Tag Archives: Genocide

News Eastern Europe Poland

Poland: Memorial

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Poland: Memorial

A new memorial for 77 Roma who were murdered in Karczew, Poland, in 1943 is planned. During the interwar period, travelling Roma would come to the village of Przewóz (now part of Karczew) for wintering and rented rooms from local farmers. From 1939, Roma lived in the village, as the Germans banned them from travelling. The life of the local Roma community ended tragically on January 2, 1943. Several German soldiers surrounded the village and began to drag Roma out of their homes onto the streets. Anyone who resisted was immediately shot; a total of 77 people were killed during the executions.

Czech Republic News Eastern Europe

Czechia, Roma, and the Genocide

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Czechia, Roma, and the Genocide

March 11, 1943, 642 Roma men, women and children were deported to Auschwitz Birkenau from the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. This was the beginning of the systematic extermination of Roma in that region.

For the majority of Czechoslovak society at the time, this remained on the fringes of interest. Although there were cases where local residents showed sympathy or tried to help, in general, there was little awareness of the fate of the Roma. And after the war, the tragedy of the Roma Holocaust was neglected for a long time. The participation of Czech gendarmes and camp commanders in the genocide of the Roma during World War II was denied for forty years under communism. The taboo was broken after the revolution by historian Ctibor Nečas and journalist Markus Pape, and courageous activists from among Roma also played their part. For example, Jan Hauer, Antonín Lagryn or Čeněk Růžička, all sons of Leti prisoners.

Austria News Western Europe

Kateřina Čapková

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Kateřina Čapková

Kateřina Čapková currently works at the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies, where she researches the various political strategies towards Roma and Romnja during the Nazi era. In the future, Austria will also increasingly be a focus of her work. Her goal: to finally make historical findings accessible to the general public.

Čapková is a Czech historian and university professor specializing in the history of Roma. Her academic career began in the 1990s at Charles University in Prague. While still a student, she worked in the Department of Jewish Studies at the Institute of Contemporary History of the Academy of Sciences.

News Eastern Europe Slovakia

Slovakia and the Tiso Regime

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Slovakia and the Tiso Regime

Hana Kubátová (45) is a historian, she is dedicated to Holocaust research, and works at the Faculty of Social Sciences of Charles University in Prague. Her book “Where Foxes Say Good Night” about the relationship between Christian nationalism and the Holocaust in Slovakia is currently being published. She says: “When the Tiso regime wanted to create “new Slovaks”, it was easier to say who did not belong to them”. Roma and Jews were definitively part of the New Slovaks…

Czech Republic News Eastern Europe

Czechia: Memorial

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Czechia: Memorial

On April 2, 2025, the gates of the Roma and Sinti Holocaust Memorial in Moravia in Hodonín near Kunštát will open again after the winter break. This will be the 7th visitor season overall. The exhibition “Stories of Survivors” remains from last year, which presents the fates of Holocaust survivors of Roma and Sinti who were internment in the camp in Lety u Písku in the form of biographical medallions.

Czech Republic News Eastern Europe

Czech Memoirs

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Czech Memoirs

An article about the memoirs of Karolína Kozáková, née Růžičková, published under the title Journey through life in a gypsy wagon. It represent a unique testimony about the internment of Roma in the Ruzyně forced labour camp and their subsequent transport to the Auschwitz II-Birkenau extermination camp. It is from these memoirs published by the Museum of Romani Culture in the book Memoirs of Romani Women (2004) that the information leaflet prepared by the Prague Forum for Romani History at the Faculty of Arts, Charles University, for this year’s 82nd anniversary of this tragic event draws. It is the only known eyewitness testimony that captures the internment of Romani people in the Ruzyne forced labour camp.

Czech Republic News Eastern Europe

Czechia: Commemoration

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Czechia: Commemoration

On Monday, March 10, 2025, dozens of people commemorated the 82nd anniversary of the mass deportation of Roma and Sinti from Prague to the Auschwitz concentration and extermination camp with a memorial service in Ruzyne, Prague. The participants, most of whom wore black clothing, laid floral wreaths at the wooden statue. The event, which has been held at this location for the third year and was initiated by the Roma and Sinti Center, is organized by the Prague 6 district in cooperation with the Museum of Roma Culture and the Prague Forum for Roma History at the Faculty of Arts, Charles University.

Czech Republic News Eastern Europe

Prague: Memorial Service

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Prague: Memorial Service

The Prague Forum for Roma History at the Faculty of Arts, Charles University invites you to a memorial service to honour the memory of the Roma and Sinti victims of the Holocaust

On Monday, March 10, 2025 at 3 p.m., a memorial service will be held in the park near the Old Square in Prague Ruzyne to mark the 82nd anniversary of the mass transport of Roma and Sinti from Ruzyne to the Auschwitz concentration and extermination camp.

News Eastern Europe Poland

Auschwitz: Commemoration

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Auschwitz: Commemoration

A commemoration was held on February 26th in Auschwitz on the 82nd anniversary of the first Roma transport to the camp.

News Eastern Europe Slovakia

Slovakia: Commemoration

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Slovakia: Commemoration

80 years ago, in the small locality of Dubnica nad Váhom in Western Slovakia, 26 Roma were murdered by Nazis. 6 women who were ill and 20 men were transported from the detention camp and murdered on the site of an arm factory.

There was a commemoration of this event in Dubnica nad Váhom.

Germany News Western Europe

Germany: Unku

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Germany: Unku
Erna Lauenburger (1920-1943), a Sintiza from Berlin, became known under the name Unku. In 1931, the children’s book “Ede and Unku” by the author Alex Wedding (1905-1966) was published. The story is set in the Berlin working-class milieu and deals with poverty and labour disputes in the Weimar Republic. At the centre of the story is the friendship between the two children of the title.

Together with descendants of Erna Lauenburger, Margitta and Manolito Steinbach from the Menda Yek e.V. association and the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe Foundation as well as the Documentation and Cultural Center of German Sinti and Roma, the Berlin City Museum has expanded the BERLIN GLOBAL exhibition to include the biography of Erna Lauenburger.

Italy News Western Europe

Sardinia: Students on the Genocide

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Sardinia: Students on the Genocide

A group of students from class 5I of the De Sanctis Deledda High School of Human Sciences (Martina Camplani, Martina Vacca, Martina Stefani, Benedetta Garau, Serena Sailis, Alessandro Spanu and Edoardo Fa), coordinated by teacher Franca Rita Porcu (teacher of Philosophy and Human Sciences), created an educational project, based precisely on the podcast tool, to reflect and reason on some of the genocides of history.

Besides the Shoah, the Tutsi, and the Native Americans, one of the episodes is devoted to Roma.

Europe Germany News Western Europe

Philomena Franz

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Philomena Franz

The Nazis would never have imagined that she would outlive them. The almost centenarian Philomena Franz, who escaped certain death several times, in an extermination camp and four concentration camps, delivers these words to the director, producer and film actor Detlev Buck, who meets her in her Berlin home to arrange an interview. It was 2020, Buck had decided to shoot a documentary on the Holocaust for the Arte TV network. Until then he had never dared to make a film about the Nazi persecutions. It was the survivors who encouraged him. They feared that future generations would forget what happened. Among them Philomena Franz, a Sinti, born in 1922 and died a hundred years later, on December 28, 2022.

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