Introduction: memory and recognition of the Nazi genocide of the Roma in the Baltic context

When Wanda Stankiewicz, a survivor of the concentration camp in Pravieniškės, Lithuania, returned to her hometown, Eišiškės, in 1944, she found almost no one of her community left alive. Many of her kin perished in Pravieniškės. Others were killed in the mass shootings at the border with Belarus or were deported to Germany for forced labor. Staying in the middle of her destroyed town, once a home to a vibrant Roma community, Wanda realized that she was left alone to struggle for her living in a hostile world.¹

Every survivor had a unique story. Yet their accounts of return often sound alike. As surviving Roma left their forest hideouts and returned from concentrations camps, they faced the bitter reality of community destruction in which they now had to live. Even the testimonies recorded decades after World War II narrate the experiences of return in terms of loss, loneliness, and alienation. As Slawomir Kapralski notes, ‘This experience subverted the sense of traditional culture and left Roma survivors with a permanently emasculated culture, ruined tradition, destroyed family and clan bonds, and weakened system of cultural cohesion’ (see Kapralski 2022 in this Special Issue). In his contribution, Kapralski further reveals how the trauma encoded in Romani culture and came to define the relations between Roma and ‘others.’

The above seems hardly surprising in the view of existing, though preliminary, statistics on the losses of Romani communities. For the Roma of the Baltic region, the war and genocide were devastating. Arguably, only one in three Roma in Lithuania, one in two Roma in Latvia and one in ten Roma in Estonia survived the war (see Kott 2015). In the cases of Latvia and Lithuania, these estimates might be even higher, since it is as difficult to account for all victims of the Holocaust by bullets as it is to say how many Roma died, while hiding in the wilderness – from starvation, infectious diseases, natural threats, and the severe climate (Bartash 2023b).² The Romani population of Estonia was almost completely destroyed in the course of well-planned and countrywide police actions (see Weiss-Wendt 2022 in this Special Issue).

After World War II, the Romani picture of the region where diverse Romani groups were once at home, significantly changed. The Laiuse Roma, for instance, who had centuries of history in Estonia, were completely swept away (see Weiss-Wendt 2022 in this Special Issue). After the war, Russka Roma from Latvia gradually took their place (see Roht-Yilmaz 2022 in this Special Issue). Likewise, Many Polska Roma of the Vilnius region chose to join postwar population transfers between Poland and the Soviet Union, leaving behind the places where they had lived and traveled since the seventeenth century (for more examples, see Bartash 2023b). Eve Rosenhaft’s contribution sheds light on the fates of Sinti from East Prussia who bore a double trauma – as victims of Nazi persecution and as German expellees from the area that became Kaliningrad region of the Soviet Union after the war.

As tragic as it was, the destiny of the Baltic Roma is largely unknown to most in the Baltic countries. Throughout the Soviet period, the memory of the Roma received neither official recognition not public attention. Romani victims were categorized as ‘victims of fascism,’ along with other noncombatants. As a result, documenting this genocide was not prioritized. The impacts of this omission are still felt today. Most mass killing sites of Roma genocide victims remain undocumented and unmarked, and community initiatives break apart due to the lack of archival evidence and institutional support (see Bartash 2019).

The year 1991 marked a new phase in history writing and the work of memory in the Baltic states. These processes led to the creation of new national narratives that were largely focused on the destinies of titular nations under Soviet rule. As the Baltic societies reworked their own painful memories of the ‘war after the war’ and Soviet deportations, they were not ready to listen to the voices of ethnic minorities affected by the Nazi genocide (see Avin and Pilarczyk-Palaitis 2022 in this Special Issue).

Since late 1990s, the Holocaust has started gradually entering public discourse in the Baltic countries, ‘paving the way for the memory of Romani genocide’ (Avin and Pilarczyk-Palaitis 2022 in this Special Issue). This happened thanks to the continuous efforts of the Jewish community, including Holocaust survivors. They started to initiate community commemorations and museum exhibitions long before professional historians published their works on the Holocaust (Makhotina 2016).

At the same time, the local Roma communities were ‘unruly actors’ in their own states (see Kelso and Eglitis 2014). They had neither a public voice nor material or educational resources to raise awareness about the Nazi genocide. Post-Soviet transformations placed many Roma at the margins of their societies. Nationalist policies of the 1990s, including inflexible language laws, did not always account for the rights and cultural peculiarities of ethnic minorities. Many Roma, for instance, had cross-border life paths and spoke Russian or Polish as their second language. It was not uncommon that they were denied citizenship (and employment), being unable to pass a language exam and prove their long-term residence in the Baltic countries. Until recently, the European Roma Rights Centre has issued disturbing reports on the plight of Baltic Romani minorities subjected to discrimination and anti-Roma prejudice.³

The situation with the commemoration of Romani genocide has started slowly changing after the integration of the Baltic states into the European Union. Despite the EU recommendation to its member states, however, only Lithuania has included the Holocaust Memorial Day for Sinti and Roma (2 August) in the national calendar. Latvian Roma commemorate their victims on International Romani Day (8 April), laying a wreath in the river Daugava (see Šūpulis in this Special Issue). Lithuanian Roma commemorate their victims in front of the Soviet-era memorial ‘to the victims of fascism’ in Paneriai and lay flowers on a symbolic wheel, constructed out of stones by Roma children (see Bartash in this Special Issue). So far, the memorial in Kalevi-Liiva, Estonia, raised on the initiative of a Roma NGO in 2007, is the only one of its kind throughout the Baltics (see Roht-Yilmaz 2022 in this Special Issue).

As demonstrated by Avin and Pilarczyk-Palaitis, official recognition takes a collective effort. Their article reveals a network of memory agents – NGOs, individual activists, and scholars – who have supported the Lithuanian Roma community in their struggle for ‘the most significant and far-reaching achievement’ (see Avin and Pilarczyk-Palaitis 2022 in this Special Issue).

An interesting aspect of this process was the involvement of academics in the debates at the Lithuanian Parliament, as well as in the preparation for these debates. During the parliamentary session, historians Neringa Latvytė and Arunas Bubnys presented their archival findings on the Nazi persecution of Roma in Lithuania. The Lithuanian experience invites us to reflect about the role of scholars in modern society, where researchers are often consulted by policymakers. Even if historians do not produce scholarship together with the communities whose history they write, their research findings (and personal position) may still affect the people. Moreover, scholars may or may not use their voice to speak in support of their ‘research objects’ in public, breaking the silence.

The position of an activist scholar is a brave one. Their views do not gain public approval automatically and are not necessarily shared by colleagues. This is especially true in case of the activist scholars that advocate on behalf of stigmatized minorities, whose narratives of history have not been widely accepted or even confront official histories. As Edmunds Šūpulis has argued for Latvia, ‘Roma collective memory is in potential conflict with the Latvian mnemonic praxis that has a tendency to downgrade everything connected to the socialist system and to the Soviet Union especially’ (Šūpulis 2019, 40). Likewise, the older generation of Lithuanian Roma does not exactly agree with the official line of the glorification of the Forest Brothers, at least some of whom were complicit in the Nazi genocide (see Davoliūtė 2017). A broad public representation of the Forest Brothers’ legacy without an open discussion of its dark sides opens old wounds and does not allow for the ‘unblocking’ of community memory, in Kapralski’s terms. Trauma and mistrust, the result of a neighborly betrayal, sit deeply in the collective identity of the Roma and prevents them from a more active ‘mnemonic integration’ with their societies.

This special issue is, in a certain way, an attempt to break academic silence on the memory of the Baltic Roma communities. Although the scholarship on the memory of the Romani genocide is growing, this trend has largely bypassed the Baltic region. In fact, this is the first attempt to bring together emerging and established scholars whose scholarly paths have crossed with the histories and memories of Baltic Roma.

Agnieška Avin, Anna Pilarczyk-Palaitis, and Eva-Liisa Roht-Yilmaz started working for Roma NGOs long before embarking on their first research project. Therefore, these authors are well positioned to apply a community lens to the public representation of the Nazi genocide of the Roma. Drawing on the concept of new museology, anthropologist Eva-Liisa Roht-Yilmaz explores the depiction of Roma in Estonian museums. New museology places an emphasis on diversity and the participation of the represented communities in the creation of museum exhibitions. None of this works for Estonia, Roht-Yilmaz concludes. In her search for the answer to the question ‘Why?’ Roht-Yilmaz engages in conversations and correspondence with the exhibitions’ curators. She demonstrates how the lack of expertise in Romani history and community outreach prevents Estonian museums from telling the histories of the Roma.

Anthropologists Agnieška Avin and Anna Pilarczyk-Palaitis follow the ongoing processes of the creation of the cultural memory of the Romani genocide in Lithuania. The authors depart from the early post-Soviet period when Romani memory was mostly confined to the oral narratives of Romani survivors. In their exploration of this transition, Avin and Pilarczyk-Palaitis rely on Jan and Aleida Assmann’s (2006) theory of communicative and cultural memory. As they build their chronological overview of various grassroots initiatives, the authors also address the challenges that the Roma community of Lithuania faces. Avin and Pilarczyk-Palaitis use an impressive amount of diverse sources, such as media reports, interviews with activists, and participant observation during commemorative activities.

The analysis by Avin and Pilarczyk-Palaitis reveals the importance of ‘stored memories’ (Assmann 2006) for the processes of memory making. Without having the ‘storages of memory’ – archives and oral history collections – a transition from communicative to cultural memory would be hardly possible. Even if not engaging with the community directly, historian Anton Weiss-Wendt explores the archives of potential community importance. He undertakes an ambitious attempt to ‘relate particular episodes of violence to specific individuals.’ This is a much-needed approach, since, almost eighty years after World War II, we still do not know most Romani victims by name. This significantly complicates commemorative activities and the erection of new monuments. The amount and quality of primary sources on Estonia, and police archives in particular, enable Weiss-Wendt to uncover the names and individual histories of many Romani victims. After extracting as much personal information as possible from police records, the historian juxtaposes this data to the ethnographic records of Paul Ariste, produced before World War II. Thus, the people appear from behind the statistics.

While the memory of the Lithuanian Roma has been gradually transmitted into society, the memories of Latvian Roma are still ‘stored’ in the Latvian National Oral History Archive. Sociologist Edmunds Šūpulis, one of the archive’s creators, searches for an answer to the question: why do the memories of the Latvian Roma not go beyond family cycles and enter the public domain? Utilizing Michael Stewart’s (2004) concept of ‘remembering without commemoration,’ Šūpulis attributes these developments rather to the perception of the past in Romani culture than to social factors. Nevertheless, he admits the absence of public interest and the lack of coordination of community initiatives.

A memory studies scholar, Sławomir Kapralski goes several steps further and provides genius answers to some of the questions raised by other contributors. He does so by integrating empirical studies with theoretical reflections in the field of memory studies. Kapralski proposes four types of ‘Roma memory:’ ‘the memory unconsciously encoded in culture, the second emerges due to the unblocking of memories by external factors, the third refers to the construction of memories by the Roma movement, the fourth accounts for individual management of memory.’ While advancing his argument, the author pays close attention to the interactions between Roma and ‘others,’ emphasizing that ‘Roma do not remember in a mnemonic vacuum but in an interaction with other groups and institutionalized, mass-mediated frames of memory from which they often borrow mnemonic forms and contents’ (see Kapralski 2022 in this Special Issue).

Historian Eve Rosenhaft illuminates the entanglements between the memories of Sinti and German expellees from East Prussia, a region that is often overlooked in the field of Baltic studies. Before the war, East Prussian Sinti were closely integrated with the local rural communities and market economies. But how have both groups – ‘Germans’ and ‘German Sinti’ – remembered their shared Heimat (homeland) and pre-war encounters? Rosenhaft painstakingly brings together pieces of memory as reflected in images, texts, and virtual nostalgic communities. She finds that despite both groups having developed into distinct memory communities after World War II, they share the narratives of ‘flight, expulsion, and resettlement.’ Rosenhaft’s brilliant text reminds us that the history of the Baltic region is ‘the history of a multi-ethnic condominium that defies shifting national borders.’ She calls on historians to ‘keep in reserve a different set of maps, defined by the movements of ordinary people and their respective senses of community and belonging’ (see Rosenhaft 2022 in this Special Issue).

Volha Bartash uses cross-border family histories of Roma as a starting point for her analysis of the relationship between memory and borders. She demonstrates that the Roma from the borderlands of Lithuania, Latvia, and Belarus share the memories of their pre-war trajectories, as well as of the Nazi persecution and German occupation. Bartash argues that these common memories and attitudes toward the past ‘organize’ the Roma of the borderlands in cross-border memory networks. Drawing on her oral history survey and ethnographic observations, Bartash elucidates how the families and communities, separated by state boundaries, have remembered and commemorated the Nazi genocide across shifting borders.

Together, the contributors to this special issue bring to the table a mosaic of empirical case studies on the history and memory of diverse Romani communities from the region. They also address the issues of public representation of the Nazi genocide of Roma, as well as the challenges that activists and practitioners have to tackle in their work. The contributions presented here will be of interest to scholars in the fields of Baltic studies, Romani studies, genocide studies and memory studies. We also hope to reach practitioners, educators, and emerging scholars of the Nazi genocide of the Roma. The articles have extensive references to the national historiographies on the topic and could be used as a departing point for one’s own journey into the fascinating history of the ‘constellation of (Romani) groups’ (Kapralski in this Special Issue) who have been or were once at home in the Baltics.

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Volha Bartash

Volha Bartash, PhD is a researcher and lecturer at the Graduate School for East and Southeast European Studies, University of Regensburg. CONTACT [email protected], Landshuterstr. 4, 93047, Germany.

Neringa Latvytė

Neringa Latvyte is a doctoral candidate and lecturer at the Faculty of Communication, Vilnius University. CONTACT [email protected], Sauletekio al. 9, 10222, Vilnius, Lithuania

Notes

1. Interview with a second-generation Roma survivor conducted by V. Bartash, Eišiškės, Lithuania, October 2016.

2. The term, ‘Holocaust by bullets,’ was coined by Father Patrick Desbois, a Catholic priest and public activist, to bring attention to ‘other’ experiences of the Nazi genocide in eastern Europe, namely the victims of mass shootings (Desbois 2009).

3. For example: http://www.errc.org/roma-rights-journal/roma-denied-documents-and-rights-in-lithuania; http://www.errc.org/roma-rights-journal/lithuanian-authorities-forcibly-evict-five-romani-families-in-winter; http://www.errc.org/roma-rights-journal/latvian-court-finds-employment-discrimination-in-case-brought-by-romani-woman.