“People of Freedom and Unlimited Movement”: Representations of Roma in Post-Communist Memorial Museums

Ljiljana Radonic

doi:10.17645/si.v3i5.229

Abstract

The “universalization of the Holocaust” and the insistence on Roma rights as an EU accession criteria have changed the memory of the Roma genocide in post-communist countries. This article examines how Roma are represented in post-communist memorial museums which wanted to prove that they correspond with “European memory standards”. The three case studies discussed here are the Museum of the Slovak National Uprising, the Jasenovac Memorial Museum and the Holocaust Memorial Center in Budapest. I argue that today Roma are being represented for the first time, but in a stereotypical way and through less prominent means in exhibitions which lack individualizing elements like testimonies, photographs from their life before the persecution or artifacts. This can only partially be explained by the (relative) unavailability of data that is often deplored by researchers of the Roma genocide.

Highlights

When I was discussing an earlier version of this article with my colleagues—who are well aware of the pogrom-like attacks that cost the lives of many Roma in post-communist countries in the 1990s and the constant threats anti-Gypsism poses for Roma today, but do not read scholarly texts about Roma on a regular basis—they were glad to find out that there is a word for the mass murder of Roma by the Nazis and their collaborators: Porrajmos
How are Roma represented in permanent exhibitions opened in the last fifteen years? How have the “Europeanization of memory” and the insistence on Roma rights as an EU accession criteria influenced the memory of the so-called “Roma Holocaust” in postcommunist countries?
This article focuses on those state post-communist memorial museums that have included the persecution of the Roma in World War II in their permanent exhibitions most extensively

Summary

Introduction

When I was discussing an earlier version of this article with my colleagues—who are well aware of the pogrom-like attacks that cost the lives of many Roma in post-communist countries in the 1990s and the constant threats anti-Gypsism poses for Roma today, but do not read scholarly texts about Roma on a regular basis—they were glad to find out that there is a word for the mass murder of Roma by the Nazis and their collaborators: Porrajmos. This article focuses on those state post-communist memorial museums that have included the persecution of the Roma in World War II in their permanent exhibitions most extensively. The Holocaust Memorial Center in Budapest is dedicated to the mass murder of Jews and Roma from an entire country—Hungary The fact that these museums have included Roma in the first place can only be understood in the context of the “Europeanization of the Roma Genocide”. 32) Still, we need to distinguish between the individual approach that aims at displaying “ordinary life before” (Köhr, 2007) and empathy without identification on the one hand, and the victim represented as part of a collective, as an emotionalizing symbol for national suffering on the other hand When it comes to representing ethnic minorities, the exhibitions analyzed in this article fight the marginalization of Roma and the history of their persecution in their respective societies. The three case studies will show how this challenge is confronted in the museums

Museum of the Slovak National Uprising

Jasenovac Memorial Museum

Holocaust Memorial Center in Budapest

Conclusions