Milos Karoli is marked for life as prisoner number Z 9103 at Auschwitz

16-year-old Milos Karoly awoke emaciated in the Red Cross field hospital’ after the liberation of the Dachau concentration camp in 1945. He came with a terrorist march from Buchenwald, and before that he saw almost the entire family killed in the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp.

Adopt stricter foreign law

Milos Karolyi was born in 1929 in Belgium. The family started throwing balls between Norway and several European countries. Joseph Karolyi’s parents and Elizabeth and Rasha were born in Christiania and married in the Catholic Church in Fredrikstad. The children were born in Oslo and many other Norwegian cities. When German forces occupied Norway in 1940, neither Milos and his family nor other Roma were in the country. The reason is that the persecution began several years before the German occupation.

Elizabeth and Risha were photographed in 1922 with children Zulu on her lap, Mary from left, Polycarp, Charles from behind and Regina in front. Elizabeth and his children Mary, Charles and Regina were murdered at Auschwitz-Birkenau, and Zulu was murdered at Buchenwald prior to liberation. Polycarp survived with the brothers Milos and Tzugorka. (Archives Générales du Royaume)

Throughout the 1920s, the Norwegian authorities had a plan to get rid of all rooms in Norway. Aftenposten complained of the “plague of gypsies” in 1922, and showed a picture of the room’s entourage at Holbergs plass in Christiania. In 1927, the “Gypsy Oath” of the Foreigners Act was passed to prevent “Gypsies and other vagrants” from entering the kingdom. (Aftenposten August 29, 1922)

Today, the Norwegian Gypsies are recognized as a national minority with a long history in Norway. Many came to Norway after 1860 when the passport requirement was abolished, at the same time that Roma slavery was abolished in Romania. Since the 1920s, the Norwegian authorities have tried to get rid of Roma in the country. Based on the Citizenship Act, 30-40 Gypsies held Norwegian citizenship in 1924, but in 1927 Parliament passed a new and stricter foreign law with a “Gypsy Clause” that would have disastrous consequences for the Norwegian Gypsies. It is now stated here that “Gypsies and other itinerant people who cannot prove that they have obtained Norwegian citizenship will be prevented from entering the kingdom”. The Aliens Act now applies to Norwegian citizens.

Norwegian passports for over 20 years

In 1930, one-year-old Milos was arrested in Sweden with his family, and in 1931, the family was again banned from entering Norway. In 1934, an entourage with families Karoly, Joseph and Humble was stopped at the Danish border station Badburg, despite the fact that the parents of the family Joseph Karoly and Czardas Joseph and Karl Modest were born in Norway and have held Norwegian passports for more than twenty years.

68 Roman-Norwegians were banned from entering Norway in 1934. The photo shows the group before their deportation from Badburg in Denmark to Germany, where they were interned in the Nazi regime’s first pure “gypsy camp”. Josef Karolyi, right, was among the many later murdered at Auschwitz-Birkenau. (Image from the book “One for Us”)

The year before, Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany, and the first Nazi concentration camps were established. The Danish newspaper Politiken reported on January 24, 1934 how angry the Gypsies were, especially the women. They would rather die than go back to Germany.” But the entire entourage was transferred to Altona outside Hamburg the next day. Here they were held in a labor camp that became the first pure “gypsy camp” of the Nazi regime and rehearsals for what was to come. The stay was short and the prisoners were deported to Belgium.

In the fall of 1943, the order was issued for the mass internment of Roma in Belgium, and in January 1944, 15-year-old Milos was sent with the majority of the family to Auschwitz, Ward 2, Birkenau – the notorious Roma camp. Each person got a prisoner number tattooed on his left arm. Milos Karoli was marked for life as prisoner number Z 9103, Z of the Roma. A black triangle was sewn onto the suits: “We were told this meant we were ‘antisocial.’ We didn’t know what that meant,” Milos recalls many years later. Here he saw fathers and siblings being killed: “Death wonders everywhere, in what we eat, what we have done and what we have said.”

The main entrance to the largest Nazi extermination camp Auschwitz II (Birkenau). Milos Karoli and the other prisoners were taken by train to the main gate. Of the 66 Norwegian chamberlains that came here, only four survived. (Auschwitz-Birkenau memorial and museum)

The long struggle to get to Norway

When liberation came, Milos and other surviving Norwegian Gypsies were stateless, and the struggle to reach Norway would take over ten years. In 1956 Milos was denied entry to Norway, although the Roma requirement was repealed by Parliament that year because it was racially discriminatory. Despite the fact that his older brother received Norwegian citizenship in 1957, Milos was deprived of it until 1959, when he was finally able to come to Oslo.

For an individual, it would have serious consequences for not returning citizenship to the war years, as both German POW compensation and the Norwegian War Pension require people to be Norwegian citizens under Actual residence of detention. For the survivors, freedom came at a heavy price. Only in 2015 came the apology from the Norwegian authorities.

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sources

Johann Bergqvist, Roman Norwegians in Nazi Concentration Camps, Tobias 2/2010
Jan Brostad, Lars Lane, Maria Roosevel and Carl Emil Vogt, Unwelcome People. The Evolution of Norwegian “Gypsy Politics” and the Extinction of Norwegian Spaces 1915-1956, Kaplin Dam, 2017
Finger
Natalina Janssen, granddaughter of Milos Karolis
Oslo City Archives, Archives “Compensation of Prisoners for Norwegian Gypsies” and Gypsy Office
peder Skojas and curry LilholtAnd the one for each other. Gypsies Milos Karoli and Frans Joseph say,Gildendale 1978
Maria Rosefull, Lars Lane and Jan Brostad, “Getting Rid of Them.” The Development of “Gypsy Politics” and the Extinction of Norwegian Spaces, HL Centre, 2015
Maria Rosefull, Zulu Karolyi. A European history, Kaplan Dam, 2021