In 1999, the British Council sent me to be Writer in Residence at the Masaryk University in Brno, in the Czech Republic. While I was there, I started researching the history of the Romanies in Central Europe, including their mass killing under the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia during the second world war.
I had wanted to write a novel with Romany characters for a long time. (My father is part-Romany, a family story which was confided to me with an air of great secrecy, when I was a teenager.) A Czech professor at the University told me of a place nearby, a camp called Hodonín near Kuntat, where the Romanies were kept before being transported to Auschwitz.
One snowy winter day, I visited Hodonín with my partner and our two-year-old daughter. The site of the camp was up in the hills, on a road hidden by trees, and what we found was extraordinary: it has been turned into a holiday camp. Dormitory blocks have been added. A swimming pool has been built. Only one of the original concentration camp barracks remains. It houses a table-tennis table.
While we wandered disbelievingly around the deserted, out-of-season camp, a Czech porter emerged from a small house and stared at us. With sign language and a few words of broken Czech, we communicated why we had come. He gestured up into the woods, and we followed a track through the snow to find a ghostly clearing with a small memorial, erected by local Romany people, on the site of a mass grave where the hundreds who died in the camp were buried. There were fresh footprints in the snow – we were not the only visitors that day – the local Romanies still tend the memorial.
I knew then that my story would have to concentrate on that part of the world, and came up with the idea of following a nomadic kumpánia, or tribe, through the 20’s, 30’s and 40’s, beginning with the birth of a boy in a barn in rural Bohemia. I made my family Kalderash, or Coppersmith Gypsies, and gave them the name of Maximoff. (Our family may have been Kalderash.)
In the 20’s, life for the Maximoffs is good: copper-smithing, cherry-picking, travelling. But as the novel progresses, we follow the kumpánia through the Depression, the rise of Fascism and the eventual invasion by the German army. Yenko Maximoff, the boy, must learn that he is no longer the spoiled princeling of an adoring clan, but a fugitive, hated because of his race. When his family are interned in the camp at Hodonín, he must make the choice to escape on his own or to stay and perhaps perish with them. He escapes, and makes his way to Prague, where he is sheltered by a family friend and eventually takes part in the Prague Uprising of May 1945.
The use of a large historical canvas was new to me. My first three books were all short, contemporary and peopled largely by women characters roughly the same age as myself. Making an imaginative leap into the head of, say, a middle-aged, Kalderash Rom Baró living in Bohemia in the 1920’s was an enormous challenge. How could I say what such a man would think or feel? I didn’t even know what he would have for breakfast. But with more travel, and a lot of research in the British Library, I discovered what many writers before me had discovered. Such a man thinks or feels in much the same way I would think or feel. Discovering and writing about what he has for breakfast is a way of communicating his feelings authentically. It doesn’t change the feelings themselves.
During this process, I came across the American philosopher Richard Rorty, and his eloquent plea for solidarity and understanding between different types of human beings, as explained in his book, ‘Contingency, irony, and solidarity.’ ‘Solidarity is not discovered by reflection but created,’ he writes. ‘It is created by increasing our sensitivity to the particular details of pain and humiliation of other, unfamiliar sorts of people.’
In reviews of my previous books, there is one comment that pleases me above all others. A critic writing in the Independent said, ‘Louise Doughty writes about people who don’t usually get written about.’ By that she meant that although my heroines were young and female, they were not the glamorous city girls of ‘chick-lit’. They were ordinary women leading ostensibly ordinary lives beneath which a variety of torrents raged. And as I was writing Fires in the Dark I found it extraordinary to realise how little mainstream fictional writing there is about Romanies.
Moris Farhi’s Children of the Rainbow is one of the few English-language exceptions. Otherwise, Romany characters appear as exotic symbols of freedom or sexual licence (D.H. Lawrence, The Virgin and the Gypsy). Or as thieves, beggars or any of the other tiresome litany of racist stereotypes which are used to characterise Romany people in newspapers and magazines on a daily basis.
I have chosen to be a novelist because I want to tell stories, but in telling a story of a particular group of people who happen to be Romany, I have discovered a new and highly politicised evangelism. ‘The novel, the play and the television drama have replaced the treatise and sermon as the principle vehicles of moral change and progress,’ Rorty writes. I would not make so large a claim for Fires in the Dark. But if my novel makes a few people think differently next time they see a Romany person in the street or read about them in the newspapers, then all that research will have been worthwhile.
Fires in the Dark – extract from Part 4
At this point in the novel, 1942, the main characters have been captured by the authorities and interned. The narrative then switches to a Roma settlement in South Bohemia, where a family by the name of Malík are struggling to survive through the rationing, shortages, and constant threat of arrest and imprisonment.
The way it works is this. The man in charge of public order in this forgotten backwater is Officer Sergeant Holt. Holt considers himself to be a decent man. He was sorry when they took the Jews because he didn’t have anything against them personally. They never troubled anyone as far as he could see. He has no such scruples about gypsies. He wouldn’t care if he never saw one of them again. But he does like Karel Malík, who he doesn’t really think of as a Gypsy, as such.
He and Karel Malík go back a long way. They were at school together, before Karel left to help his father at the factory. They didn’t see each other then for some years, but when Officer Sergeant Holt was promoted to his public order post he found that Karel was by then an Elder in Romanov and their lives began to intersect again. Now, they meet once a fortnight to play cards – Karel always lets him win, which is a standing joke between them. And Officer Sergeant Holt is confident that Karel respects him and keeps order in Romanov, as much as he can.
There is a world weariness about Karel Malík that Holt recognises and imagines he shares. They are both men just trying to do the right thing for their separate communities, after all. He thinks of Karel as a white man trapped in a brown heathen skin. And he sees himself as a happy, abandoned fellow, by nature, enclosed by his own sense of duty as an Officer of the law. Gypsies – the Devil take the lot of them! But Karel Malík is all right.
That brother of his, however, is another matter. Jan Malík nearly got Romanov burnt down just before the war. A local peddler went to Romanov selling cleaning materials, a harmless boy, half-simple, with blond hair and a withered arm. Jan Malík accused him of looking at his daughter – which the boy might well have done, as it was easy enough to look at someone when you were selling them a dishcloth. Jan had kicked the boy down the lane. Unfortunately, the boy was the nephew of one of the town merchants, a popular man with a lot of friends. Holt had been forced to dissuade them from going down to Romanov one night with their faces covered, holding flaming torches.
Sergeant Holt made Karel Malík pay for that. Two gold bracelets found their way onto the wrist of the popular merchant’s sister. Where they came from, he didn’t like to think. As long as it was out of his district, he didn’t care.
The war has put an end to vigilante threats from the residents of Orlavá but Sergeant Holt knows that a far worse threat to Romanov is looming. He meets with the local landrat each week. He receives regular circulars from the Ministry of Interior. Back in May, there was the Government Decree on the Preventative Fight Against Criminality. Gypsies and persons wandering in a Gypsy fashion are now officially asocials, which means they can be arrested at any moment. Ever since last year, the Ministry has been asking him to fulfill certain quotas. Each district has to arrest a certain number of miscreants, vagabonds and general layabouts to be sent to the punitive work camps. If he can’t find them, then Sergeant Holt is obliged to arrest the nearest thing he can get. So far, he has managed to keep it down to well-known ne’er do wells; men from the workhouse, a couple of old down-and-outs who camped on the other side of town and were not related to the Romanov lot. He has not had to touch Romanov, or anyone liked or respected in Orlavá itself. But it is only a matter of time.
Then, in July, it comes. It isn’t even marked confidential. The General Commander of the Civil Police in the German Protectorates of Bohemia and Moravia has issued the order for The Elimination of the Gypsy Menace.
It is to be called Registration Day, and every Gypsy must register. The date is set for the first week in August. Deportations will take place the same day. Holt sends one of his men to fetch Karel Malík.
When he arrives at his office, Karel seats himself unhurriedly on the other side of Sergeant Holt’s desk. Holt stands with his back to Karel, staring out of the window. Beyond the courtyard outside his office, the lane swoops down, revealing an uninterrupted view of fields where tree-tops sway gently in an old summer breeze. He thinks how innocent those breezes seem, and how simple compromises are, morally simple. If a man points a gun at a child’s head and says, I will shoot this child, or I will shoot those two children over there, what are you supposed to say? You say, all right, shoot him and spare those two. Shooting one child is half as bad as shooting two. Men who can’t admit that are more than cowardly, thinks Sergeant Holt, they are morally corrupt.
He hears himself saying to Karel Malík. ‘I don’t know what the transports are for. For one of the camps, I suppose, but I hear some of those places are not so bad. You have to work but you get fed. You’re all on file. I can’t see what anyone can do. You can hardly take off down the road in a big gang. You won’t get ten kilometres.’
Karel is sitting on the other side of Holt’s desk, leaning back in his chair with his arms folded, as relaxed as if they were discussing a rabbit hunt. ‘There must be something…’ he insists simply, calmly. Success with Holt depends on him behaving as little as a man like Holt would expect a gypsy to behave. As a consequence, Karel is so relaxed he appears almost somnambulant.
Holt is still staring out of the window, watching one of his men sweep the yard. That is all the authorities are asking of us, he thinks, to keep the place clean. Eventually, he turns and looks at Karel, although he still does not sit. ‘There is a possible loophole…’ he says thoughtfully. ‘But I can’t get all of you through it.’
Karel nods, to indicate that he appreciates what Holt is doing, and that he will agree to the price.
‘We can try and say that you’ve been settled so long that you don’t count as Gypsies. You can apply for Christian status, but we’ll have to do it straightaway, before Registration Day. Several of you have jobs. That makes a difference. Normally, it wouldn’t work, but I know the local Commander…’ There is another pause, another nod, another tacit agreement to the local Commander’s price, whatever it may be. ‘But…’
Holt allows that but to hang in the air while he wanders over to his desk and seats himself. ‘It is known that we have a Gypsy settlement here and there will be talk if I do not send you off to be registered. I have to be seen to be obeying the law or they will simply replace me with someone who will. You must give me some of your people. Half. A truckload. Once they have been sent off, we can begin an appeal procedure immediately. Maybe we’ll get them out. But the rest must stay invisible in the meantime. You know what I mean. Anyone who is known in the town must go, otherwise people will notice you’re all still here and someone will tell. You yourself are in great danger. I don’t know whether I will be able to protect you.’
‘I cannot give you half,’ Karel says reasonably. ‘How would I persuade them? It would mean splitting up families. Half is out of the question.’
‘Give me twenty, a dozen even. I can fob them off with that, for a while at least. I can’t do it for less. You know what I am risking even agreeing to that.’
Karel regards Sergeant Holt with a steady, clear-eyed gaze. Karel is a man who understands a bargain, particularly a bargain with a gadjo. It is how he has lived his whole life, and he knows that his whole life and the whole lives of every man, woman and child in Romanov is what is at stake.
‘Four,’ he says evenly, after a pause. ‘I can give you four.’
