Abstract:
The text is a draft chapter of a forthcoming book on the social and political engagement of Roma in post-war Czechoslovakia during the first two decades of its existence as a communist state (1948-1969). Based on documents written by socially engaged Roma or reporting on their activities, the text explores the visions and arguments they proposed. By contextualizing these in the evolution of the state's approach to G*psies, the text traces the social spaces in which activists tested their strategies and visions, as well as the willingness of the communist state to include Roma as partners. The text offers insight into a development that preceded the establishment of the only Czechoslovak Roma organization sanctioned by the communist state, the Union of G*psies-Roma (1969-1973), whose leaders also participated in the international Romani movement. Focusing on the first 20 years of Romani activists' efforts in Czechoslovakia to claim their status as partners in negotiating the future of Roma thus offers a much needed look at the genesis of a Czechoslovak part of this important global development.

Helena Sadílková is an assistant professor in the Department of Central European Studies at Charles University in Prague, where she is also the director of the Romani Studies Seminar. She was a Ben and Zelda Cohen Fellow at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington (2022). Her main research interests include the post-war history of Roma in Czechoslovakia, the history of state socialism, and the socio-political participation of Roma as a historically marginalized community. She is co-editor-in-chief of the Czech Roma Studies journal Romano džaniben (Prague). Her publications include "Asserting a Presence in the Public Sphere: Autobiographies of Two Romani Holocaust Survivors in Communist Czechoslovakia" (with M. Závodská in Donert C., Rosenhaft E.: The Legacies of the Romani Genocide in Europe since 1945, Routledge, 2022) and "The Postwar Migration of Romani Families from Slovakia to the Bohemian Lands. A Complex Legacy of War and Genocide in Czechoslovakia" (in Čapková, Adler: Jewish and Romani Families in the Holocaust and its Aftermath, Rutgers University Press, 2020).
Contact: helena.sadilkova@ff.cuni.cz

Eszter Varsa is a social historian with a Ph.D. in Comparative Gender Studies (Central European University, Budapest, 2011). She was a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Intra-European (IEF) Research Fellow at the Leibniz Institute for East and Southeast European Studies (IOS) in Regensburg (2014-2016), and a Romani Rose Fellow at the Research Center on Antigypsyism at the Department of History, University of Heidelberg (2020). Her main research interests include the history of child protection, health/hygiene, reproductive politics, and Roma in 20th century Eastern Europe. Currently, Eszter Varsa is a postdoctoral researcher in the ERC project ZARAH: Women's Labor Activism in Eastern Europe and Transnationally, From the Age of Empires to the Late 20th Century (Project Director: Susan Zimmermann) at the Central European University, Vienna.
Contact: varsae@ceu.edu