C C M M Y Y CM CM MY MY CY CY CMY CMY K K ISBN: 978-3-9822573-0-3 ISBN: 978-3-9822573-0-3 9 9783982783982257303257303 1st edition Copyright © 2020 European Roma Institute for Arts and Culture (ERIAC) Selection and editorial matter © Anna Mirga-Kruszelnicka and Jekatyerina Dunajeva, 2020 Individual chapters © their respective authors 2020 “Re-thinking Roma Resistance throughout History: Recounting Stories of Strength and Bravery” is developed in the framework of the European Roma Institute for Arts and Culture (ERIAC) project “Re-thinking Roma Resistance”, funded by Stiftung Erinnerung, Verantwortung und Zukunft (Foundation EVZ). This publication does not represent an expression of opinion by the Foundation EVZ. The author(s) bear(s) responsibility for the content. Published by European Roma Institute for Arts and Culture (ERIAC) Cover design by Bozzai Krisztina Cover illustration © Emanuel Barica 2020 Proofreading by Camellia Bojtor Printed in Budapest, 2020 100 copies ISBN 978-3-9822573-0-3 Table of content Preface by Ethel Brooks 5 Introduction. “Re-thinking Roma Resistance: Recounting Sto- ries of Strength and Bravery” by Anna Mirga-Kruszelnicka and 13 Jekatyerina Dunajeva PART 1: REGIONAL PERSPECTIVES ON ROMA RESISTANCE Chapter 1. “Roma Resistance and the Struggle for Historical Jus- 28 tice in Norway and Sweden” by Jan Selling Chapter 2. “Roma Resistance in Serbia, Slovenia, Bosnia and Her- 45 zegovina, Montenegro and Macedonia during World War II” by Danijel Vojak PART 2: COUNTRY CASE STUDIES OF ROMA RESISTANCE DURING THE HOLOCAUST Chapter 3. “Roma Struggle in Lithuania: Strategies of Survival and 68 Impulse to Resist” by Aurėja Jutelytė Chapter 4. “Roma Holocaust in Hungary: Importance and impli- 98 cations of Roma Resistance” by Jekatyerina Dunajeva Chapter 5. “Roma Resistance in the Independent State of Croatia, 120 1941-1945” by Danijel Vojak Chapter 6. “Roma Resistance in Occupied Poland” by Justyna 145 Matkowska Chapter 7. “‘How I became a partisan’. Filmmaking as a Resistance 169 Strategy against Oblivion” by Vera Lacková Chapter 8. “The German Sinti and Roma at the Time of National 187 Socialism” by Bildungsforum gegen Antiziganismus PART 3: ROMA RESISTANCE THROUGHOUT HISTORY Chapter 9. “From Roma Slavery to WWII – Roma Resistance in 200 Romania” by Adrian-Nicolae Furtună Chapter 10. “Roma Resistance in Spain” by Nicolás Jiménez 220 González Chapter 11. “French Roma and Travellers’ Resistance: a Long 233 Struggle” by Lise Foisneau Biographies 247 Preface By Ethel Brooks In 2020, seventy-five years after the end of World War II, and seventy-six years after the destruction of the so-called zigeunerlager at Auschwitz-Birk- enau, the Memorial for the Murdered Roma and Sinti under National So- cialism in Berlin is under threat. Erected in 2012, today the Deutsche Bahn plans a new railway line connecting Potsdamer Platz to the Reichstag. Sitting directly across from the Reichstag in the Tiergarten, the memorial is in the middle of Berlin, and, while new possible routes are being mapped and alter- nate plans are being made – including the addition of an information centre in the rail station under the memorial – the very fact that, only eight years after its inauguration, this memorial is under threat, shows the importance of continued vigilance, continued resistance and continued commemoration. The Memorial came thirty years after Germany officially recognised the ra- cially-based motives for the annihilation of Roma and Sinti. Its inauguration occurred nearly forty years after the first activists began calling attention to the losses suffered by Roma and Sinti communities after their persecution had gone unacknowledged for decades after the end of World War II. At the inau- guration of the Roma and Sinti Memorial, Romani Rose, head of the German Council of Sinti and Roma, a Sinto activist who lost 13 members of his family at Auschwitz-Birkenau, said, “There is not a single family of Sinti and Roma in Germany, who have not lost immediate family members. It shapes our identi- ty to this day.” The Holocaust claimed the lives of three-quarters of the Roma and Sinti population in Europe; in some areas, such as the Czech Republic and parts of Poland, the Romani population was decimated. There are multiple areas of research, documentation and analysis that are yet to be carried out, including creating a better archive, a stronger analysis and a clearer under- standing of Roma and Sinti lives. Persecution of Roma and Sinti predated the Nazi era, with historiographic 5 evidence of pogroms, harassment and genocide reaching as far back as the Middle Ages through the nineteenth century.1 While under Article 109 of the Weimar Constitution, Roma and Sinti were accorded full and equal citizen- ship rights, by 1926, Bavaria required registration of all Sinti and Roma and instituted measures for “Combatting Gypsies, Vagabonds and the Work-Shy.” In 1936, a central office for “Combatting the Gypsy Nuisance” opened in Mu- nich, and the Interior Ministry set up directives authorising police to conduct raids on “Gypsies” in preparation for the Berlin Olympics. That same year, Roma became subject to the Nuremberg Race Laws, and many Roma who came under the scrutiny of the state were forcibly sterilised. The first concen- tration camp for Sinti and Roma (called zigeunerlager, or Gypsy Camp, by the Nazis) was established at Marzahn, on the outskirts of Berlin, on July 16, 1936. Located between a sewage dump and a cemetery, the camp imprisoned Roma and Sinti who had been rounded up during the pre-Olympic period. Di- rectly after, local municipalities established concentration camps for Sinti and Roma throughout Germany and beyond, set up by the Nazis and their allies throughout Europe.2 It is important for us to remember and document, Romani and Sinti expe- riences of life before the Holocaust; to understand that the widespread use of identity cards with anthropometric measurements and racial categorisations were part of the founding of Interpol; and that the roundups and internments of Roma and Sinti began in Nazi Germany in the mid-1930s. To remember and to work to document all that we lost – the hundreds of thousands of in- dividuals, the families, the communities, about whose fate we know nothing, and whose stories are not told in history books; nor, most likely, are they com- memorated in national archives. While concentration camps are the best-documented sites of wartime atrocity by the Nazis and their allies, their prisoners tortured, worked to death, gassed and murdered by other means, they are just one facet of the genocidal project of the Holocaust in Europe. Approximately twenty thousand concen- tration camps were set up across Europe, some for transport, others for forced 1 For an historical account of anti-Gypsy laws, persecution and oppression, see Ian Han- cock, The Pariah Syndrome: An account of anti-Gypsy slavery and persecution (Ann Arbor, 1987: Karoma Publishers). 2 United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Sinti and Roma: Victims of the Nazi Era; Internet; available from http://www.ushmm.org/education/resource/roma/roma.php; accessed June 13, 2013. 6 labour, and still others for mass murder. Along with the concentration camps that imprisoned millions, ghettoes were set up in major cities, set apart by brick walls, barbed wire and armed guards, housing Jews, Roma and Sinti, and others. In Poland, the Czech Republic and beyond, German troops (Wehr- macht) and police murdered countless Roma and Sinti, who were buried in mass graves in the countryside.3 Along with official and unofficial pogroms throughout Europe, mobile death squads – einsatzgruppen – were deployed across the countryside as the Nazis pushed eastward into the Soviet Union. The numbers of Roma and Sinti who perished in the camps is only part of the story – the excavation of mass graves – most unmarked – and the iden- tification of those buried in them is still being carried out in the eastern part of Europe in the present day. There is much work to be done to document Romani experiences of the Holocaust, and still much more to determine an accurate estimate of the numbers who were murdered, both inside the camps and by mobile killing squads, pogroms and other forms of violence. In the seventy years since the end of World War II, we still have no accurate count of the Romani and Sinti lives lost during the Holocaust, especially in the areas in the East, where the Romani population was greater and, we can assume, the number of those murdered rose accordingly. It is crucial for us to hold memorial ceremonies and set aside spaces and monuments to those who were murdered, to those who lost family, loved ones and community, to those who returned from the camps or hiding only to find their cultures and life worlds decimated; to those who survived genocide. Fur- thermore, it is important not only to remember the dead and commemorate the survivors but also to celebrate the heroes, those who reached out beyond their families, beyond their communities, who – in the work of saving the lives of others – ran the risk of losing their own. What about Roma and Sinti resistance to the terror and destruction carried out by the Nazis and their allies? One of the most significant but understud- ied, and, according to recent research, perhaps apocryphal acts of resistance carried out by Roma and Sinti prisoners occurred on May 15-16, 1944 in the zi- geunerlager of Auschwitz-Birkenau. Roma and Sinti prisoners were deported to Auschwitz in family groups, and at least 23,000 were murdered in the gas 3 Gerhard Baumgartner, “Concentration Camps,” for Project Education of Roma Chil- dren in Europe, Council of Europe, https://www.un.org/en/holocaustremembrance/docs/ Roma%20concentration-camps%20OSCE%20.pdf ; Internet; accessed June 13, 2013.