Mnemonic border-crossings: how Roma communities from the Baltic borderlands remember their shared past

ABSTRACT

How have Roma communities, separated by state boundaries, remembered and commemorated the Nazi genocide? How have they communicated and mourned for their losses across shifting borders? This article explores the complex relationship between community memory and borders, drawing on my oral history and ethnographic research in the Lithuanian – Belarusian and Belarusian – Latvian border regions. Departing from family histories of Roma before, during, and after the Nazi genocide, my analysis takes several analytical directions by: 1) linking the memory paths with the trajectories of Roma communities; 2) highlighting the ways in which changing border regimes have shaped a Romani commemoration practice; 3) revealing communicative aspects of cross-border memories. My analysis enables me to outline a phenomenon of a cross-border memory community. Such communities are based on family and community networks of Roma, their shared histories, and attitudes toward the past, for instance, nostalgia for the Soviet time. The last section of the article demonstrates how the Soviet nostalgia interweaves with the commemoration of the Nazi genocide.

KEYWORDS:

• Cross-border memory community
• Lithuanian–Belarusian–Latvian borderlands
• Nazi genocide of roma
• public commemoration
• memory politics
• Soviet nostalgia

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Svetlana Novopolskaja and the Roma Community Centre in Vilnius, as well as to Vida Beinortienė, Daiva Tumasonytė, and Aušra Simoniukštytė for their support and advise during my fieldwork in Lithuania. My colleagues Neringa Latvyte and Mantas Šikšnianas guided me through the Paneriai mass killing site and shared their thoughts on the situation with the commemoration of Romani genocide in Lithuania. My work on this article was made possible by a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship (Horizon 2020) at the Leibniz Institute for East and Southeast European Studies, Regensburg (project no. 793826).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Here, I use the terms ‘border’ and ‘boundary’ interchangeably, being aware of the variety of meanings given to them by different disciplines (for a discussion, see Gibson 2016).

2. In 2013–14, I held a Jeff and Toby Herr Fellowship at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and in 2015–16 I held a Research Fellowship at the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies. Both fellowships enabled me to develop my project.

3. In ethnographic writing, vignettes are narrative descriptions of particular scenes from the author’s fieldwork, placed within the main text. Through vignettes, the researcher intends to share their field experiences that are essential for grasping conclusions of the paper (Schöneich 2021, 115).

4. Conversation with a second-generation Roma survivor, Vilnius, October 2016.

5. Here I use the term ‘Holocaust by bullets’ coined by Father Patrick Desbois (Desbois 2009) to bring the reader’s attention to ‘other’ experiences of the Nazi genocide in Eastern Europe, namely the victims of mass shootings.

6. Virtual conversation with a second-generation Roma survivor, Minsk, July 2021.

7. Interview with a second-generation Roma survivor, Braslaŭ, August 2017.

8. Interview with a Roma survivor, Ashmyany, September 2015.

9. Materials of the Soviet Extraordinary State Commission (Chrezvychainaya Gosudarstvennaya Kommissiya po ustanovleniyu i rassledovaniyu zlodeyanii nemetsko-fashistskikh zakhvatchikov i ikh soobshchnikov), Ashmyany raion, Molodechno oblast’, BSSR, 1945, Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii (State Archive of the Russian Federation, GARF), f. 7021, op. 89, d. 12.

10. Interview with a second-generation Roma survivor, Pastavy, September 2015.

11. Interview with a Roma survivor, Pastavy, September 2015.

12. Interview with a second-generation Roma survivor, Ashmyany, September 2015.

13. Interview with a second-generation Roma survivor, Druja, August 2017.

14. The sedentarization itself was part of the Soviet assimilation policy toward the Romani minority. The law of 1956 issued by Nikita Khrushchev stipulated criminal responsibility for traveling (Bartash 2015).

15. Interview with a second-generation Roma survivor, Druja, August 2017.

16. Interview with a second-generation Roma survivor, Vilnius, October 2016.

17. Interview with a second-generation Roma survivor, Eišiškės, October 2016.

18. The European Roma Rights Centre repeatedly reported on the cases of citizenship denial to Roma in Lithuania. See the ERRC website http://www.errc.org/roma-rights-journal/roma-denied-documents-and-rights-in-lithuania (accessed 31 August 2022).

19. Interview with a second-generation Roma survivor, Vilnius, October 2016.

20. Webpage of Braslaŭ raion, https://braslav.vitebsk-region.gov.by/ru/news_raion/view/uchebnyj-god-dlja-drujskix-shkolnikov-nachalsja-s-novoseljja-16006/ (accessed 16 December 2021).

21. Interview of the author with a second-generation Roma survivor, Lida raion, July 2018.

22. Webpage of Klaishany secondary school, https://klaishi.schools.by/news/645006 (accessed 30 August 2022).

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the Marie Sklodowska-Curie [793826].

Notes on contributors

Volha Bartash

Volha Bartash, PhD, is a researcher and lecturer at the University of Regensburg She has published on the history and ethnography of Roma in Belarus and Lithuania, as well as on the history and memory of World War II.