Cecilia Woloch

American Poet

Video statement on the occasion of 2 August 2024, Holocaust Memorial Day for Sinti and Roma

My name is Cecilia Woloch. I’m an American poet. It’s an honor to make a statement today.

In 1865, the writer Gustav Flaubert sent a letter to the writer George Sand in which he wrote:

“[I visited] a camp of Gypsies at Rouen… they excite the hatred of the bourgeois even though inoffensive as sheep. This hatred is linked to something very deep and complex. It is found in all orderly people. It is the hatred that they feel for the bedouin, the heretic, the philosopher, the solitary, the poet. And there is fear in that hatred.”

As someone who was born American, who has always enjoyed the rights and privileges of being a U.S. citizen, the fortunate daughter, or granddaughter, of immigrants from Poland and its south Eastern borderlands, I have perhaps spent an inordinate amount of time thinking and reading and writing about the holocaust of WWII — horrific events that took place before I was born, in a place I’d never seen until I was already a young woman.

But as a human being, as an artist and a citizen of the world, as someone who embraces the Romani part of her heritage, however anecdotal and undocumented, the attempt to eradicate the Roma people — along with the Jewish people of Europe, and disabled and homosexual persons, and to enslave those who did not conform to the Nazi “Aryan” ideal — feels very personal to me. It was, after all, an attempt to eradicate the non-conforming — to eradicate, not only the people, themselves, but what they stood for. It was an assault on the spirit that animated those people, but also an assault on the soul of the world.

The Roma people, throughout their history, have represented a kind of personal freedom long envied by those less free. Known for their music and their dance, for their close communal bonds and their defiance, their insistence on being who they are, despite persistent persecution and poverty, their insistence on the joy of creativity, on the life of the spirit, on passion and imagination, they were targeted for extermination. Because the inner life, the creative, that flame that’s within each of us, and that artists and musicians and poets strive to keep alive, and the sense of community and joy and transcendence that its expression fosters among people, always poses a threat to authoritarian and totalitarian regimes. For the Nazis of eighty years ago, as for the despots of all times, and of today, the danger that threatens their power is the power of the human imagination, the human spirit. This is what, for me, the attempt to destroy the Roma people represents: an attempt to destroy the spirit and the imagination – not only of the Roma, but of all of us. It seems we may be facing a similar threat now. And standing against it, with our songs and poems and capacity for love and joy, seems to me not frivolous, but an urgent task.

In the past year, I’ve had the pleasure and the honor of working with two Roma artists — Bogumiła Delimata, from Poland, and Cristo Osorio, of Spain, on a collaborative presentation based on my poems and incorporating music and dance. While my book-length poem, Tsigan, deals in large part with the persecution of the Roma throughout history, and especially during the holocaust, Bogumiła and Cristo insisted that our presentation should also be a celebration of the creative spirit, that it also be joyful. At the end of the performance, the entire audience of more than a hundred people joined us in dancing and singing. So many people said to me afterwards, “I needed this. I didn’t know how much I needed this.”

In dark times, there will always be singing. In time like this, when history seems to darken the skies again, we must persist in singing — of the darkness, but also of our own histories, of the creative spirit that can not — must not — be extinguished. What kind of world would it be, for any of us, without music, poetry, imagination, human connection, love?

I COME TO YOU