Genocide, Postwar Migration, and Social Mobility: Entangled Experiences of Roma and Jews
About the project
Excellence Project, Czech Science Foundation, grant no. 19-26638X 2019–23
Marking a fundamental rupture in the history of Roma and Jews, Nazi genocidal policies altered the culture, social makeup, religious outlook, and geography of both victim groups. Our project works with the understanding that only an interdisciplinary approach—bringing together sociology, anthropology, history, and other disciplines—can help us create an integrated account of Romani and Jewish experiences in twentieth and twenty-first-century Central Europe.
First, we are building on the increasing scholarly focus on the diversity of policies, chronologies, and experiences that characterized the Jewish Holocaust—and by extension also the Romani genocide. This allows us to explore the Czechoslovak case as a variety of a larger set of historical trajectories and to look at Jewish and Romani entanglements in local and European settings. Second, we are drawing on the opportunities for comparative and relational research opened up by recent tendencies to move beyond debates on the uniqueness of the Jewish Holocaust (Weiss-Wendt 2008; Stone 2012). We see a history of entangled Jewish and Romani experiences as a crucial step in the shared development of Holocaust and genocide studies. The second pillar of our project is the migration and mobility of Jews and Roma during and after the war up to the present. We argue that the Holocaust, with its segregation, ghettoization, forced migration, and deportations, influenced the postwar migrations and (social) mobility of both communities – Roma and the Jews – with consequences up to the present. To articulate these connections, we combine historical, sociological, and anthropological approaches.
Team
Head of the project
Kateřina Čapková
Team at the Institute of Contemporary History:
Renata Berkyová
László Csősz
Jan Grill
Marek Jandák
Pavlo Khudish
Markéta Krommelová
Michala Lônčíková
Karolína Stegurová
Michal Vlk
Head of the subteam at the Faculty of Arts
Helena Sadílková
Team at the Faculty of Arts:
Markéta Hajská
Jan Ort
Milada Závodská
External collaborators:
Benjamin Frommer
Ari Joskowicz
Raz Segal
Outcomes related to the history of Roma and Sinti
Dec 13, 2024
The book traces the history of a Romani family from the territory of today’s Slovakia across the 19th and 20th centuries. Working with a large body of diverse historical sources as well as with a wealth of ethnographic data, ...
Nov 26, 2024
Bewertung der Kriegserfahrungen von Roma und Juden in der Nachkriegstschechoslowakei: This article focuses on the recognition of the wartime suffering of Roma, Sinti, and Jews in the territories of the present-day Czech and Slovak ...
Sep 1, 2024
Jan Hauer’s book Moji lidi (My People) reveals the life of Sinti living in the Bohemian lands (today’s Czech Republic) in the 20th century.
Jan 6, 2022
The article focuses on the local practice of the central policies of socialist Czechoslovakia that aimed to regulate the movement of the Roma, namely the legal efforts to settle "nomadic persons" and subsequently the plan of controlled ...
Dec 27, 2021
Autobiographies by two Romani Holocaust Survivors in Communist Czechoslovakia: The chapter discusses autobiographies by two Romani Holocaust survivors from Czechoslovakia written between 1957-1989 in order to explore the post-war ...
Dec 20, 2020
The author of the study presents a micro-historical study of a family of Vlach Roma (Lovára) of western Slovakian origin, who were one of the few Romani groups still on the move in the mid-1950s and who in the late 1950s were forced to ...
Oct 16, 2020
Diaries, testimonies and memoirs of the Holocaust often include at least as much on the family as on the individual. Victims of the Nazi regime experienced oppression and made decisions embedded within families.
Oct 16, 2020
The author provides an insight into the process of post-war reconstruction of family and social life of Roma Holocaust survivors from the Bohemian Lands and Slovakia in the context of a general forgetting of the specifics of their wartime fate ...
May 18, 2023
Today, many people have become resigned to the fact that xenophobia is a central feature of the transatlantic political landscape.
Jun 8, 2022
The conference will center on the responsibilities of Romani and non-Romani historians concerning Romani narratives and the limitations of their capacity to engage with them. It will address the manner in which academic work can be conceptualized ...
Sep 16, 2019
In recent years, an increasing number of research projects, publications, and media have directed their attention toward the subject of Romani migrations and mobilities. Nevertheless, the majority of these studies have seldom integrated ...