‘My father didn’t beat my mother in a gypsy fashion – he just beat her’

Famed Roma activist Gelu Duminică on challenging stereotypes and changing the dictionary definition of the word ‘gypsy’.

By Iulia Hau
Published On 18 Nov 2023

The strongest memory Gelu Duminică has from his fieldwork as a sociology student in Romania is the smell of burned human flesh. “There were bloody times back then, in the ‘90s and early 2000s, after the fall of communism,” he says. “People were setting each other on fire. Literally. Many people (whether through tensions between Romanian and Hungarians, Romanian and Roma, or Hungarian and Roma) died in interethnic conflicts.”

Duminică, 46, is one of the leading voices for the Roma cause in Romania. He is a man with a warm voice and a sparkling, deep regard for the subject he knows so well and so personally.

Much of his journey begins with his grandfather, who was fighting for Romania on the Eastern Front during World War II. While he was risking his life to defend his country, his country was busy deporting his Roma family during the Romani Holocaust. Of the 40 members of the family pushed out, only two returned home – one was Duminică’s father.

The Romani Holocaust involved the forced deportation of 25,000 Romani people to Transnistria, a region under Romanian control at the time. Records show that nearly half were children and, tragically, more than 11,000 lost their lives to severe hunger, extreme cold and the deadly typhus epidemic.

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