Abstract:
Based on the study of a specific community between 1927 and 1947, the Čoroman Roma from Tulcea in eastern Romania, the chapter offers an anthropological reading of the relationship between written sources in state archives and oral information collected within the community. In the period between the two world wars, the Čoroman circulated in the Dobrudja region for professional reasons. As a result of this circulation, in 1942 they were transported to Transnistria by the Romanian gendarmerie as "Tiganii Nomazi" (nomadic Gypsies). After their return from the camps in 1944, the group moved back, but was subjected to singular violence in the form of the lynching of 12 men in a local village in 1947. The author consolidates and examines the individual stories of these events as told to him by the Roma, using written archival sources, with the aim of highlighting the unique role of the experience of persecution, its chronology and its actors. Overall, the chapter encourages the reader to allow the Roma of Tulcea to impose their own vision of their history from their own perspective, thus producing an ethnography of violence.

Grégoire Cousin (University of Verona, Italy)

Petre Matei (Elie Wiesel National Institute for the Study of the Holocaust, Romania)