towards an archive of roma experiences of the holocaust
“[The Roma Holocaust] is a story that remains unknown—even to many Gypsies that survived it[1].”
Historians have often referred to the persecution of the Roma and Sinti by Nazi Germany and its collaborators as a “forgotten Holocaust”[2]. The Roma were categorized by Nazi ideology alongside Jews and other supposedly biologically or socially inferior European citizens, for mass sterilization, murder and a host of medical experiments. While scholars, politicians, advocacy groups and members of the general public debate the exact numbers of victims and the genocidal intent of the Nazis, it remains that the deaths of between 220,000 to 1.5 million European Roma and Sinti children, women and men remain but a footnote in popular historical knowledge. The gravity of this state of affairs is put in stark relief by some figures which claim that, by the end of the War, over half of the German, Czech, Austrian, Latvian and Polish Roma had been killed, while almost the entire Roma populations in Holland, Croatia, Belgium, Lithuania and Estonia were exterminated[3]. Attempts to rebuild Roma and Sinti communities after the War were made more difficult by the fact that there was no official recognition of the Roma persecution during the Holocaust until after 1982 in West Germany[4]. What’s more, the compensation laws that went into effect after the War stated that reparations could only be paid to those survivors who were persecuted on account of racial, political or religious motives[5]. The judicial system put in place after the War therefore implicitly sided with official Nazi rhetoric, which legitimated the elimination of Gypsy communities based on an assumed universal asocial criminality. As Jànos Bàrsony, a Hungarian Roma writes,
“[t]here was no catharsis at the liberation, there was no common confronting of the past, there was no forgiving
and no common drawing of a lesson, there was no social debate.[6]”
Perhaps then it is not surprising that the plight of the Roma has not loomed large in popular collective memory of the Holocaust.
Especially in academic discourses, scholars have paid much attention to the fact that the Roma and the Sinti do not seem to “want” to discuss their victimization by the Nazis with the wider world. In fact, there is an startling assumption that the lack of understanding of the Roma past by non-Roma majorities in the places they live is testament to a lack of historical memory or a will to remember in Roma communities. For example, in his post War research, Jerzy Ficowski claims that, “the ovens of the extermination camps have been forgotten,” adding, “one might think that Auschwitz, Treblinka, Belzec and Chelmo never existed[7].” While for Ficowski, forgetting is a strategic testament to the vitality of the Gypsy culture, in much more recent scholarship, Clendinnen[8] and others have suggested that the Roma have never needed to probe their own histories beyond the need to survive in the current moment[9]. In my mind, these assertions misleadingly promote that the Roma are a people “without history” that they have no need for an attachment to their past; or that their “culture” encodes a ritualistic form of “forgetting” that safeguards their cultural identity from assimilation into a non-Roma majority culture. But these types of statements are by no means confined to academic audiences. For example, in her best-selling novel chronicling Roma society across Europe, Isabel Fonseca claims that the Roma have “made an art of forgetting” their experiences of the Holocaust[10]. While none of these authors has nefarious intentions, I join those who believe that this type of totalizing “cultural” reasoning sits dangerously—if ironically—close to the claims of cultural criminality and asociality that Nazi eugenicists employed during the War. My questions are: Could the presumed silence of the Roma mean something other than forgetting? Is this a self-imposed art of forgetting, or perhaps an inability to hear other ways that Roma Holocaust memories are being remembered? Too often, the silences of those who lived through them are taken as evidence of the erasure of their legacy on Roma lives at present.
Towards an Archive?
The study of archives has in itself become an important topic in academic literature[11], one that has turned the archives from a collection of content to be selected from to a subject of serious inquiry in itself[12]. Part of this “archival turn” is a realization that archives are not just about the collection and retrieval of information about the past, but rather are active ways that claims are made about the past and means of understanding are forged in the present. As Schwartz and Cook put it, “archives themselves are part of that claim and therefore shape that understanding. [13]” Archives are thus vested with the dynamics of power in which they are created—a power to control what people in the future might think about the past. Therefore archives may be positioned in ways that assert dominant understandings of history and legitimate class relations or as ways to subvert them. An important recent thread in scholarship about archives has begun to expand the notion of archives to the spaces where memories are transmitted in everyday reality. Riano-Alcala and Baines suggest that, “the archive, then, is living. It is embedded in the day-to-day lives and surroundings of the survivor-witness and inscribed on the bodies of tellers and listeners.[14]” The point is that archives are not static, unified or objective markers of the past, but rather are themselves part of an ongoing and contestable attempt to transmit memory. For the purposes of this website I see archives as a mean of knowledge production about the Roma Holocaust, one that must in itself be examined in the ways it foregrounds certain “facts” about the War at the expense of others. In naming the site “Towards an Archive…” I wish to implicate this website as a part of this process of knowledge production that is both affected by my own position as a North American academic and limited by my own attempts to make sense of Roma Holocaust material.
Oral Testimonies.
Lastly, a short caveat about the lack of excerpts of oral testimony on this site is needed. Written accounts by survivors, witnesses, perpetrators, accomplices and others are a fundamental facet of Holocaust literature. Not to mention, the Nuremburg trials after the War, relied on the oral testimonies of survivors to indict those responsible for some of the atrocities of the Holocaust. Thus oral testimony was and is crucial in the achievement of justice for many of those targeted by genocidal violence. Furthermore, as most of us have not experienced the utter inhumanity of an attempted genocide or the ravages of total war, firsthand accounts provide a crucial and unique glimpse of the unimaginable. In regards to scholarly invocation of these narratives, Holocaust studies is a well established field in many universities and there are high quality peer-reviewed journals like Holocaust and Genocide Studies which continue to shed light on the experiences of Holocaust survivors and their families. Together the words and experiences of those that endured the Holocaust form frameworks to understand genocidal violence and its effects.
In spite of this I have chosen not to reproduce quotations of oral testimonies here. The reasons are twofold. The first is that I have not conducted the in-depth study of oral testimonies of Roma Holocaust survivors that I believe is necessary to fully elucidate the context that these testimonies are made in. Writing against the tendency of some academics to emphasize moments of linguistic breakdown in survivor testimonies—which many believe is a pathological result of extreme trauma—some theorists claim we must be “wary of making up people”[15] by supplanting our own rationale for explaining the experiences of Holocaust survivors. As Hirsch and Spitzer persuasively argue, such use of oral testimonies is well intentioned. “But, when, in the process of analysis and reflection, we cite and repeat those moments, when we thus abstract them from the context of their appearance, we risk projecting too pervasive a structure of meaning unto them.[16]” Secondly, I am interested here in the ways that Roma Holocaust memory is transmitted to audiences in the general public as well as policy makers and academics. Therefore I have included references to many works in literature, film, visual art, etc (academically centred or otherwise) that rely on the personal experiences or oral testimony of those who experienced the Roma Holocaust. My hope is that, by leaving in tact the diverse and complex social milieus that the testimonies have been produced in, visitors to the site will explore them in their original contexts and decide for themselves how these testimonies affect them.
Conclusion.
The overall intention of this website is not to provide a “correct” or a complete account of the Roma Holocaust. It is, rather, to create a public space where alternate memories of the Holocaust can sit uncomfortably juxtaposed with dominant Holocaust histories. In this context silence, forgetting, and remembering are part of a larger politics of memory[17] that has likely augmented the forms of representation that Roma memories of the Holocaust have taken in the post-War years. Rather than assume that the silence of the Roma in the historical record of the Holocaust represents a lack of history or will to remember, this website represents my attempts to ask in what other ways might these memories be expressed. Could it be that the Roma have been speaking in other ways? That scholars, politicians and the wider non-Roma public have neglected to attend to the alternative ways that the Holocaust has been experienced and remembered? I think yes. The Roma can and do articulate their memories of the Holocaust. I believe that an unfortunate part of academic research is that it often does not reach beyond an academic audience. Therefore, in making public my own search for Roma expressions of Holocaust memory I aim at engaging a wider audience than would be possible in writing an academic paper. My personal interest in Roma Holocaust memory began by asking why these sorts of memories tend to stand in the shadows of more dominant versions of history. My hope is that you, as a visitor to this site, will ask the same question.
D. Manson, PhD Student.
Vancouver, Canada.
April 14, 2014.
[1] Fonseca, Isabel (1995) Bury Me Standing: The Gypsies and Their Journey. New York: Vintage, Pp. 243.
[2] Fraser, Angus (1995) The Gypsies. Oxford: Blackwell Fraser’s, Pp. 257
[3] Brearley, Margaret (2001) The Persecution of Gypsies in Europe. American Behavioural Scientist 45, Pp. 590
[4] Zoltan D., Barany (2002). The East European gypsies: regime change, marginality, and ethnopolitics. Cambridge University Press. Pp. 265
[5] Margalit, Gilad (1997). The justice system of the FRG and its policy regarding the persecution of the Gypsies during the Third Reich. Holocaust and Genocide Studies 7(3): 330–50.
[6] Quoted in, Bársony, János and Agnes Daróczi (2008) Pharrajimos: The Fate of the Roma During the Holocaust. New York: IDEBATE Press, Pp. 12.
[7] Ficowsci, Jerzy (1950). The Polish Gypsies of To-day. Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society 29, Pp. 95.
[8] Clendinnen, Inga (1999). Reading the Holocaust. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
[9] See also, Stewart, Michael (2004). Remembering without Commemoration: The Mnemonics and Politics of Holocaust Memories among European Roma. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 10(3), Pp. 568.
[10] Fonseca, Pp. 276.
[11] See Jacques Derrida, 1995. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (Chicago: Chicago University Press) for an influential attempt to establish the archive as a legitimate theoretical subject.
[12] Stoler, Ann Laura, 2002. Colonial Archives and the Arts of Governance. Archival Science 2: 87–109.
[13] Schwartz, Joan and Terry Cook, 2002. Archives, Records, and Power: The Making of Modern Memory. Archival Science 2: 3.
[14] Riaño-Alcalá, Pilar and Erin Bained, 2011. The Archive in the Witness: Documentation in Settings of Chronic Insecurity. The International Journal of Transitional Justice 5: 413.
[15] Kidron, Carol A, 2009. Toward an Ethnography of Silence: The Lived Presence of the Past in the Everyday Life of Holocaust Trauma Survivors and Their Descendants in Israel. Current Anthropology 50(1): 18.
[16] Hirsch, Marianne and Leo Spitzer, 2009. The witness in the archive: Holocaust Studies/ Memory Studies. Memory Studies 2: 158.
[17] Hacking, Ian (1996). Memory Sciences, Memory Politics. In Tense Past: Cultural Essays in Trauma and Memory, eds. Paul Antze and Michael Lambek. Routledge: London, Pp. 67-88.
Historians have often referred to the persecution of the Roma and Sinti by Nazi Germany and its collaborators as a “forgotten Holocaust”[2]. The Roma were categorized by Nazi ideology alongside Jews and other supposedly biologically or socially inferior European citizens, for mass sterilization, murder and a host of medical experiments. While scholars, politicians, advocacy groups and members of the general public debate the exact numbers of victims and the genocidal intent of the Nazis, it remains that the deaths of between 220,000 to 1.5 million European Roma and Sinti children, women and men remain but a footnote in popular historical knowledge. The gravity of this state of affairs is put in stark relief by some figures which claim that, by the end of the War, over half of the German, Czech, Austrian, Latvian and Polish Roma had been killed, while almost the entire Roma populations in Holland, Croatia, Belgium, Lithuania and Estonia were exterminated[3]. Attempts to rebuild Roma and Sinti communities after the War were made more difficult by the fact that there was no official recognition of the Roma persecution during the Holocaust until after 1982 in West Germany[4]. What’s more, the compensation laws that went into effect after the War stated that reparations could only be paid to those survivors who were persecuted on account of racial, political or religious motives[5]. The judicial system put in place after the War therefore implicitly sided with official Nazi rhetoric, which legitimated the elimination of Gypsy communities based on an assumed universal asocial criminality. As Jànos Bàrsony, a Hungarian Roma writes,
“[t]here was no catharsis at the liberation, there was no common confronting of the past, there was no forgiving
and no common drawing of a lesson, there was no social debate.[6]”
Perhaps then it is not surprising that the plight of the Roma has not loomed large in popular collective memory of the Holocaust.
Especially in academic discourses, scholars have paid much attention to the fact that the Roma and the Sinti do not seem to “want” to discuss their victimization by the Nazis with the wider world. In fact, there is an startling assumption that the lack of understanding of the Roma past by non-Roma majorities in the places they live is testament to a lack of historical memory or a will to remember in Roma communities. For example, in his post War research, Jerzy Ficowski claims that, “the ovens of the extermination camps have been forgotten,” adding, “one might think that Auschwitz, Treblinka, Belzec and Chelmo never existed[7].” While for Ficowski, forgetting is a strategic testament to the vitality of the Gypsy culture, in much more recent scholarship, Clendinnen[8] and others have suggested that the Roma have never needed to probe their own histories beyond the need to survive in the current moment[9]. In my mind, these assertions misleadingly promote that the Roma are a people “without history” that they have no need for an attachment to their past; or that their “culture” encodes a ritualistic form of “forgetting” that safeguards their cultural identity from assimilation into a non-Roma majority culture. But these types of statements are by no means confined to academic audiences. For example, in her best-selling novel chronicling Roma society across Europe, Isabel Fonseca claims that the Roma have “made an art of forgetting” their experiences of the Holocaust[10]. While none of these authors has nefarious intentions, I join those who believe that this type of totalizing “cultural” reasoning sits dangerously—if ironically—close to the claims of cultural criminality and asociality that Nazi eugenicists employed during the War. My questions are: Could the presumed silence of the Roma mean something other than forgetting? Is this a self-imposed art of forgetting, or perhaps an inability to hear other ways that Roma Holocaust memories are being remembered? Too often, the silences of those who lived through them are taken as evidence of the erasure of their legacy on Roma lives at present.
Towards an Archive?
The study of archives has in itself become an important topic in academic literature[11], one that has turned the archives from a collection of content to be selected from to a subject of serious inquiry in itself[12]. Part of this “archival turn” is a realization that archives are not just about the collection and retrieval of information about the past, but rather are active ways that claims are made about the past and means of understanding are forged in the present. As Schwartz and Cook put it, “archives themselves are part of that claim and therefore shape that understanding. [13]” Archives are thus vested with the dynamics of power in which they are created—a power to control what people in the future might think about the past. Therefore archives may be positioned in ways that assert dominant understandings of history and legitimate class relations or as ways to subvert them. An important recent thread in scholarship about archives has begun to expand the notion of archives to the spaces where memories are transmitted in everyday reality. Riano-Alcala and Baines suggest that, “the archive, then, is living. It is embedded in the day-to-day lives and surroundings of the survivor-witness and inscribed on the bodies of tellers and listeners.[14]” The point is that archives are not static, unified or objective markers of the past, but rather are themselves part of an ongoing and contestable attempt to transmit memory. For the purposes of this website I see archives as a mean of knowledge production about the Roma Holocaust, one that must in itself be examined in the ways it foregrounds certain “facts” about the War at the expense of others. In naming the site “Towards an Archive…” I wish to implicate this website as a part of this process of knowledge production that is both affected by my own position as a North American academic and limited by my own attempts to make sense of Roma Holocaust material.
Oral Testimonies.
Lastly, a short caveat about the lack of excerpts of oral testimony on this site is needed. Written accounts by survivors, witnesses, perpetrators, accomplices and others are a fundamental facet of Holocaust literature. Not to mention, the Nuremburg trials after the War, relied on the oral testimonies of survivors to indict those responsible for some of the atrocities of the Holocaust. Thus oral testimony was and is crucial in the achievement of justice for many of those targeted by genocidal violence. Furthermore, as most of us have not experienced the utter inhumanity of an attempted genocide or the ravages of total war, firsthand accounts provide a crucial and unique glimpse of the unimaginable. In regards to scholarly invocation of these narratives, Holocaust studies is a well established field in many universities and there are high quality peer-reviewed journals like Holocaust and Genocide Studies which continue to shed light on the experiences of Holocaust survivors and their families. Together the words and experiences of those that endured the Holocaust form frameworks to understand genocidal violence and its effects.
In spite of this I have chosen not to reproduce quotations of oral testimonies here. The reasons are twofold. The first is that I have not conducted the in-depth study of oral testimonies of Roma Holocaust survivors that I believe is necessary to fully elucidate the context that these testimonies are made in. Writing against the tendency of some academics to emphasize moments of linguistic breakdown in survivor testimonies—which many believe is a pathological result of extreme trauma—some theorists claim we must be “wary of making up people”[15] by supplanting our own rationale for explaining the experiences of Holocaust survivors. As Hirsch and Spitzer persuasively argue, such use of oral testimonies is well intentioned. “But, when, in the process of analysis and reflection, we cite and repeat those moments, when we thus abstract them from the context of their appearance, we risk projecting too pervasive a structure of meaning unto them.[16]” Secondly, I am interested here in the ways that Roma Holocaust memory is transmitted to audiences in the general public as well as policy makers and academics. Therefore I have included references to many works in literature, film, visual art, etc (academically centred or otherwise) that rely on the personal experiences or oral testimony of those who experienced the Roma Holocaust. My hope is that, by leaving in tact the diverse and complex social milieus that the testimonies have been produced in, visitors to the site will explore them in their original contexts and decide for themselves how these testimonies affect them.
Conclusion.
The overall intention of this website is not to provide a “correct” or a complete account of the Roma Holocaust. It is, rather, to create a public space where alternate memories of the Holocaust can sit uncomfortably juxtaposed with dominant Holocaust histories. In this context silence, forgetting, and remembering are part of a larger politics of memory[17] that has likely augmented the forms of representation that Roma memories of the Holocaust have taken in the post-War years. Rather than assume that the silence of the Roma in the historical record of the Holocaust represents a lack of history or will to remember, this website represents my attempts to ask in what other ways might these memories be expressed. Could it be that the Roma have been speaking in other ways? That scholars, politicians and the wider non-Roma public have neglected to attend to the alternative ways that the Holocaust has been experienced and remembered? I think yes. The Roma can and do articulate their memories of the Holocaust. I believe that an unfortunate part of academic research is that it often does not reach beyond an academic audience. Therefore, in making public my own search for Roma expressions of Holocaust memory I aim at engaging a wider audience than would be possible in writing an academic paper. My personal interest in Roma Holocaust memory began by asking why these sorts of memories tend to stand in the shadows of more dominant versions of history. My hope is that you, as a visitor to this site, will ask the same question.
D. Manson, PhD Student.
Vancouver, Canada.
April 14, 2014.
[1] Fonseca, Isabel (1995) Bury Me Standing: The Gypsies and Their Journey. New York: Vintage, Pp. 243.
[2] Fraser, Angus (1995) The Gypsies. Oxford: Blackwell Fraser’s, Pp. 257
[3] Brearley, Margaret (2001) The Persecution of Gypsies in Europe. American Behavioural Scientist 45, Pp. 590
[4] Zoltan D., Barany (2002). The East European gypsies: regime change, marginality, and ethnopolitics. Cambridge University Press. Pp. 265
[5] Margalit, Gilad (1997). The justice system of the FRG and its policy regarding the persecution of the Gypsies during the Third Reich. Holocaust and Genocide Studies 7(3): 330–50.
[6] Quoted in, Bársony, János and Agnes Daróczi (2008) Pharrajimos: The Fate of the Roma During the Holocaust. New York: IDEBATE Press, Pp. 12.
[7] Ficowsci, Jerzy (1950). The Polish Gypsies of To-day. Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society 29, Pp. 95.
[8] Clendinnen, Inga (1999). Reading the Holocaust. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
[9] See also, Stewart, Michael (2004). Remembering without Commemoration: The Mnemonics and Politics of Holocaust Memories among European Roma. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 10(3), Pp. 568.
[10] Fonseca, Pp. 276.
[11] See Jacques Derrida, 1995. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (Chicago: Chicago University Press) for an influential attempt to establish the archive as a legitimate theoretical subject.
[12] Stoler, Ann Laura, 2002. Colonial Archives and the Arts of Governance. Archival Science 2: 87–109.
[13] Schwartz, Joan and Terry Cook, 2002. Archives, Records, and Power: The Making of Modern Memory. Archival Science 2: 3.
[14] Riaño-Alcalá, Pilar and Erin Bained, 2011. The Archive in the Witness: Documentation in Settings of Chronic Insecurity. The International Journal of Transitional Justice 5: 413.
[15] Kidron, Carol A, 2009. Toward an Ethnography of Silence: The Lived Presence of the Past in the Everyday Life of Holocaust Trauma Survivors and Their Descendants in Israel. Current Anthropology 50(1): 18.
[16] Hirsch, Marianne and Leo Spitzer, 2009. The witness in the archive: Holocaust Studies/ Memory Studies. Memory Studies 2: 158.
[17] Hacking, Ian (1996). Memory Sciences, Memory Politics. In Tense Past: Cultural Essays in Trauma and Memory, eds. Paul Antze and Michael Lambek. Routledge: London, Pp. 67-88.