ABSTRACT
Everywhere Gypsies are the lowest of the low. Until 1989 it was official Communist policy in Eastern Europe to absorb Gypsies into the “ruling” working class. Although the Hungarian attempt to impose a standardized vision of how an ethnic minority like the Gypsies should live was in some respects a specifically Communist project, in many other ways it illustrated a relation between social reformers and the people who were supposed to benefit from these reforms that could have been found anywhere in the “democratic” Western world. In the Czech Republic, most of the petty and not so petty machinations that are worked against luckless Gypsy families have the seal of bureaucratic procedure stamped on them. For as long as there have been Gypsies in Europe, they have suffered hostility, segregation, and misery. Since the beginning of the Second World War, there have been two dramatic attempts to “solve the Gypsy problem” once and for all.
