The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #16949   Message #164879
Posted By: McGrath of Harlow
18-Jan-00 - 08:33 PM
Thread Name: When does Folk = Not political music?
Subject: RE: When does Folk = Not political music?
"We faced something terrible.Heaps of unburied bodies and unbearable stench. When I saw the suriviving Romanies, with small children among them, I was shaken. Then I went over to the ovens and found on one of the steel stretchers the half-charred body of a girl, and I understood what had been going on there." (Frederick Wood, later first president of the Gypsy Council in England, telling of his arrival at Belsen as a British serviceman.

That comes from a book called "The Destiny of Europe's Gyspies", by Donald Kendrick and Grattan Puxon. Fot Gypsies the war was as bad as it was for Jews - but after it was over, the persecution didn't stop, and it still hasn't. And there has never been a Gypsy Spielberg to make a film to move the world, or strong and powerful people to call for this Holocaust to be kept before our eyes.

Here is another quote from the book, a song/poem:

U bar dikhila xoymi, oprundus,
sviymi vastinsa biri armasaya.
Liska ozistar sesi garadu
mangila pali ti inkil ziyasa.

The upright stone stares angrily
with clenched fist and a great curse.
From within a hidden voice
tries to send out a song.

The roads where we still travel
wait to hear it.
The Gypsies await the call
together with their horses.

But they are quiet, all are asleep.
Our brothers lie among the flowers
and noone knows who they are
or on which road the victims fell.

Hush Gyspsies! Let them sleep
beneath the flowers.
Halt, Gypsies! May
all our children have their strength.
Dimitri Golemanov.