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 drastic wartime fate, the persistence of anti-Roma stereotypes, and the massive population movements in post-war Czechoslovakia. The migration of Roma from Slovakia to the Bohemian lands remains central, interpreted both as a response to historical local social hierarchies and wartime persecution, and as a possibility of unprecedented social mobility in the realities of postwar Czechoslovakia. Using the example of a family from southern Slovakia that joined the migration movement and soon established itself as residents of postwar Brno, the Moravian capital and future Czechoslovak center of Romani political mobilization, the author argues that migration offered Romani individuals, supported by their family structures, multiple opportunities to actively shape their postwar lives and the lives of their families and local communities.

Book chapter from Eliyana Adler, Kateřina Čapková (eds.), Jewish and Romani Families in the Holocaust and its Aftermath (Rutgers University Press, 2020), 190-217.