Eliska Tanzer (2020) The Girl from Nowhere. A Romani Ghetto Life: A Memoir.

How many languages can you speak? Read and write in? I do a passable impression of English. That’s about it. Eliska Tanzer, birthplace was Drovane. She was brought up in a Romani ghetto in Slovakia. Therefore, she  can speak Slovak and Romani. She learned the language of dance from her mother, Lenka, a prostitute but continued to fail to learn their family trade and couldn’t blow a banana.

Franz Volker was East German before he was German. So Elizka can also speak German as her dad took her back and forward to live with him. Her dad fathered another four children with four different mothers. Their common tongue—German.  

Her grandmother on her father’s side surprised her grandchildren by being fluent in Russian. Because she was born in Russia. Eliska may have picked up a smattering of Russian, listening to her speak about her past.

Franz claimed not to know Lenka was only thirteen when his racist mates hired her as a titbit.  

Her own mother, Vera, had been in Auschwitz and part of Dr Mengele’s experiments, after she claimed to be a twin, because she thought it meant better conditions.

Franz’s dad, Sikke, remembered that era fondly. He brought his son up to fight bare- knuckled bouts with other lads from an early age. His indoctrination was that Hitler was misunderstood. He was a German nationalist, pushed too far. And the German nation was being forced to give up its own nation to Jews and foreigners. White people starved (as did all poor people in the Hungry Thirties). All Hitler wanted to do was liberate white people. Reclaim their land. Stop other nations taking over their country and filling it with untermensch. Concentration camps were necessary to protect ordinary white people.

Multiculturalism was a racist trick and the thin-end of the wedge to bully non-whites and propagate foreign doctrines that poisoned the nation.

If any of this sounds vaguely familiar from the racial language and playbook of the moron’s moron Trump and his running dogs, then this was Franz’s bible. He worked with white supremacist groups in Eastern Europe, Poland and Germany, spreading the word. The paradox here is his daughter was not pure blood and he not only fucked a Gypsy but kept in touch with Lenka, even nursing her.

Ironically, Lenka found the money and connections to send their daughter, Eliska, in a cardboard box to England by fucking a racist English MP.

Eliska learned English in Leicester and Wolverhampton, while still a fourteen-year-old child. She was sent to work, of course, cleaning, night and day. Those kinds of jobs English kids really love to do.

Eliska also picked up Punjabi and Hindi. The latter was useful for working in the black economy, nightshift, making clothes as a seamstress (and designer). But also for understanding what some of her rapists were saying when they took her virginity and beat her almost to death in a typical lad’s night out.

The language of a person as a thing is universal. The language of nationalism bleeding racial hate and white superiority. Eugenics, dressed in the nice clothes of the middle-classes, quite happily TAKING ALL OUR JOBS AND GETTING HOUSES. FUCKING OFF BACK TO THEIR OWN COUNTRY.

‘England will always be my homeland,’ said Eliska Tanzer. It gave her an education and allowed her to write. She stopped watching the news. It was filled with increasingly more and more racist bile. It was depressing her.

Eliza Tanzer, The Girl from Nowhere, has somewhere. She refuses to be othered as a thing to be disposed of, when unused, in the dogma of prevailing dehumanising political rhetoric of Trump, Farage et al.  

Something they never call allow: ‘Justice is giving each their due.’ Cicero.  

And I’m quite partial to the Ubuntu (Southern Africa) saying, without fully understanding it.

‘I am because we are.’           

The Girl from Nowhere is not a must read. But I did feel compassion for that poor little gypsy girl. Choosing hatred is a career choice for many politicians. I’m going off track as I usually do. Eliska Tanzer tells it like it was and is. Read on.