A Bit More Detail

When they were last on Canadian soil, the Pusuma family took sanctuary in a Toronto church as they fought to avoid being sent back to their native Hungary.

On Thursday, 18 months after leaving Canada, Jozsef Pusuma, his wife, Timea Daroczi, and their daughter Viktoria (Lulu) were welcomed back by their loyal supporters who battled for the Roma family’s return.

“I’m happy to be here, back for a free life. I feel home,” said an exhausted Pusuma, as he and his family walked out from the Pearson Internation Airport customs area to the applause of more than a dozen supporters from the Windermere United Church and Romero House.

“Thank you, Canada for giving my family a new life. We have fought for so long and today I’m free.”

Barbara Sheffield, a member of the church, said she was thrilled to see the family back and justice having persevered.

The Black Death didn’t just wipe out millions of Europeans during the 14th century. It left a mark on the human genome, favoring those who carried certain immune system genes, according to a new study. Those changes may help explain why Europeans respond differently from other people to some diseases and have different susceptibilities to autoimmune disorders.

Geneticists know that human populations evolve in the face of disease. Certain versions of our genes help us fight infections better than others, and people who carry those genes tend to have more children than those who don’t. So the beneficial genetic versions persist, while other versions tend to disappear as those carrying them die. This weeding-out of all but the best genes is called positive selection. But researchers have trouble pinpointing positively selected genes in humans, as many genes vary from one individual to the next.

Enter Mihai Netea, an immunologist at Radboud University Nijmegen Medical Centre in the Netherlands. He realized that in his home country, Romania, the existence of two very distinct ethnic groups provided an opportunity to see the hand of natural selection in the human genome. A thousand years ago, the Rroma people—commonly known as gypsies—migrated into Europe from north India. But they intermarried little with European Romanians and thus have very distinct genetic backgrounds. Yet, by living in the same place, both of these groups experienced the same conditions, including the Black Plague, which did not reach northern India. So the researchers sought genes favored by natural selection by seeking similarities in the Rroma and European Romanians that are not found in North Indians.

Netea; evolutionary biologist Jaume Bertranpetit of Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, Spain; and their colleagues looked for differences at more than 196,000 places in the genomes of 100 Romanians of European descent and 100 Rroma. For comparison, the researchers also cataloged these differences in 500 individuals who lived in northwestern India, where the Rroma came from. Then they analyzed which genes had changed the most to see which were most favored by selection.

Genetically, the Rroma are still quite similar to the northwestern Indians, even though they have lived side by side with the Romanians for a millennium, the team found. But there were 20 genes in the Rroma and the Romanians that had changes that were not seen in the Indians’ versions of those genes, Netea and his colleagues report online today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. These genes “were positively selected for in the Romanians and in the gypsies but not in the Indians,” Netea explains. “It’s a very strong signal.”

Seventy years ago Czech and Slovak Roma embarked on a grim path to nearly complete annihilation. In the spring and summer of 1943, 4,500 Roma were shipped off to the so-called Gypsy camp in Auschwitz: one-third were from camps in Lety and Hodonin, in the south and southwest of the country, and two-thirds were taken from their homes. The fates of local Roma remain one of the least investigated chapters of the war, and one part of this story is completely unknown – that some Roma survived the Nazi attempt at extermination thanks to the help of “white people.”

Even after decades 87-year-old Emilie Machalkova’s voice shakes and tears fill her eyes when she recalls those scenes. The spring sun was not yet very warm when one Monday afternoon she stood, a 16-year-old girl, at the railway station in Nesovice, a village 40 kilometers (25 miles) east of Brno. She, her parents, two brothers, grandmother, and 3-year-old cousin were waiting for a train to take them to the stables of the protectorate police in Masna Street in Brno, where they had been told to report. Nearly all their neighbors accompanied them to the station, Machalkova recalls: all her childhood friends and family friends came. Someone brought a traditional Czech pork dish, others bread. “All of us were crying a lot because we thought that we wouldn’t come back.”

They were right to be afraid. A few weeks earlier much of Machalkova’s extended family in Moravia had been summoned to Masna Street. Lugging a suitcase, her grandfather Pavel had left, along with three of her uncles, some cousins, and other relatives – all together 33 members of the large Holomek family, a known clan of Moravian Roma. Even though it was not until after the war that they found out the whole truth, at the time everyone suspected that Roma, just like Jews, were being sent to their deaths. “In ’42 they took away the entire Jewish Fischer family, who had an estate and a restaurant in Nesovice. We knew our time was coming too,” Machalkova says.

Last year Machalkova and her husband, Jan, celebrated their 50th anniversary in a comfortable apartment in Brno. On the walls and shelves is a flood of smiling photographs of their three daughters, son, grandchildren, and great grandchildren – reminders that thanks to the bravery of some, they were among the few protectorate Roma who escaped the extermination machine.

• Acts of Minor Treason's Andrew Barton shares a vintage photo of Toronto's Union Station from 2010, before the massive construction on Front Street that transformed the scene.


• Bad Astronomy's Phil Plait notes that the very large majority of stars in the night sky are quite likely to still be alive, not having died in the mere tens of thousands of years (at most) it has taken for their light to reach us.


• The Burgh Diaspora's Jim Russell notes that German attitudes which force women to choose between motherhood and employment aren't going to work in the long run.


• Centauri Dreams suggests that landing sites on icy Europa's chaos regions are likely to give probes access to its biologically interesting water oceans, and notes the serious problems associated with focusing lasers for interstellar solar sails across light years of space.


• Crooked Timber's Chris Bertram notes the hardening of British attitudes towards migrants, while John Quiggin notes the role of nepotism in the centres of globalization.


• The Dragon's Tales has plenty of interesting links: one suggesting that known exoplanet systems seem to follow Kepler's law, another suggesting that habitable exomoons are likely to orbit at least part of the time outside of the local stellar habitable zone if they're to avoid overheating, and a third one mapping the genetic legacies of different ancient migrations to the Western Hemisphere.


• Eastern Approaches notes the new cosmopolitanism and experimenting of Polish cuisine and chronicles the destructiveness of the continued alienation and even oppression of the Roma of Hungary.


• Far Outlier's Joel notes the growing popularity of baseball in the late 19th century Kingdom of Hawai'i and chronicles the origins of smallpox inoculation among the beauty practices of Circassian female slaves.


• A Fistful of Euros' Alex Harrowell makes an argument that independent satellite surveillance played a role in the decisions of France and Germany not to involve themselves in Iraq. Commenters dissent, suggesting that an Italy equally plugged into Franco-German networks didn't care about the intelligence.


• Joe. My. God. notes that a bare majority of Taiwanese now support same-sex marriage, and comments approvingly about American gay conservative Jamie Kirchick's calling out of Russian homophobia on Russia Today at the expense of his career with that station.

• 80 Beats' Andrew Moseman reports that U.S. Army doctors have come up with a new effective treatment against Ebola, at least based on the new class of drugs' use in monkeys.


• Castrovalva refers to an interesting study of fascism as it relates to consumerism in a disenchanted world in J.G. Ballard's novels.


• Eastern approaches' V.P. is not happy with France's deportation of Romanian Roma to their homeland.


• At Extraordinary Observations, Rob Pitingolo speculates about the effect of crosswalk countdowns on New York City pedestrians. Speaking as a Torontonian pedestrian, I think that they're challenges. Can you make it?


• A Fistful of Euros' Edward Hugh is not hopeful about the Bulgarian economy's prospects.


• Language Hat reports on efforts to Latinize Russian in the early Soviet Union.


• Joshua Foust suggests at Registan that stability in Chechnya is being bought at the expense of pushing its instability into neighbouring regions of the North Caucasus.


• The Search's Douglas Todd reports on suggestions that Scandinavian legislation on common-law couples, denying surviving partners inheritance rights, might actually be progressive in that it generally lets the partners opt for the sort of relationship they want.


• Slap Upside the Head lets us know that the Conservative federal government has snubbed the Montréal pride parade, again. Surprise.

Once or twice a month, three-year-old Mate Csorba disappears from his family house on the edge of a Hungarian village. When his worried relatives find him wandering in the forest, he tells them he is searching for his father and his older brother, who are out hunting.

That is, after all, what his grandmother told him one morning a year ago, after a midnight blaze of firebombs and gunshots destroyed their house on the edge of a rural village, and black-clad gunmen chased the boy's family through the woods and killed Mate's father and five-year-old brother, both named Robert.

“Little Mate had been sleeping in my house when I heard three shots and a window smashing in their house next door,” his grandmother, Erzsebet, said as she surveyed the burned-out ruins. “I heard a car driving away fast, and then saw my daughter-in-law standing and screaming outside, with burns all over her, beside the body of little Robert. I couldn't tell Mate the truth.”

[. . .]

“You can't imagine what it's like when it gets dark here,” Erzsebet Csorba says. “My 14-year-old son sleeps in my bed, he's so afraid of ending up like his brother.” She plans to stay put in Hungary, in defiance of the right-wing militia known as the Hungarian Guard that likely carried out the killings. But many of her neighbours are considering another, increasingly popular tack: Fleeing Hungary, very often to the safety of Canada.

That is why this Hungarian murder spree, and its aftereffects, have become a matter of deep concern in Ottawa, where officials say they are likely to impose visa restrictions this year on Hungarian visitors.

After the killings gained attention last year, Canada began seeing a sharp spike in applications for refugee status from Hungarian Roma families visiting Canada. Hungary is now Canada's third-largest source of refugee claimants, according to Citizenship and Immigration Canada.

The Harper government is likely to require Hungarians to make applications for visas at Canada's consulates in Hungary, an expensive process that could draw waves of protest from the sizable Hungarian-Canadian community, many of whom arrived as refugees after the 1956 Soviet invasion.

Officially, the government has no visa plans, but aides said restrictions are likely to be imposed after Hungary's April election, in order to avoid providing ammunition to extremist anti-Roma parties.

[. . .]

In the first nine months of 2009 alone, after the murders in Hungary began, that number increased almost fivefold, to 1,353 applications – and the numbers for the past four months are believed to be even higher. All of the 2009 asylum applications have been rejected. Canadian officials argue that Hungarian citizens are free to live in any of the other 26 EU countries, so are not considered legitimate asylum claimants.

The number of refugee claims by asylum-seekers from Hungary has rocketed to nearly 1,400 so far this year - almost five times last year's total - making it the top source country for refugee claims at points of entry into Canada, figures obtained by The Canadian Press show.

The explosion in Hungarian refugee claimants, however, hasn't convinced the federal government to impose visa restrictions on Hungary as it did on the Czech Republic earlier this year.

[. . .]

The number of claims for refugee status from Hungarians rose to 1,353 to the end of September, compared with 285 for all of 2008 and just 24 the previous year.

And the number of claimants nearly doubled in the three-month period after Canada imposed visa restrictions on the Czech Republic and Mexico, compared with the first half of the year.

While Canada does not break down claimants by ethnicity, immigration authorities anecdotally say the vast majority of recent Hungarian refugee claims have been made by Roma.

[. . .]

Many in the Hungarian-Canadian community don't see the recent wave of claimants as legitimate refugees.

"I know what discrimination is, I went through it as a child," said George Telch of Toronto, who came to Canada as a refugee from the former Yugoslavia in 1949.

"Many of us (in Toronto's Hungarian community) think these people are coming to Canada for economic reasons," he said. "They're not genuine refugees.

"They have the old story in their heads that (Canada) is paradise, you don't have to work, you get rich, you get the car, the house, everything."

A ceremony at Auschwitz Sunday to commemorate the half a million Sinti and Roma killed by the Nazis became a reminder of the threats these people continue to face across Europe.

Evidence of the threats came the following day with the murder of a Sinti woman in her home in Kisleta village in Hungary 230 km east of Budapest. Her 13-year-old daughter was injured in the attack. The police in Budapest say that at least 16 attacks on Sinti and Roma people have taken place in the last 12 months.

The Roma are a people who have migrated to Europe since the 14th century. The Sinti are an offshoot of this group living mostly around Germany and Austria. There are an estimated 12 million Roma and Sinti in Europe.

Sinti and Roma, popularly known as gypsies, are the largest ethnic minority group in Europe, and have endured racism and discrimination for centuries. The Nazis killed some 500,000 of them in concentration camps and in raids.

The Aug. 2 ceremony was held because on that date in 1944 Nazi forces killed 2,800 Sinti and Roma detainees – among them children, women, and the elderly - in the gas chambers of Auschwitz. They were brought in from the concentration camp Birkenau that was constructed to imprison gypsies.

Sinti and Roma delegates spoke at the ceremony of the significance of Auschwitz and Birkenau in the history of European racism against gypsies.

"For us Sinti and Roma, both concentration camps constitute a symbol of the affliction and death of hundreds of thousands of our relatives," said Roman Kwiatkowski, chair of the Polish Union of Sinti and Roma. "We, Sinti and Roma from all Europe, are united by the memories of the crimes committed by the Nazi dictatorship against our people."

[. . .]

The discrimination Roma face was evident at the Aug. 2 ceremony itself. The event was nearly cancelled after the Polish government withdrew a grant of 25,000 euros. It was saved by the Polish Jewish community.

"When I heard that the Polish government had withdrawn its financial support for the Sinti and Roma commemoration, I immediately picked up the telephone," Piotr Kadlcik, chair of Poland's Jewish community told IPS. "We cannot allow a moment such as the commemoration of August 2 to fall into oblivion." He called friends and organisations, and persuaded them to donate money for the ceremony.