Romani

The Romani (also Romany, Romanies, Romanis, Roma, Zigeuner, or Gypsies) are traditionally nomadic ethnic group with origins in what is now India. The Romani left Asia roughly 1,000 years ago, and are widely dispersed across the world. Their largest concentrated populations in Europe, but they also reside in the Americas and, to a lesser extent, in North Africa and Asia.

They are more popularly known as Gypsies, based on the mistaken belief that they originated from Egypt. As the word "Gypsy" has also developed connotations of illegality or abnormality, many Roma few it as a slur.

Historically, Roma have been relegated to the fringes of society and subjected to an alternating cycle of persecution and toleration. However, even in time and places where Romani were not actively persecuted, they were still allowed only limited opportunities to integrate into all levels of society. The Roma were among the prime targets of the Nazis and their allies, who defined the Romani in the same ways they defined the Jews. Anywhere from a quarter to a full half of the Romani population of Europe (approximately 1 million people) were murdered during the Holocaust, an event the Romani call the Porajmos. Even after the war, a few countries maintained a policy of marginalizing the remaining Romani within their borders. For example, Czechoslovakia initiated a forced sterilization program for women beginning in 1973 that continued until the Velvet Revolution of 1989. Even in the first decades of the 21st century, the Romani are still regarded with suspicion and disdain in much of Europe. Romani populations in other parts of the world are subjected to less malign treatment, but issues of cultural stereotyping still persist in the United States, among other places.

Romani in The Gladiator

In an alternate where the Soviet Union won the Cold War, Gypsies continued to do odd jobs in the countryside, as well as con games and theft, at the close of the 21st century. Even more than a hundred years of communist rule failed to make them good collectivized citizens.

When Annarita Crosetti was young, her father would threaten to sell her to the Gypsies when she annoyed him, but when she became a teenager he stopped, since they might take him up on the offer.

Romani in In the Presence of Mine Enemies

The Roma of Europe were systematically erased by the Greater German Reich in much the same manner as the Jews. By the 21st century, it was believed that the Roma were all dead. As secret Jews survived in the very heart of the Reich, some Roma may have also been hiding in plain sight.

Romani in "Shtetl Days"

The government of the Greater German Reich wiped out the Roma after the War of Retribution just as it wiped out the Jews. Nonetheless, Romania recreated a Gypsy camp as a tourist attraction, much as Germany had recreated shtetls in various provinces.

Romani in The War That Came Early

In the aftermath of "the big switch" of 1940, which saw France and Britain join with Germany against the Soviet Union, Peggy Druce could help but wonder if the French government might decide to persecute the Gypsies living in France, including the jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt, as a sop to their new Nazi allies.

Romani in "Zigeuner"

The Romani or Zigeuner had been a persecuted people prior to Adolf Hitler's rise to power in Germany. However, Hitler's experiences on the Eastern Front of World War I, where the Zigeuner stole necessities, such as horses, boots and telegraph wire, hardened Hitler's own personal disdain for the whole of the Zigeuner people. (Conversely, Hitler also saw how badly the Russians treated another repressed group, the Jews, and grew sympathetic to them.)

Upon his ascendancy, Hitler declared Zigeuner to be Untermenschen, along with Bolsheviks and homosexuals. With the outbreak of World War II, Hitler directed the SS to round up and eliminate the Zigeuner they found in the areas Germany occupied. Hitler also directed Germany's allies to do the same thing with single-minded tenacity.  Thus, even as the Soviet Red Army had entered eastern Hungary in October 1944, SS Haupsturmführer Joseph Stieglitz oversaw the capture and deportation of a Zigeuner village near Nagylengyel in western Hungary.