Tag Archives: Genocide

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.

Italy News Eastern Europe News Western Europe Slovenia

Slovenia, Fascists, and Roma

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Slovenia, Fascists, and Roma

In Lonjer, a then entirely Slovenian village on the outskirts of Trieste, the fascist authorities interned six Roma and Sinti between September 1940 and September 1943. The fascists confined them there after the Italian Ministry of the Interior ordered all prefects on September 11, 1940, to register Roma who were citizens of Italy and to confine those without permanent residence.

This fact as well as others were presented by Paola Trevisan in the Gopčević Palace. The historian and anthropologist dedicated her first scientific monograph to the persecution of Roma and Sinti in fascist Italy, which she presented in Trieste as part of the events marking Holocaust Remembrance Day. The author was interviewed by historian Michele Sarfatti.

News Eastern Europe Slovakia

Slovakia, Tiso, and Holocaust

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Slovakia, Tiso, and Holocaust

In the Northern Slovakian Town of Varin, there was still a street named after Dr. Josef Tiso. A catholic priest, he served as president of the Nazi client state of Slovakia and was executed in 1947. Under his presidency, Jews but also Roma were deported and executed.

Now that the street is being renamed, locals object. Maybe some history lesson would be appropriate here?

News Eastern Europe Slovenia

Slovenia on the Genocide

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Slovenia on the Genocide

An article in the Slovene press about German historian Karola Fings from Heidelberg University mwho  is working on the first encyclopedia on the genocide of the Roma during World War II. In an interview with the French news agency AFP, she said that in many countries the full extent of the persecution of the Roma during World War II is still unknown.

However, Fings cited the example of Estonia, where the Roma community was virtually wiped out, so that its dialect does not even exist. She added that some countries, such as Belgium, the Netherlands and Croatia, were particularly affected.

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