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If you want to help the Domari people in Palestine, this post has a link and a guide

Like the genocide against Jews, the genocide against Roma gradually moved from the definition of the Roma as racial enemies, to their deportation in slave labor camps, and to their extermination on the Eastern Front and in death camps. Here is a comprehensive summary of how the Nazi anti-Romani genocidal policy unravelled:

(source: Roma Resistance During the Holocaust and Its Aftermaths, Angéla Koczé, Anna Lujza Szasz, eds.)

-- "Technocrats and their Tools of Genocide: The Scientific-Police Complex and the Genocide of Sinti and Roma under the Nazi Regime, 1938–1943", Theophile Leroy and Verena Meier, 2022

The Forgotten History of Romani Resistance

May 15, 2015 By Pierre Chopinaud

On the evening of May 16, 1944, in the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, SS guards armed with machine guns surrounded the area of the camp designated for Roma and Sinti prisoners. Their intent was to round up the nearly 6,000 prisoners there and send them to the gas chambers. But when the guards approached the area, they were met with armed resistance from the inmates.

The prisoners had learned of the planned “liquidation” and fashioned weapons from sheet metal, wood, pipes, rocks, and any other scraps of material they could get their hands on. According to the memories of survivors and witnesses to the incident, the inmates forced the guards into retreat, and though some prisoners were shot that night, the act of resistance allowed the Roma and Sinti prisoners to put off execution for several more months.

How can such an epic episode have been lost to history? Who knows about the Sonderkommandos revolt of August 1944? Who knows about Witold Pilecki, who infiltrated Auschwitz to organize its resistance network? Keeping alive the memories of these events could help prevent such crimes from happening again in the future. 

This is why La Voix des Rroms is raising awareness around May 16, the Romani Resistance Day in Europe. The Romani Resistance Day represents a change in the way Romani culture and identity appear in public space. This change comes from an understanding of this space as a political one, where a history of resistance replaces a history of oppression. We have urged Romani organizations across Europe to embrace this date: there are several events planned this year in Budapest; Lety (Czech Republic); and Paris, where we are organizing Romani Resistance Day (Fête de l’insurrection gitane) in collaboration with other stigmatized minorities like Muslims and blacks.

For too long, Roma people have been misrepresented by stereotypes: the beggar, the prostitute, the compassionate victim, the folkloric artist. Those stereotypes overshadow the nuances of Romani culture and identity, which have to be the result of political struggle. Romani cultural creation aims to challenge mainstream culture, identity, and representation, just as the African American civil rights movement in the United States changed the whole of America’s identity. 

We must do all we can to promote Romani culture and identity. For more than four decades, Europe’s Roma communities have wanted to establish an institution that would give their traditions and creations their own stage. Across Europe, institutions exist to celebrate an array of cultures, nationalities, and identities, but there is nothing of this kind for Roma.

The European Roma Institute, recently proposed by the Open Society Foundations, the Council of Europe, and leading Roma organizations and figures, is a unique way to address this imbalance and give Romani traditions and creations their own stage.

In order to be successful, the European Roma Institute will need to tackle the breadth of Romani culture and identity. A lot has been done in the past to promote Romani culture with the help of an institutional framework, but it failed, in my opinion, because the specificity of Romani culture cannot be expressed using mainstream categories. There are some very specific features of Romani identity and culture that need to be addressed, like Romani humor; among all Roma, there is a common perception of the world, a common distance from society, as is exemplified in Charlie Chaplin movies—whose grandmother was, in fact, a Roma woman from England. 

The main challenge of the European Roma Institute will be to deal with the tensions between unity (we are all “Roma”) and multiplicity (we all belong to the “landscape” or the territories we live in). That double belonging has always structured Romani identity. It needs to be fully addressed.

Ceija Stojka’s bibliography

Ceija Stojka (1933-2013) was an Austrian romani writer, painter, activist and musician. She published three autobiographies: We Live in Seclusion (1988), Travelers on This World (1992) and I Dream That I am Alive - Liberated From Bergen-Belsen (2005), in which she describes the persecution of Austrian Roma by the Nazis and the time she spent in Auschwitz, Ravensbrück and Bergen-Belsen, from her perspective as a romani girl.

“A Gypsy Dreaming in Jerusalem,” Amoun Sleem

Amoun Sleem is a Palestinian Domari* woman living in Jerusalem. At 16 years old, she founded the first and only Domari rights organization in the Middle East, which aims to support the Dom people, and especially Domari women. The Dom have been facing intense racism and persecution from the Israeli State for decades.

“I write this book to show the difficulties of being Gypsy, but also to show the creativity and beauty in the Gypsy culture. I write it to thank the people who were placed in my life as helpers and encouragers. Many of them have passed away. I hope the readers will enjoy my story as I have enjoyed living it. I give thanks to God for what He has given me in these years.” (x)

“A False Dawn: My Life as a Gypsy Woman in Slovakia”, Elena Lacková

“The book recounts Lacková’s life story from her childhood in the Romani settlement until her retirement in 1980 told through the lens of an extraordinarily gifted and strong-minded Romani woman against the background of developments in the second half of the twentieth century in the former Czechoslovakia. Lacková´s fate is testimony to the fate of the Roma as a group in that country.

The text describes the frictions between, on the one hand, Lacková´s position as a Communist and a civil servant taking part in the implementation of state policies towards Roma as citizens of socialist Czechoslovakia and, on the other hand, her approach to life, her attitudes and her way of thinking, which reflect her immersion in Romani tradition and values as well as the hierarchies of rural Slovakia. Also reflected is her determination to help improve the situation of local Romani communities, which had suffered war-time persecution and isolation, and from the ignorance of the post-war local authorities. The book describes her motivation and willingness to take part in the Romani emancipation movement.” (x)

“American Gypsy,” Oksana Marafioti

Oksana Marafioti is a Russian Romani and Armenian writer, naturalized American citizen. “Marafioti’s book, American Gypsy: A Memoir, published this month, is a humorously honest story of growing up Gypsy, touring Europe with her family of performers, dealing with racism in Russia, then adapting to the U.S., where she was caught between the old world and new amid teenage angst, high school and her musician father’s psychic/exorcism business.” (x)

“Zwischen Liebe und Haß”, Philomena Franz (only in German)

Philomena Franz is a Sinti Auschwitz survivor. Her “autobiographical narrative, Zwischen Liebe und Haß: ein Zigeunerleben (1985), is significant as the first survivor account of the atrocities that were inflicted on Roma during the Second World War. For the past forty years, Franz has been active as a speaker at schools, universities, and community meetings, emphasizing the importance of remembering the Holocaust and its victims.“ (x)

“Never Enough Time in the Day: Memoir of a proud Romani woman”, Olga Fečová (only in Czech)

Olga Fečová (1942-2022) was a respected member of the Czech romani community. In her book, she “captures the idiosyncratic inhabitants of a disappeared world, one of Romani settlements where life was lived traditionally, of tenement houses with balcony hallways in the Old Town of Prague, of "colonies" housing the working class, and sincerely shares her life experience and opinions about it all” (x)

“Our Settlement”, Irena Eliášová (only in Slovak)

“Irena Eliášová was born on 3 May 1953 in the Roma settlement of Novésa (Nová Dedina u Levic) in Slovakia. Her father made a living as a musician. In the 1960s the family went to seek work in Czechia. They stayed at numerous places both in Southern and Northern Bohemia. She only finished elementary school because following her father becoming ill she had to take a job and help provide for the family as a seamstress. After getting to know her future husband the couple moved to Liberec. When her three children grew up, she finally became fully invested in her beloved writing. In 2008, she published the first book of memories called “Our Settlement”.” (x)

“Zigenerska,” Katarina Taikon (only in Swedish)

Katarina Taikon was a famous Swedish Romani rights activist, nicknamed “the Martin Luther King of Sweden.” In her autobiography, she criticizes the living conditions Roma are forced to live under in Sweden. Her book had a tremendous impact in Sweden and in the lives of Swedish Roma, as it drew attention to the poverty and the racism they face from the larger society, leading to the first social mobilizations aiming at improving the lives of Roma in Swedish society.

“Sur ces chemins où nos pas se sont effacés,” Pisla Helmstetter (only in French)

Pisla Helmstetter (1926-2013) was an Alsacian Sinti (romani) woman. In her autobiography, she reminisces about her childhood, spent travelling among French landscapes, in the 1930s, and about her teenage years, during which her family was persecuted by the Nazis, who ethnically cleansed Alsace of all its Roma, deporting them to concentration camps or forcing them to internment camps.

[A]nti-Jewish activities both before and during World War Two were distinct from anti-Romani policies in so far as they were more likely to produce substantial political noise as well as a substantial paper trail. Parliaments discussed anti-“Gypsy” legislation, but these deliberations largely produced a consensus that transcended left-right divisions. By contrast, legislative debates on Jews were contentious and offered politicians an opportunity to clarify their positions on major social and political issues. In the first two years of the French Revolution, the National Assembly dedicated no less than thirty-two parliamentary sessions to the subject of whether to give Jews—who constituted less than one percent of the population—citizens’ rights.23 One estimate claims that around 2,500 works on Jewish emancipation appeared in German lands between 1815 and 1850.24 Such disproportionate attention to the rights and actions of a small minority only grew by the late nineteenth century, when parties on the right made the threat of Jews, Jewish money, and Jewish liberalism a signature theme.25 Unlike much of the discrimination that was quietly leveled against Roma, with little debate, anti-Jewish sentiment was something people mulled over publicly and vocally—and also something that Jews opposed with just as much debate and ink. The challenge is to think of these dimensions—the relative silence or noise accompanying persecution and the traces it left—without creating hierarchies of suffering."