ABSTRACT Roma and Jews occupied a similar space in the mindset of the wartime Slovak authorities when they designed persecution policies that targeted these groups. This article explores the various entanglements produced by this persecution, examining not only policy proposals, legal norms, and persecution practices, but also collective and individual experiences and memories. Focusing on several aspects of the wartime experiences of Slovak Jews and Roma (such as displacement, forced labour, and participation in the Slovak Army or the resistance), the authors explore the simultaneity, parallels, separations, and asymmetries in the implementation of particular persecution policies, as well as the different types of entanglements of the local Jewish and Romani communities in them. By examining how Romani and Jewish individuals perceived each others’ persecution, the article emphasizes the complex interwar relationships among members of the two communities, particularly in rural Slovakia, as a key phenomenon that especially shaped the Romani memory of the destruction of the Jews. In this context, the article also discusses the asymmetrical silence regarding the position of local Roma in Jewish testimonies, a silence shared by both Jewish survivors and their interviewers, even in the post-socialist era. Building on its exploration of the asymmetrical dynamics of postwar recognition of Jewish and Romani Holocaust victims, the article also highlights specific initiatives in which the predominance of Jewish recognition and Holocaust memory has facilitated the inclusion of Romani co-sufferers, for example, in certain compensation programmes.

ABSTRACT Scholars have juxtaposed genocide in four ways: they compare them; they incorporate them into a single master narrative; they offer causal explanations linking the emergence of one genocidal campaign to another; or they focus on relations between victim groups. Building on the essays in this journal issue, this article explores how new research on Roma and Jews can help us break with some common arguments in Holocaust studies that emerge from these approaches. Emphasizing the power of local analyses of interactions between victim groups, it discusses how we can challenge familiar chronologies and overcome a Berlin-centric focus in depictions of the Romani Holocaust. It highlights the possibility of an integrated history of Nazi and Axis war crimes that allows the experiences of different victim groups to shape our questions.

The entangled Holocaust history of Roma and Jews throughout “Rain of Ash: Roma, Jews, and the Holocaust”, tells the untold stories of shared experiences and victimhood. Responding to “Who will tell the stories of the Romani Holocaust?”, Joskowicz acknowledges Roma's sufferings and highlights the uneven position of Roma in their pursuit of justice, as well as the lack of recognition, unequal resources, and uneven memorialization. Additionally, the book reflects the attitudes and narratives that are still being integrated across Europe, about Roma. The author acknowledges that scholars, activists, and lobbyists recognized the Romani genocide but also critically approaches the Romani scholarship. “Rain of Ash: Roma, Jews, and the Holocaust”, is an essential contribution to the Romani knowledge production and an invitation for Romani scholars and activists to engage further and question the past.

ABSTRACT Remedios Amaya was the first Roma woman to represent Spain at the Eurovision Song Contest. Chosen because of her ethnicity, Amaya’s Romani heritage was meant to commemorate the Samudaripen/Porajmos (Romani Holocaust) in the year Munich hosted Eurovision (1983). Despite efforts to foster an image of modernization and progressive values, the hostile reception that followed her performance being awarded zero points contributed to the perpetuation of various stereotypes of Romani women. Analyzing press reviews of Europe’s most popular music program, my aim is to explore the perceptions of non-Roma commentators with regard to the selection and reception of a Romani singer as Spain’s representative. Looking at reception studies and stardom, this article will analyze the intersection of ethnic and gender stereotypes in relation to a female Roma artist during the early years of Spanish democracy. It will explore the hypersexualization and exoticization of Amaya’s TV performance, which revived the image of the Gitana, a trope that under Franco embodied the image of an idealized Spain. Widely exploited by the tourist industry, Roma culture (or more precisely, the naturalization of certain stereotypes assigned to Gitanos) was blamed for reviving the association with the recent dictatorship, thus displaying the persistence of Spain’s unresolved past and ambivalent cultural identity that still destabilizes Spaniards with regards to their status in Europe.

Starting with an analysis of artworks by Małgorzata Mirga-Tas, the paper examines the modalities of Romani (in)visibility in the context of Holocaust commemoration and knowledge production. Using a case study of one video testimony: an interview with Romani survivor Krystyna Gil conducted by Michał Sobelman and recorded for the Fortunoff Archive on 13 May 1995, the article scrutinizes Romani invisibility in four aspects. Firstly, as a specificity of Romani Holocaust, which according to Gil herself happened and is happening “on the fringes:” regarding both the geography of the Romani dispersed Holocaust and its hard-negotiated presence in historical research. Secondly, in the context of presence of Roma in visual archives of the Holocaust, dominated by Jewish stories of survival. Thirdly, as a form of mimicry in majority society that for the wartime generation of Roma – and Jews – would always be a reverberation of the “good looks” from the times of the Holocaust. Finally the paper asks how to commemorate the Romani Holocaust so that it becomes visible – visible on Romani terms. English translation will follow.

The Memoirs of Ceija Stojka: Child Survivor of the Romani Holocaust by Loreley French (review)

The Memoirs of Ceija Stojka, Child Survivor of the Romani Holocaust by Ceija Stojka (review)

Reviewed by: The Memoirs of Ceija Stojka, Child Survivor of the Romani Holocaust by Ceija Stojka Cynthia A. Klima Ceija Stojka, The Memoirs of Ceija Stojka, Child Survivor of the Romani Holocaust. Translated by Lorely E. French. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2022. 280 pp. During Spring 2005, an Austrian colleague suggested that the author Dr. Lorely E. French meet up with Ceija Stojka, a Romani writer, artist, musician, and activist who as a young girl had survived Auschwitz-Birkenau, Ravensbrück, and Bergen-Belsen. Over a thirty-three-year period, Ceija had filled over thirty notebooks filled with memories, thoughts, and illustrations, many of which concerned her life growing up in pre-Nazi times as well as her experiences in various concentration camps. This work is the culmination of many years of collaboration with Ceija and subsequent student and colleague interest in Ceija's experiences as a Roma child imprisoned by the Nazis during World War II. As an activist herself in Romani causes, Ceija raised visibility of the Romani after World War II and wrote and sang original songs. But it was not until 1988 that Ceija wrote her first memoir, entitled We Live in Secrecy: Memories of a Romani-Gypsy. Ceija describes the settlements into which Roma were forced and the ever-growing persecution against her people in Austria. The memoir is intense and descriptive, and Dr. French has done a wonderful job of translation and has succeeded in capturing the desperation and trauma of the camps. The memoir focuses mainly on Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, and Ravensbrück, relating many horrific experiences up to the British liberation in 1945. As Ceija states, "I couldn't describe this a second time, because in my thoughts I am experiencing it all over again as if it had happened yesterday" (45). The descriptions of the camps, the translations of songs that originated in Auschwitz, and the forced movement from camp to camp are emotionally described. Ceija's second memoir, entitled Travelers in This World: From the Life of a Romani-Gypsy, introduces the reader to the new life Ceija led as a 14-year-old girl, living with her mother and her mother's new partner while the family traveled. It was during this time that Ceija began enjoying the company of a small book that was at first difficult for her to read. "Every free minute I took the small book out of my hiding place. I preferred to read when I was alone and unobserved" (86). Indeed, this is the point in Ceija's life when her love for learning and writing blossoms. The descriptions in this memoir give the [End Page 130] reader a sense for occupied Austria, replete with its Russian occupiers, necessary identity cards as the family moves through different occupied zones, and dislike for people like Ceija. It is in this memoir that the reader learns of Romani laws and traditions as they are explained by Ceija's mother and Aunt Gescha. Eventually, Ceija gives birth to her son Willi, wrapping him in red swaddling to protect him from the dangers of life. A second child brings Ceija to the realization that she must fend for these children and find a way to support them. This memoir is especially touching as it draws the reader into the world of young Roma women who struggled to take care of young children and protect them from a still-hostile society. One cannot help but think of Ceija's sufferings in the concentration camps and hark back to her life as a young girl freed from the grip of the Nazis, only to be once again treated as "other" and as much less than non-Romani Austrian citizens. Ceija's final memoir, Am I dreaming I'm Alive? Liberated from Bergen-Belsen, is dedicated to her mother, Sidonie Stojka. The reader is transported back into the past to the Ravensbrück concentration camp, where she and other family members marched in bitter cold weather past mounds of corpses. It was into these piles of corpses that she and her mother dove to keep warm in the bitter cold. Ceija relates harrowing stories of trying to stay warm among...

ObjectiveCongenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH) owing to 21-hydroxylase deficiency (21-OHD) is a rare autosomal recessive disorder caused by pathological variants in the CYP21A2 gene. After a high prevalence of classic 21-OHD CAH in the Romani population was reported in the Republic of North Macedonia, we decided to estimate the prevalence of 21-OHD in Croatia and, if high, assess the possible causes and estimate the frequency of particular CYP21A2 variants.DesignCross-sectional study.MethodsData from a Croatian 21-OHD genetic database was reviewed, and only Romani patients were included in the study. CYP21A2 genotyping was performed using allele-specific PCR, MLPA, and Sanger sequencing.ResultsAccording to a survey conducted in 2017, Croatia had 22,500 Romani people and six of them had a salt-wasting (SW) form of 21-OHD. All were homozygous for the c.IVS2-13A/C-G pathological variant in intron 2 and descended from consanguineous families belonging to different Romani tribes. The calculated prevalence of 21-OHD in Croatian Romani is 1:3,750, while in the Croatian general population, it is 1:18,000. Three of the six Romani patients originated from two neighboring villages in North-western Croatia (Slavonia County), as well as the seventh patient who is of mixed Romani/Croatian descent and heterozygous for the c.IVS2-13A/C-G pathological variant (not included in the prevalence calculation).ConclusionA high prevalence of SW 21-OHD in the Croatian Romani population caused by the homozygous cIVS2-13A/C-G pathological variant was found. In addition to isolation and consanguinity, other possible reasons could be the heterozygous advantage of the CYP21A2 gene pathological variant and the bottleneck effect as a result of the Romani Holocaust in World War II.

This article explores performance-centred efforts to remediate the erasure of Romanies from public Holocaust narratives. First, the French play Samudaripen uses aesthetic strategies that emphasize themes of violence and rupture in order to evoke the brutality of Romani persecution under Nazi and Vichy regimes. With its performative elisions between Romani experiences in internment camps in France and concentration camps abroad, Samudaripen connects both historically-specific and fictionalized instances of Romani trauma to broader patterns of anti-Romani persecution past and present. Second, the Romanian-Romani language theatre piece Kali Traš (‘Black Fear’) relays the story of the Romani deportations to camps in Romania in the region of Transnistria under the rule of Romanian fascist dictator Ion Antonescu. Kali Traš pushes back against the silencing of the Romani genocide by reinvigorating the counter-history of the Romani Holocaust in both informative and affectively compelling ways. Each play proclaims Romani agency in commemorative contexts through its narrative and aesthetic strategies. This article shows how Romani artists have engaged in public-facing projects that criticize mainstream Holocaust historiographies and anti-Romani racism more broadly, assessing the extent to which such works constitute valuable additions to Romani struggles for recognition and reparations.

Roma continue not only to be discriminated against and to experience racist-motivated violence. Past and present racist violence and trauma that Roma experience are largely devalued by societies in Europe today. Knowing that education plays a key role in the development of intergroup relations and the development of students’ identities, the question emerges: what is the role of educational discourses on Roma in the development of social attitudes that devalue the violence and trauma experienced by Roma individuals and communities? In this essay, I pose this question and outline existing studies that could provide us with some answers as well as with avenues for further research.

Abstract For over half a century, historians have made ample use of witness testimonies. Efforts to preserve the accounts of marginalized people in particular have broadened the range of voices available to us and significantly expanded the field. Yet we have paid too little attention to the potentially disturbing consequences of the creation and distribution of such testimonies. Focusing on the experiences of Romani Holocaust survivors, this essay argues that new practices of surveillance and victim-witnessing developed in tandem, from the mid-twentieth century to the present. Beginning in the 1960s, prosecutors asked Romani survivors to testify about the crimes committed against them under Nazism even as state authorities continued to criminalize and surveil Romanies across Europe. These and related experiences have meant that different Romani witnesses—or potential witnesses—have often had to balance the desire to have their stories heard against the fear of being listened in on. As surveillance becomes increasingly pervasive and as personal information is increasingly monetized, the lessons that European Romanies learned as early victims of targeted policing remain salient for historians today. Despite its potential to empower, victim-witnessing also creates new vulnerabilities—both those we can currently anticipate and those we can’t yet fully imagine.

Both academic and popular culture discourses are inhabited by statements that “pathologize” the ways Roma remember the Holocaust and other traumatic events. Against these claims, this article’s main aim is to explore contemporary artistic production from Austria which fosters “Roma will to memory” within an assemblage of political practices and discourses. To this end, I will explore Marika Schmiedt’s body of artistic memory work from 1999 to 2015, relying on a critical visual approach. The impetus for this exploration is Slawomir Kapralski’s assertion that the actual cases of active remembering and commemoration among Roma and Sinti would render the traditional approach to Roma as “people without memory and history” inaccurate. As this case study shows, there is no such a thing as “Roma indifference to recollection,” but rather, the testimony about the traumatic past is silenced or obstructed by the lack of the infrastructure, the bureaucracy of the archives, and the strategic forgetting politics.

From the Editor José Brunner As we know, modern societies have developed a broad spectrum of practices to preserve the memory of their past. They impose a history curriculum on pupils, store documents in archives, build museums and proclaim official days of remembrance. In all these instances they seek not only to provide information about a world that no longer exists, but also to produce narratives of past events and experiences, giving them present meaning and pointing to future ramifications. Literature constitutes a less formal and more imaginary way of resuscitating the past, giving it a fictional new life and narrative meaning. In the first contribution to this issue, Nathan Bracher analyzes a striking phenomenon in the French literary scene: the recent appearance of a number of prominent historical novels and narratives of World War II, which, along with an account of traumatic events, relate their authors’ own quest to reveal the truth about the past and explore its meaning for the present. Describing these novels as written in the “first-person present imperfect,” Bracher refers both to the fact that this past is not yet entirely over or complete and to the narrator’s deep involvement in this history. The following two contributions deal with problems in narrating the First World War in contemporary Britain, which also arise from the involvement of the narrators in the history they wish to relate. Catriona Pennell discusses the ways in which the history of the war is taught in English secondary schools and investigates the consequences of such narratives for British society. Marlene A. Briggs analyzes the transcribed oral history of “Harry” Patch, The Last Fighting Tommy, in order to reveal the psychic and social dimensions of trauma in the testimonies of Great War veterans. She points to the ways in which such oral histories may contradict established versions of the experience of the war and shed light on reconstructions of memory after trauma The analysis also raises broader questions about the reception of the First World War in Britain today. [End Page 1] It may seem, perhaps, that questions relating to narrative entanglements, omissions and emphases are more relevant to literary representations, history teaching and oral accounts of the past than to the collection and storage of testimonies in archives. But Ari Joskowicz’s exploration of the ways in which testimonies of the Romani Holocaust are often provided by Jewish survivors or stored in archives dedicated to the Jewish Holocaust is a striking example of how one minority controls a large portion of the public memories of another. Noah Shenker examines how the distinct archival techniques and testimonial methodologies that the USC Shoah Foundation Institute developed for recording the testimony of Holocaust survivors may affect our understanding of other genocides and the fate of their victims, in this case those of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. He argues that although the transfer of these methodologies to the Cambodian context may obscure the historical and cultural specificities of the Cambodian genocide, they can nonetheless contribute to the documentation of that event. Thus, while the first three contributions to this issue analyze the effects of present personal, political or social entanglements on the way history is narrated, the latter two essays analyze their effects on the techniques and methods deployed to record and store testimonies about the past. [End Page 2] Copyright © 2016 The Trustees of Indiana University

Bridging Holocaust history and memory studies, this article explores the multiple and asymmetrical entanglements of Jewish and Romani (or “Gypsy”) accounts of Nazi genocide. These entanglements exist in large part due to the fact that testimonies of the Romani Holocaust are commonly filtered through the lens of Jewish survivors or stored in archives dedicated to the Jewish Holocaust. Modern Jewish-Romani relations thus represent a rare—and arguably unique—case in which one minority controls such a significant portion of the public memories of another.

The Nazi Genocide of Roma: Reassessment and Commemoration, edited by Anton Weiss-Wendt. New York & Oxford, Berghahn Books, 2013. 284 pp. $120.00 US (cloth), $34.95 US (paper). An earlier book edited by Anton Weiss-Wendt was Murder Without Hatred: Estonians and Holocaust (Syracuse, 2009), but he omits H-word from title under review here, referring instead to Romani Genocide. This was considered move; there are still number of Holocaust scholars who acknowledge that fate of Romani victims constituted genocide, but who balk at including them Holocaust. And there are some too who deny that their treatment even qualified as genocide. Guenther Lewy claimed that the various deportations of Gypsies to East and their deadly consequences do not constitute acts of genocide (The Nazi Persecution of Gypsies, Oxford, 2000, p. 223). Steven Katz denied that Romanies were victims of genocide: in comparison to ruthless, monolithic, meta-political, genocidal design of Nazism vis-a-vis Jews, nothing similar ... existed case of Gypsies ... In end, it was Jews and Jews alone who were victims of total genocidal onslaught both intent and practice at hands of Nazi murderers (Quantity and interpretation: Issues comparative historical analysis of Holocaust, Remembering for Future, Oxford, 1988, p. 213). And Yehuda Bauer argued that for Nazis, Roma were only minor irritant (Anatomy of Auschwitz Death Camp, Bloomington and Indianapolis, 1994, p. 446). Weiss-Wendt makes it clear that [t]he new archival evidence presented this anthology confirms earlier findings that placed victimization of Roma within definition of genocide--a confirmation rather than reassessment (p. 1). This theme unites collection of chapters Weiss-Wendt has assembled. Each presents new interpretations of, and sometimes new material for, growing body of research on Romani Holocaust historiography. The related question, whether Romanies were targeted for racial reasons, denied for so long by Federal Republic of Germany's judiciary connection with reparation for survivors--is also addressed chapter by Gilad Margalit. That it needed to be addressed at all when Nazi documentation abounds with references to Romani race reflects impotence of Romani voice during years following 1945. Roma are still not speaking for themselves loudly enough to be heard. The number of Romani intellectuals investigating fate of Romanies Holocaust remains small, surely accounting part for slow progress bringing it to world attention. While lack of Romani scholars is certainly factor, another is discussed by Slawomir Kapralski, who calls false (p. 236) position made by its main proponent Michael Stewart who argues that there is a general lack of interest matters past among Roma, (p. 579)--some kind of (genetic? cultural?) Romani selective memory at work that sets Holocaust to one side. In addressing commemoration that forms part of book's title Kapralski makes it clear that there are fact number of memorials to Romani victims throughout Europe. …

This article examines the Romani Holocaust experiences by mapping out the silences that haunt this question. As a case study, the article uses the testimonial documentary Porraimos: Europe’s Gypsies in the Holocaust and argues that the Romani Holocaust question is entangled in a moral discourse described in Lyotard’s Le Differend. Bearing witness to the differend can give new insights into the understanding of the Holocaust, the conceptualization of Romani identity, and the framing of media witnessing. The article concludes with a discussion of the face and its relation to witnessing arguing that the affective feel of the differend that interpellates one as a witness is delivered through the face.

We have been able to observe a shift in the European Union’s cultural policy from conceptualizing culture in symbolic terms to instrumentalizing it in governmental terms. Taking the example of Romani minority governance in Europe, this paper analyzes the consequences of this turn and focuses on the nexus between Romani Holocaust remembrance and cultural policy in the EU and its member states, the Czech Republic in particular. Governing through cultural and memorial practices, rather than predominantly through social policies and human and minority rights, represents a relatively new stage in how the EU tries to deal with Romani minorities in post‐communist Europe. The politics of European minority integration has led to an increased attention to the marginalized situation in which many European Roma live. However, the simultaneous governmentalization of Holocaust remembrance for integrative aims risks reinforcing stereotypes of the Roma, thereby hampering insight into current marginalizing mechanisms toward them and into possibilities to challenge these processes.

This essay focuses on the role of memory in Austria. It demonstrates the significance of literary production when addressing and coming to terms with the past. Reflecting on the role of memory in history and literature, I see the boundaries between the two blurring. My inquiry includes several questions: Why should we remember? How can we integrate literature into a theoretical framework of memory and history? Why do authors take the trouble to reconstruct a burdened past or even relive pain and suffering? How do authors address the connections between the past and the present? Is it important to draw distinctions between Non-Romani and Romani authors?

* Foreword, by Isreal W. Charny * Preface * Acknowledgments * Introduction to the First Edition, Alan S. Rosenbaum * Introduction to the Second Edition, Alan S. Rosenbaum * 1. The Ethics of Uniqueness, John K. Roth * 2. Religion and the Uniqueness of the Holocaust, Richard L. Rubenstein * 3. From the Holocaust: Some Legal and Moral Implications, Richard J. Goldstone * 4. The Uniqueness of the Holocaust: The Historical Dimension, Steven T. Katz * 5. Responses to the Porrajmos: The Romani Holocaust, Ian Hancock * 6. The Atlantic Slave Trade and the Holocaust: A Comparative Analysis, Seymour Drescher * 7. The Armenian Genocide as Precursor and Prototype of Twentieth-Century Genocide, Robert R. Melson * 8. The Comparative Aspects of the Armenian and Jewish Cases of Genocide: A Sociohistorical Perspective, Vahakn N. Dadrian * 9. Stalinist Terror and the Question of Genocide: The Great Famine * 10. The Holocaust and the Japanese Atrocities, ???Tokudome * 11. Applying the Lessons of the Holocaust, Shimon Samuels * 12. The Rise and Fall of Metaphor: German Historians and the Uniqueness of the Holocaust, Wulf Kansteiner * 13. Uniqueness as Denial: The Politics of Genocide Scholarship, David E. Stannard * About the Contributors * Index