Daily Archives: janvier 10, 2023

Turin: Coming Out

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A theatre play on coming out.

The show was born from the idea of five Roma boys and girls in search of their history and identity. Five young people who met during a memorial trip to Auschwitz-Birkenau on the occasion of the day of commemoration of the Roma genocide, on August 2, 2022. This trip allowed five young Roma to discover a chapter of history that they hadn’t been taught in school. Visiting the places where part of their families were exterminated forced them to confront the past and question their own identity as young Roma in Italy today.

Back from Poland, the Roma decided to tell their common story and to intertwine the narrative with some personal stories of today’s Roma. The show aims to keep alive the memory of the tens of thousands of men, women and children who were exterminated and were unable to make their voices heard.

At the same time, the protagonists recount the difficulties of coming out ethnically, that is, of “coming out” and declaring one’s ethnic belonging. Although Roma rationally know that they are not guilty of anything, it is difficult for them to be able to get rid of that sense of guilt that comes from growing up in an oppressive context in which one is considered “thieves”, “dirty”, “inferior”. In the Romani community, the majority of people hide their origins and make themselves invisible. This for fear of falling into a discriminatory limbo that denies the right to housing, health, work and education.

Czech Republic: Disgusting

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The Czech comedian Štěpán Kozub, in his performance at the O2 arena on 29/12/2022 made a really bad joke disparaging Roma and Jews as well as the memory of the Holocaust. Roma and Jewish organisations are protesting.

Kozub told that sometime after the Second World War, a bus full of Roma people went to see the ghetto so that it would never happen again. The guide goes to announce that “a bus full of gypsies” has arrived, and the porter replies: “But we don’t do that here anymore”.

Bad, especially since everybody in the sold out arena laughed.

Slovakia: Enough!

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The gathering of the Marian Kotleba supporters in Michalovce will have an follow up: Roma in Slovakia are planning a series of protests against the former member of the National Council of the Slovak Republic, Marian Kotleba.

The marches will be held in larger cities and towns, they want to invite representatives of the European Commission to in addition to journalists. They will report them to the relevant authorities during this week. František Tanko, the chairman of the civic association Union of Roma in Slovakia, informed about this today at a briefing in front of the Presidential Palace.

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