As one official wrote, the arrival of the Roma in the ghetto "sparked a widespread sensation". I saw two gypsy women being followed by a large group of children and, later on, a few more gypsies surrounded by a crowd of curious onlookers”. Many Jews looked down on the Roma with prejudice. Hebrew teacher Chaim Aron Priest reflected after their release from detention: "How will the gypsies support themselves? Men will trade horses; women will predict the future; in a nutshell, doing what they have always done. And most importantly, they will help Jews with smuggling. Until they settle down, their activities will include robbing Jews - their brothers in the ghetto. Today a gypsy stole a jacket from a Jew in front of thousands of passers-by". Emanuel Ringelblum, in turn, noted the mood in the street: "People are afraid of them. They will rob, steal, break windows and take bread from the displays," treating the arrival of the Roma as a misfortune for the whole ghetto. Samuel Puterman wrote that Ringelblum's fears turned out to be correct, but he justified this in part by the tragic situation faced by "a small handful of destitute people whose only wealth was freedom". Others, on the other hand, were ambivalent in their thoughts - Abraham Lewin criticised the removal of additional bread rations for officials, writing: "It goes to the gypsies. The Jews will have to starve more, but the gypsies will not be any more satiated from it”. At the same time, he praised Centos' decision to grant aid to Roma children: "The CENTOS board did the right thing and acted humanely”. In turn, Adam Czerniaków, the chairman of the Jewish Council, considered it his humanitarian duty to help the Roma in the ghetto, stating in his diary, “For human reasons, I must take care of them, above all the women and children."
The fate of the Roma in the Warsaw Ghetto depended on their nationality and the area they came from. The Roma from territories directly controlled by Germany had no legal protection, whereas citizens of Germany's allied states, such as Hungary, Romania, or Bulgaria, had some level of protection against genocidal policies.
Available sources provide various information about the origins of the Roma in the Warsaw Ghetto. This may suggest a significant level of diversity among the different groups of people resettled in the ghetto. In May 1942, a group of Roma living in Warsaw and originating from the General Government were forcibly relocated to the ghetto. Besides them, there was a contingent of Roma from the Reich in the ghetto - including Weiss, mentioned by Czerniakow, a German Roma from Hamburg, and displaced persons from Łowicz, which had been annexed to the Reich. German official reports mention "gypsies displaced from the Reich with German citizenship," which is an inaccurate term, as the Roma have been deprived of their Reich citizenship since 1935. Another German document mentions displaced persons from the Bialystok district. From his exchanges with the ghetto commissioner, Czerniakow learned that there were references to a group of people originating from Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria. As it seems, most of the Roma who arrived in Warsaw had Polish citizenship before the war, or - they came from Germany but had their German citizenship revoked.
Some accounts from the ghetto indicate that Roma individuals were sent to Treblinka during the early deportations in the summer of 1942. Roma people were likely subjected to this fate when they were directed to their assigned residence in the ghetto, which seems to have been part of the deportations happening alongside other refugee locations. However, at that specific period, there was a group of Roma people in Central Detention. In Samuel Puterman's literary description of the deportations from the Central Detention Centre during the initial day of the deportation action, there is no mention of the deportation of Roma individuals. Presumably, the detainees remained there until the autumn of 1942. In November, about a hundred Roma were released into the ghetto, but some were still held in cells. Their fate was the subject of unverified news - one author claimed that a group of about ten Roma escaped from the detention centre in early December, while another author mentioned the deportation of some of the remaining Roma in the ghetto in late 1942 and early 1943.
Nevertheless, a designated number of Roma were expected to remain in the Central Detention Centre until the January action. As part of the events, a German officer issued an order to deport all individuals from the Central Detention Centre, including both detainees and prison staff. This is confirmed by the account of Stanislaw Adler, who repeated the story of his acquaintance, who witnessed “attorney Rozensztadt forcefully loaded into a wagon with naked and barefoot gypsies chased out of the Central Detention Centre”. The deportation of this group is the last sure testimony to the presence of Roma in the Warsaw Ghetto.
After the liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto, there was still a group of Roma in Warsaw. In the summer of 1944, Jakub Hochberg, who was hiding in the Prague district, wrote extensively about their experiences and discussed the relative freedom they enjoyed: “At the onset, the Jews and the Gypsies were confined within the ghetto, but now they are free, fearlessly walking around the city. It's difficult - that’s how things are at the moment. I don't envy them; as a human being, I wish everyone freedom and movement”. According to Hochberg, this group of Roma had Romanian documents that protected them from repression. It is uncertain if this group was involved in the release of Romanian Roma from the Central Detention Centre in the spring of 1942. The subsequent fate of these Roma individuals is still unknown.
Roma Women in Lublin ghetto
(Yad Vashem)
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