Battle STORY

The revolt of the “Gypsy families’ camp”

Episode 2/9: “The world as it really is”

By Pierre Chopinaud

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

(Previously…)

“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, in 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 that had no equivalent in Europe since the Second World War.”

 “Today, the Roma minorities of Ukraine are at risk of being erased from the present and past of the nation to which they belong.”

“Never again?” That, I’ve heard since childhood, is the moral of European history. Yet here and now, before my very eyes, it was still happening. It was still happening, especially for children, women, and men whose ancestors, 60 years ago, were victims of the genocide perpetrated by the racial hatred of the Nazi German state and its allied and collaborating states.

I want to emphasize that, 20 years later, today it’s still happening for the Roma minority in Ukraine, both in the eastern regions invaded by the Russian army and in the still-protected central and western territories, who are at risk of being erased from the present and past of the nation to which they belong.

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“Does this mean that Europe was still suffering from the same ill? Was the moral of contemporary European history a bad fable? “

As an outsider, the situation I witnessed called into question my own history, my own identity as a Frenchman, as a European, the principles and values ​​in which I had been raised. How is it possible that here in Europe, men, women, and children whose ancestors were victims, just like the Jewish men, women, and children of Europe, of the immense crime in whose memory modern Europe was rebuilt, could find themselves thus driven from their land, murdered, abandoned, victims of the states to which they belong, under the responsibility of the United Nations, and in the indifference of the consciences of the people?

How was it possible that men, children, and women—whose parents’ and grandparents’ bodies had, 60 years earlier, been reduced to lives deemed worthless—could, with the widespread consent of elites and the people, be rejected 60 years later from the condition of humanity and the dignity that, as a natural right, belongs to them?

Does this mean that Europe was still suffering from the same affliction? Was the moral of contemporary European history a bad fable?

How can we look at this question now, 20 years later, when far-right and fascist movements are returning to power, one after another, in European countries?

“To make the world as it should be coincide with the world as it actually is, as the master of radical political organizing, Martin Luther King, said when he described his vision”

For me, the moral of the little stories I’d heard there 20 years ago, when I was 18, was that my life had to take a certain direction. I didn’t know exactly which one yet. But what was now certain was that the story I’d grown up in, the story in which I’d learned I was like a character, the story in which my conscience was formed, the story whose moral says that if human dignity dies in one person, it dies for all of humanity, because all lives equally deserve dignity, the story whose principles and values ​​say that all human lives are equal in dignity and have the right to security and happiness, especially if they are exposed to political hatred—this story would lose all meaning if I didn’t take action. By doing what? I didn’t know yet. Otherwise, I would strive, along with others, using the powers I possessed, and which I still needed to discover (what can one do at 18?), to make reality resemble the ideal we dream of. To make the world as it should be coincide with the world as it truly is, as the master of radical political organization, Martin Luther King, said when he described his vision: I had a dream.

(To be continued in the next episode…)