La mémoire des discriminations et des persécutions envers les tsiganes

Abstract

The memory of discriminations and persecutions towards the Gypsies from Dites-le avec des pleurs (1990) by Mateo Maximoff Among the different aspects of the Gypsy memory which go through Mateo Maximoff’s writing, the part concerning the discriminations and persecutions toward the Gypsy minorities is particularly important. In his text entitled Dites-le avec des pleurs, which covers the period going from the beginning of the XXth century to the Second World War and after, Mateo Maximoff gives an account of the different forms of exclusion and tragedy the Gypsies had to endure. The material on which the story is based is directly taken from facts of his own family’s biography, from the writer’s personal experience and commitment, his research works, as well as from testimonies collected among other groups of Roma. Whether it deals with specific episodes of intolerance or malevolent accusations against travelling families, the reference to the anthropometric identification record imposed by the French Republic with the 1912 law on the movements of the « nomads », their being under house arrest or confinement in France between 1940 and 1946, or the conditions to which the Gypsies were submitted in the concentration and death camps under the Nazi rule.