Anti-Roma Discrimination

Anti-Roma discrimination in the villages is not confined to prejudice in the abstract: it repeatedly determines how the boy is identified, whether he can be sheltered, and how others treat him in public. His dark appearance becomes a basis for assigning him an identity he cannot control; his unfamiliar language then makes it harder to challenge that judgment. The episodes also show how hostility toward people thought to be Roma overlaps with fear of Jewish persecution and with the wartime risks of protecting an outsider.

Identity and the Conditions of Suspicion

The boy spends the next four years in villages ethnically different from the region where he was born. Local peasants are described as fair-skinned, with blond hair and blue or gray eyes; he is olive-skinned, dark-haired, and black-eyed. His speech deepens the divide: he speaks the language of the educated class, which the eastern peasants barely understand. Appearance and accent therefore mark him as an outsider before he has an opportunity to establish who he is. The villagers’ suspicion is directed at a child who has little power to make his own account intelligible to them.

That misrecognition becomes visible in an early gathering around him. The crowd speaks in a dialect he does not know, watches him suspiciously, and includes people restraining snarling dogs. One person reaches toward his hair, then withdraws when the boy turns. The onlookers discuss him, repeatedly applying a Roma identity; when he tries to speak, his language and manner of speaking provoke laughter rather than understanding. The exchange reveals a pattern that recurs later: the boy is inspected and classified, while his own effort to answer is treated as further evidence of difference.

Public Display and Conditional Acceptance

The hut’s owner turns that difference into a spectacle. Over the following days, families come to stare while the boy is made to hop in a sack garment. The visitors laugh at the performance, and some respond to his direct gaze by looking away or carrying out gestures meant to ward off the evil eye. The scene joins public amusement to superstition: the boy is not simply unfamiliar but is treated as a threatening presence whose gaze may itself require protection against. His humiliation becomes entertainment for the assembled villagers.

A later farmer accepts him as a workhand only after questioning him about his past and repeatedly asking whether he is a Jewish or Roma orphan. The boy answers cautiously, swearing that he is a Christian and an obedient worker; the farmer nevertheless has him repeat his account and laughs at his failed attempt to speak the local dialect. Other men watch critically. The decision to employ him is a limited opening, not proof that the suspicion has disappeared: the farmer hires him for work in the yard and fields, and the boy responds with desperate gratitude. His place in the household depends on labor and on the farmer’s willingness to retain him.

Even that conditional inclusion carries humiliation beyond the farm. The master sometimes takes him to weddings and celebrations, where he orders him to recite poems and stories learned before the war from his mother and nurses. The boy’s urban speech sounds sharply unlike the villagers’ softer, drawn-out dialect, and he is made to drink vodka before performing. Guests trip him as he makes his way to the center of the room. His education and language, once part of his earlier life, become another public display of difference, staged at his employer’s direction for the amusement of others.

Persecution, Fear, and the Risks of Shelter

During mushroom season, the master takes the boy into the woods with the villagers. Because he thinks the boy looks Roma and fears that the Germans might be told about him, he shaves the boy’s black hair. A large old cap, pulled low over his face, makes him less conspicuous. The disguise is a practical response to danger, but it also makes the boy’s appearance something that must be managed to protect the household. He stays close to the master, aware that his usefulness may be the reason he is kept for a while.

The surrounding villagers become more hostile, and the boy is threatened with being burned. Shepherds try to drag him toward a fire; he resists and escapes that immediate danger. The threat recalls the Germans’ purpose-built furnaces, which he knows are used to kill others. At night he worries that divine punishment might also be directed at people with dark hair and eyes who are called Roma. He wonders what separates Roma from Jews when both are treated as marked for the same fate, and asks himself how a fair-haired family might understand a dark-haired child. These reflections show persecution reaching beyond an immediate encounter: the categories imposed on him become questions about inherited identity, survival, and the possibility of belonging.

Fear also governs whether adults will take him in. When two young soldiers encounter him, they question whether he is Roma or Jewish and joke at his denial as they escort him toward the village. Later, a priest speaks with a farmer who argues that the boy’s appearance identifies him as an unbaptized Roma child and that sheltering him could bring danger if German forces found him. The priest protests quietly, but the farmer’s fear prevails. The exchange makes the danger of refuge explicit: religious disagreement does not undo the practical power of the threat that the Germans may visit the village.

Repeated Exclusion and Its Significance

The same classification follows the boy into religious and communal spaces. At dawn, elderly women waiting outside a church stare at him with disgust, label him a vampire or a Roma foundling, and spit in his direction. Their prayers and rosary beads contrast with their treatment of the child: religious observance does not prevent the group from turning him into an object of aversion. At another churchyard gathering, villagers recognize him and attack him with branches and whips, then restrain him by a cart and horse. He manages to free himself. The episode extends the pattern from watching and mockery to collective physical assault.

Across these encounters, the boy is alternately inspected, disguised, questioned, displayed, excluded, and attacked. The labels imposed on him are not consistent in their details: people also suspect that he is Jewish, and the boy himself struggles to distinguish the groups that the villagers associate with dark features and persecution. What remains consistent is that his own words cannot reliably overturn the judgments made from his appearance. The account thus presents anti-Roma discrimination as an everyday process, sustained through gossip, laughter, superstition, public ritual, and the threat of denunciation as well as through overt violence. In wartime villages already burdened by German demands for food and the danger of punitive raids, fear helps explain why shelter is precarious; it does not erase the harm caused by treating a vulnerable child as a suspected identity rather than as a person.