based was made possible by a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Award, a Charles H. Revson Fellowship for Archival Research from United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, a Foreign Language Area Studies Scholarship, as well as additional funding from Columbia University. iv Czesław Walek, the director of the Czech government’s Office of Roma Community Affairs, and Lýdia Poláčková, the Romani Advisor in the Ostrava City Hall, were instrumental to my research; I could not have done my fieldwork without their support, and I am deeply grateful to them for their faith in my project. I would also like to gratefully acknowledge the intellectual generosity of the team of social workers who shared with me their Ostrava field sites as well as their reflections on their practice of social work. I also owe a debt of gratitude to Radovan D., for although he does not make an appearance here, he has animated this entire project. I thank my stalwart friends, Robin Hawley-Brillante, Christine Forte, and Kate and Michael Haley Goldman for their patience with me over the course of this project. For his encouragement and more home-cooked gourmet meals than I can count, I thank Vincent Slatt. To Vanda Rajčan, I say ďakujem. Ruth Ferrero Turrión deserves special mention for so many stimulating conversations, as well as sharing her home with me. My brother Justin Hegburg has kept me grounded over the years with his dry wit. My parents, Alan and Faye Hegburg, sustained me through the writing of this dissertation with their good humor, intellectual curiosity, patience, and many loads of laundry. This dissertation is dedicated to them, and to the memory of my aunt, Patricia Ann Campbell. v 1 Introduction ―Czech.‖ That‘s what Markéta replied to her census taker in 2001 when he arrived at her apartment door in the city of Ostrava and inquired about to her nationality. And indeed, Markéta is Czech, a Czech citizen and free to decide the concomitant category of nationality the census also records. She is also Romani, a descendant of Slovak Roma who came to the Czech Lands in the wake of the Holocaust, which decimated the Czech Jewish and Romani minorities, and the expulsions of almost all of the German minority, which opened up the country‘s northern borderlands to Czechoslovak settlers from the interior.1 And thus Markéta is also a member of a group that although quite small – numbering 11,000 if the 2001 census is to be believed, though closer to 300,000 in most estimates2 – bears the burden of being the most visible, and most socially excluded, minority in the contemporary Czech Republic. As Markéta recounted to me several years later, during her office hours for her social work clients in one of the most impoverished districts of the city, her response apparently did not sit well with the census taker, who goaded her by asking, ―Are you sure?‖ Markéta, with her usual inimitable directness, cocked her head to one side and 1 See David Gerlach, ―Beyond Expulsion: The Emergence of ‗Unwanted Elements‘ in the Postwar Czech Borderlands, 1945-1950,‖ East European Politics & Societies 24, no. 2 (2010): 269-293; Ctibor Nečas, The Holocaust of Czech Roma, trans. Šimon Pellar (Prague: Prostor, 1999); and Tomáš Staněk, Odsun Němců z Československa 1945-1947 [The Transfer of Germans from Czechoslovakia 1945-1947] (Prague: Československá akademie věd and Naše vojsko, 1991).