“Porraimos” in Roman means great devouring, great devastation.
It happens on August 2 every year, but few people know about it.
This is the Catastrophe of Roma, Sinti, Kale, Manush in memory of more than five hundred thousand “gypsies” destroyed by Nazi Germany.
Among them is a man named Johann, who is more simply called Rukeli, which means “tree” in the Sinti language, because of the tuft of dark hair that made him instantly recognizable.
His surname was Trollman and he was born in Lower Saxony two days after Christmas 1907.
Johann “Rukeli” Trollmann grew up in Hannover and started boxing at the age of eight.
The boy was talented, strong and agile and soon made himself visible in the ring, although his position as a gypsy in Germany a hundred years ago certainly did not make life easier for him.
At first, he proudly cared little about it, so much so that he had the word “Gypsy” embroidered on his army shorts.
In the ring, Rukeli moved quickly and seemed to dance to the rhythm of imaginary music, almost like Muhammad Ali decades later, which was the exact opposite of what the Germans and their boxing culture used to see and accept.
“Inside his head, Johann saw every blow. He’s seen it before. It was his gift from childhood, and he fought with Radu, who was shorter than him, but also meaner. He is almost two years older, writes Mauro Garofalo in Alla Fine di tutto cosa. wasteland fields. Over time, black and white gave way to color. They lasted nothing, only a thousandth of a second. Nevertheless, there Johann watched what was about to happen. It was a short-lived skill, it was not suitable for everything, his brain fixed the opponent’s moves in advance, a way to neutralize them. He just needed to put speed, strength and breath into it.”
On June 9, 1933, by dancing and hitting hard, Rukeli managed to win the German light heavyweight title against the Aryan Adolf Witt, but eight days later the title was annulled for “unsportsmanlike conduct, punishable conduct, dishonorable and lacking in elegance”. boxing during the dance, and then even in motion when the winner is announced.
However, the Nazi regime gave Rukeli a second chance by forcing him to fight “German style”, unable to move from the center of the ring, unable to remain alert and evasive, without the footwork in which he was an innovator and master.
In short, a lot of shots, only a lot of shots to the center of the field, until one of the two opponents concedes.
Rukeli entered the ring openly defying Nazism and the concept of the Aryan race, his body covered in white flour and his blonde-dyed hair pulled back.
During the fight, the synth-boxer became an easy target for the opponent, and in the fifth round the fight ended with the victory of the Aryan Gustav Eder, who left blood clots mixed with white flour on the ground.
From that day on, all the evil that humanity is capable of raged against the brown-tufted boy, who in the meantime had become a man and, for Nazism, belonged to an inferior race.
“Gypsies appear to be a dangerous mixture of degenerate races,” wrote Robert Ritter, director of the Nazi Hygiene and Race Research Center.
Rukeli had his boxing license revoked and was forced to fight secretly to earn a living, he was sent to forced labor, he was sterilized, he was forced to get a divorce to save his wife and daughter from deportation, he was sent to war, he was injured.
Rukeli was a Roma, he was a Sinti, he was a degenerate race that the Nazi regime wanted to make disappear from the face of the earth, wanted to be consumed by hellfire.
But hell exists in the world of the living, and Rukeli was deported.
Today, Wittenberge is a quiet town in Brandenburg, lying on the banks of the Elbe, but during the Second World War it was a concentration camp, where Rukeli ended up – emaciated, malnourished, humiliated.
They gave him the serial number 9841 to complete the dehumanization process, and Johann Trollmann, known as Ruckeli, did not even have a name left, but only a “registration number” tattooed on his left forearm, which he had to memorize in order to be able to repeat it with every call.
Serving in Wittenberg was capo Emil Cornelius, an amateur boxer who recognized Ruqueli in that haggard shadow with serial number 9841.
In Drowned and Saved, Primo Levi wrote: “Who became a Capo? (…) Firstly, those who were given the opportunity, i.e. persons in whom the Camp commandant or his representatives (often good psychologists) saw the potential of a collaborator: ordinary criminals drawn from prisons, (…) But many, as already mentioned, aspired to power spontaneously: it was sought by sadists (…). The disillusioned looked for him (…) Finally, many of the oppressed looked for him, who suffered from the contagion of the oppressors and tended to unconsciously identify with them.”
Emil Cornelius probably belonged to the second category, the category of sadists and those who were upset and soon forced Rukeli to fight against him.
Capo Emil Cornelius definitely didn’t want to miss the opportunity to take down the light heavyweight champion.
Of course, during the fight, the exhausted body did not allow Rukeli to box, but pride, anger and courage still gave him the strength to deliver well-aimed blows, which knocked out Capo Emil Cornelius and his albagia in the second round.
The next day, Rukeli was found dead with a bullet through his head and a shovel.
However, Nazism failed to erase Ruckeli from the collective memory, and a Sinti, a prisoner of the Wittenberg concentration camp, removed the tattoo with registration number 9841 from his left forearm and reclaimed the name of Johann Trollmann, a champion of dignity outside of boxing.
Only in 2003 did the German Boxing Federation decide to officially return the light heavyweight title taken from him in 1933 to the protagonist of this story, for some time now a street has been named after him in Hannover, and in Berlin a monument in the form of a ring has been erected in his memory. surrounded by lush trees.
Only he is missing in the center of the ring, the one who boxed during the dance and who had strong roots in his nickname.
