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I’m A Gypsy?

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Back in Prague, doors open…a gypsy girl sits down beside me at a bus stop…flirting…wanting me to listen to lively music in her cell phone. I smile and she is encouraged…she smiles widely…waving back at me through the windows of her departing bus.

Later after many bad looks from faces peering at me through narrow eyes, I finally realize I am being taken for Romany…in this country not a good thing for me…it is jarring…who am I…how do I look to these people? In this country, Gypsies are regarded with hostility and open discrimination and on a train to Krakow I experience part of the why when a gypsy family corners me in the hallway… aggressively yelling into my face…demanding money…no way…I am determined.

Later at Oswiecim Poland, called Auschwitz by the Germans, I find out that half a million gypsies were incinerated during World War II by the Nazis.



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