Aušvicate hin kher báro

La chiusa finale in inglese aggiunta dai Malignant Tumour nella loro versione del 1998:

Versione italiana dal Museo virtuale delle intolleranze e degli stermini. La traduzione degli ultimi due versi è tratta dal saggio presentato in commento; in alcuni punti è stata ritoccata.

Una versione inglese tratta da The Patrin Web Journal. La strofa finale è omessa ed è stata tradotta autonomamente.

Versione francese di Riccardo Venturi, 22 maggio 2008.

Partially reproduced from: The Veracious Voice: The Romani Holocaust and the Politics of Commensuration in the Czech Republic

Krista Hegburg, Department of Anthropology, Rutgers University

If any of you are familiar with Czech-Romani Holocaust song, you’ve most likely heard “Aušvicate hin baro kher” – “In Auschwitz there is a big prison.” It was sung perhaps most famously - though not exclusively - by Růžena Danielová, a Romani Auschwitz survivor, but even if you haven’t heard Danielová, there are covers – the non- Romani Czech composer, Miloš Štědroň, used the song as inspiration for his 1970s composition, The Weeping of Růžena Danielová of Hruba Vrbka over her Husband, Dead in Auschwitz. More recently, the song has been covered by the Czech noisecore band Malignant Tumour, which, for the record, sings it in the original Romani.

If you’ve ever hear Věra Bílá’s rom-pop rendition of “Čirikloro, Mirikloro,” you’ve heard parts of the song, sung albeit to different purpose. The song also has currency outside of the Czech Lands. In Tony Gatlif’s musical documentary about Roma, Latcho Drom (Safe Trip), for example, it is featured as the sole reference to the Holocaust. Toward the middle of film, Margita Makulová trudges across a snowy landscape while an a capella trio of voices harmonizes off-screen. As they sing in Romany, “O you black bird / Carry my letter,” a black-clad Makulová makes her way toward what looks to be the ruins of Spiš castle in eastern Slovakia.

Makulová’s voice takes over the singing, polyphony resolving into antiphony as she echoes the lines again: Oda kalo čirikloro / Lidža mange mro liloro. As the song’s stanzas shift, the camera captures Makulová seated outside in the snow, her verses describing hunger in Auschwitz, panning slowly from her face down to one hand, then back to her face and on to her other arm. Thus as she sings, “There isn’t anything for us to eat … The Block Elder is evil”, we see her face; when she continues, “once I return home” (Joj sar me jekhvar khere džava), we see her right hand, holding a lit cigarette and a box of matches with a picture of Václav Havel’s face, her thumb partially obscuring the president’s forehead. And on the next line, “I will kill the Block Elder” (Le blocharis murdarava), we see the word murdarava issue from her mouth, echoed as the song’s last stanza repeats its couplet and the camera, on the same word, comes to rest on Makulová’s slightly smudged tattoo that seems to read Z-9267.

If any of you have read Elie Wiesel’s Night in the original Yiddish, this theme of revenge – “I will kill the Block Elder” – will be familiar to you. The survivor of the Yiddish text is, as one literary critic put it, “alive with a vengeance and eager to break the wall of indifference he feels surrounds him.”

If you’ve read Night in French or English translation, however, you have encountered a rather different survivor, one that has become iconic in the American understanding of the Holocaust. The narrative of this figure emerges in a stammer, in between the “silences of the dead,” as Wiesel put it; in the final, spare scene following liberation from Buchenwald, Wiesel famously gazes into a mirror and encounters a corpse whose stare has “never left him.”

This moment closes the book and opens a whole field of understanding of who and how the Holocaust survivor is. In the Yiddish, Wiesel smashes the mirror, and, moreover, writes of “[Jewish boys running off] to steal clothing and potatoes … and to rape the shiksas,” acts which, he says, did not fulfill “the historical commandment of revenge.”

In translation, these scenes are missing, vengeance subsumed by theological musings on the unrepresentability of the Holocaust. These reworkings of the text in translation, Naomi Seidman suggests, are not accidental, or merely shoddy translation. Rather, they point out the conditions under which one can be heard in certain registers – telling an elided version of the story, a story not shot through with the demand for vengeance, was the condition of possibility for being heard as a Holocaust survivor outside the community bound by Yiddish. The Yiddish text and the English and French translations are incommensurable, and not just in the narrow sense of the definition of incommensurability as “a state in which an undistorted translation cannot be produced between two or more denotational texts.” The difference in these texts underscores the fact that incommensurability arises at the interstices of social orders, in moments in which people seek to speak across them.

So what then of Makulová’s song, what of “Aušvicate hin baro kher,” sung in Romany, and capped by an equally unfulfilled “commandment of revenge?” What I want to suggest is that there are two Romani survivors as well, one that addresses a Romany-speaking audience – le blocharis murdarava – and one heard in interpretive translation. My research relates to the way in which these acts of translation and interpretation of accounts of the Holocaust unfold today in the Czech Republic as an emergent liberalism reorders the relationship of the so-called “majority” and “minority” societies, of Czech citizens to their ‘fellow citizens,’ their spoluobčané, of, in short, white Czechs to black Czechs. Specifically, I look at particular accounts of the Holocaust – those put forth in song and those put forth in reparations claims – because they are both pervaded by questions of incommensurability and its tandem term, commensuration – the act of rendering two separate things translatable and coextensive. Commensuration, from an anthropological perspective, is a social practice, a reductive labor necessary to speak across different socials orders. And, again from an anthropological perspective, it is a labor necessary to liberal orders predicated forging a public sphere of consensual reasoning that drives a non-violent democratic form of governmentality and that recognizes and redresses harm done to minority subjects. Minority subjects, that is to say, must hold their suffering up for examination and evaluation by the liberal subject of the
majority to recognize and repair for liberal governmentality to self-correct.

In this context, I’m particularly interested in the Romani survivor non-Romani Czechs are most likely to encounter, and the voice of this survivor, I hold, obtains in practices of commensuration – reductive practices of commensuration – that underpin the interpretation of Romani accounts of the Holocaust. So I’d like to turn next to how this liberal politics of commensuration occurs in reparations programs and also in interpretations of Holocaust song offered by non-Romani Czechs.

Dallo stesso film documentario (Latcho Drom) , da cui è preso il video della canzone.
Video non più disponibile

Altra versione / Other version

Trovo sul sito del Muzeum romské kultury (Museo della cultura Rom) di Brno un'altra versione di questa canzone. Nella galleria delle immagini si vede su un pannello in doppia lingua rom-ceco, con la seguente descrizione: “Una delle versioni della canzone Aušvicate che è stata composta e cantata dai Rom cechi nel campo di concentramento di Auschwitz. Per merito della cantante ed ex-prigioniera R. Danielová (1904-1988) la canzone non è caduta nell'oblio. Dopo la guerra, R. Danielová è stata l'unica della sua famiglia a tornare a casa – ad Auschwitz hanno perso la vita tutti i suoi cinque figli e il marito.”

Expozice Příběh Romů

Traduzione ceca – dal sito del Museo della cultura rom di Brno

Traduzione italiana di Stanislava – basata sulla traduzione ceca presente nel sito del Museo della cultura Rom

[1] Nel testo è presente un paio di volte una didascalia di questo tipo. La mantengo anche nella traduzione.

[2] Le ultime due righe palesemente non fanno parte della canzone. La prima frase (non ne trovo la fonte in rete) sembrerebbe una risposta a una domanda rivolta a un testimone: “Conosce questa canzone?” Spiegazione data da qualcuno che la ricorda, l'aveva sentita.
La seconda riga fa più chiarezza. Secondo le fonti, questa volta reperibili anche in rete, a pronunciare quella frase è stata Helena Malíková (da nubile Holomková), originaria di Louka nel distretto di Hodonín (Moravia meridionale), una delle poche sopravvissute all'olocausto dei Rom e Sinti cechi, ritornata a casa dopo l'internamento ad Auschwitz. La sua testimonianza è stata trascritta nel libro intitolato, non a caso, Aušvicate hi khér báro, redatto dallo studioso ceco Ctibor Nečas (1933-2017), specializzato nella storia dei Rom cechi, a cui va il merito di aver riaperto il dibattito sulle persecuzioni dei Rom cechi durante il nazismo e di aver contribuito a conservare la memoria del loro olocausto che con il tempo rischiava di diventare un argomento marginale, se non dimenticato.

Questo commento lapidario di Helena Malíková, qui utilizzato a mo' di conclusione della canzone, è stato ripreso da Nečas come titolo al racconto della sopravvissuta, infatti quelle poche parole schiette dette da lei in dialetto hanno una straordinaria espressività. La testimonianza si può leggere anche su internet (qui Holocaust), purtroppo solo in ceco (o meglio: in un dialetto moravo, la trascrizione del racconto orale tiene conto di tutte le particolarità della pronuncia e del forte colorito regionale).