Battle story

“The Revolt of the “Gypsy Families’ Camp”

Episode 1/9: “A Story of Power for the Present”

By Pierre Chopinaud

Par Pierre Chopinaud

The episodes of the series are taken from a lecture given by Pierre Chopinaud on May 16, 2025 in Berlin for the European Romani Institute for Art and Culture (Eriac).

“The choice between rebellion and submission—that’s what I’m going to talk to you about, by talking about the revolt of the prisoners in the Auschwitz-Birkenau Gypsy family camp on May 16, 1944.”

My name is Pierre Chopinaud. I am a writer. I write novels in French that recount the intimate dramas that stir the hearts of men and women, but also the great historical dramas that humanity has experienced since its beginnings. The stories I imagine are interwoven with the war in the former Yugoslavia, the Second World War, but also the wars between the Persians and the Greeks in antiquity. Above all, in the novels I write, I tell how these great dramas of human history enter the hearts of men and women and influence their destinies, the decisions they make, the choice to rebel or submit, to be indifferent or to commit themselves, for themselves or for others.

Ultimately, that’s what I’m going to talk to you about today, dear friends, by telling you a few words about the revolt of the prisoners in the Auschwitz-Birkenau Gypsy family camp on May 16, 1944, and the Romani resistance movement that I co-founded between 2010 and 2015 in France, in Paris, or more precisely, in the northern suburbs of Paris, in Saint-Denis, which is also the place where the presence of Romani people in France was first mentioned in 1427.

“Radical political organizing is an art that allows people in subordinate positions to build power in order to restore justice and reclaim their dignity.”

I speak to you today as a radical political organizer, because it is in this capacity that I co-founded the May 16th Movement. Radical political organizing is an art that allows people in subordinate positions to build power in order to restore justice and reclaim their dignity. The fundamental maxim of this political art is “there is no justice without power.” To this, I personally added, as the slogan of the Conatus organization that I founded to collectively practice this art: “the last are first.” This is a slogan I borrow from the Bible, the New Testament, from Jesus Christ if you will, but I take it more specifically from Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., a radical political organizer who was one of the leaders of the African American Civil Rights Movement. If radical political organizing is like a martial art, Martin Luther King, and his nonviolent revolution, is our Bruce Lee.

I’m telling you this because the Romani resistance movement, the May 16th Movement, the story of the uprising in the “Gypsy family camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau” on May 16, 1944, is a story of power. More precisely, it tells how to use history and stories as a leadership technique to build power and work toward justice—not only memorial justice, but justice for the present.

“The men, women, and children who arrived in the commune from neighboring Kosovo, where the war on land and the bombing campaign had just ended.”

At the age of 17, when I started to be a bit of an adventurer. It was precisely my last year of high school, and it was also the year of the Kosovo War, when European and American governments were bombing Serbia and Kosovo to end the conflict. I was perplexed by the excesses of state propaganda in my country that justified this bombing campaign. Since I wanted to become a writer and go into politics, I decided that my place was among the people there, trying to be useful amidst the catastrophe, and that I would learn more there than by listening to scholars talk at university.

There, I had my first deep and lasting encounter with Roma men and women. I was eighteen years old. I was in the commune of Suto Orizari, which I imagine most of you know. An extraordinary place in the suburbs of Skopje, the capital of North Macedonia, the only municipality in the world where the entire municipal council, including the mayor, belongs to the Romani community. Here, children and teenagers in schools and colleges learn Romani, the literary Romani language, written by artists who, for some, live on their street, in their neighborhood. It’s the language everyone speaks, in its various local dialects, in shops, hospitals, and markets. It’s also the language I learned there and still speak daily with my daughter, more than twenty years later. I was welcomed there into a small social organization whose employees were mostly Romani. This organization was responsible for identifying, registering, and assisting men, women, and children arriving in the municipality from neighboring Kosovo, where the war and bombing campaign had just ended, in accessing their rights.

The stories I heard, and that you surely have heard since childhood—the stories and grand pronouncements that underpin contemporary European civilization—can be summed up in a slogan, a moral: “Never again!”

I then listened to the accounts people were giving of the absurd and violent war that had driven them from the land to which they had belonged for centuries, in the heart of Europe. I felt, vaguely at first, that is to say, deep in my heart, that the principles and values ​​conveyed by the stories I had heard everywhere since childhood—at school, in books—the principles and values ​​that underpin Europe as a civilization, were entirely absent here: the dignity of every human being, which must be protected by the rights that belong to them, simply because they are a man, a woman, or a child; the dignity that institutions, states, international organizations, and the European Commission must guarantee in everyone.

“But here, somewhere in Europe, the children, women, and men of a national minority had been almost entirely driven from the land, from the country to which they belonged, by racist and nationalist hatred.”

All the stories, all the grand pronouncements, were a dead letter here, compared to the small accounts of people who told us of the distress they were in, and even more so the distress of those who had been unable to leave, and who had remained, caught in the crossfire of nationalist hatred. And above all, amidst the weapons, the fire that hadn’t quite died down in the city of Mitrovica, in northern Kosovo, where Roma men, women, and children were being protected by the UN in a camp built on land poisoned by lead. Even though they had survived the burning of their neighborhood, the murderous madness of nationalists on both sides was slowly killing them from below, so to speak, under the responsibility of the intergovernmental organization founded after the Second World War to protect children, men, and women when they are endangered by the state of which they are citizens. The UN contingent responsible for this catastrophe was French, and I felt in my heart that I was particularly affected by this disaster.

The stories I heard, and that you surely have heard since childhood—the stories and grand pronouncements that form the foundation of contemporary European civilization—can be summed up in a slogan, a moral: “Never again!” Never again should children, men, and women be placed in the state of distress and indignity into which they were subjected by racist and nationalist hatred during the Second World War. Yet here, somewhere in Europe, the children, women, and men of a national minority had been almost entirely driven from the land, from the country to which they belonged, by racist and nationalist hatred, and those who remained were left to die under the care of the United Nations, the very organization tasked with protecting them, in a state of organized collective weakness unparalleled in Europe since the Second World War.

(To be continued in the next episode…)