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Countering discrimination
The “Breaking into a Gallop” project consisted of three workshops, held in Austria, the Netherlands, and Serbia, which brought together teachers, artists, archivists, Roma community members, and museum professionals from across Europe to explore how we teach the genocide of the Roma, and how we might do it better.
The project is developed by Terraforming in cooperation with Centropa from Germany, the Intercultural Institute Timisoara IIT from Romania, and TENET Center for Social Transformations from Ukraine.
One of the main challenges with teaching about the genocide of the Roma is the persistent nature of antigypsyism, said Misko Stanisic, one of the organizers of the project. Speaking from his experience of living in Sweden, the Netherlands, and Serbia, Misko says, “It really goes throughout everything, through all the sections of society, through all professions. It’s very hard to get rid of these prejudices.”
Contemporary Roma voices
And when it comes to teaching about this topic, the perspectives of Roma survivors and communities are too often sidelined or left out entirely.
One of the ideas for this project came from the development of the IHRA’s Recommendations for Teaching and Learning about the Persecution of Roma during the Nazi era. In that resource, it was crucial to make a connection to the present by representing contemporary voices of the communities, and Roma voices were included throughout the text.
But this is only the first step. Misko asked, “What does a young person, the young Roma person today in any country of IHRA members, feel and think about this past?” This workshop series was an attempt to bring these voices to light.
“What does a young person, the young Roma person today in any country of IHRA members, feel and think about this past?”
Building solidarity
For Sherin Johnson, who attended the workshop in Utrecht, the workshop offered more than theoretical insight.
Sherin works as a Bildungsreferentin at Arolsen Archives, developing their learning modules. Creating educational content that addresses Nazi crimes is what she does every day. But learning from teachers and community members from so many national contexts gave her a new window into this work.
She was surprised by how quickly the group began tackling important topics, like: “How can we establish solidarity on an international level if we lack it on a national level? How do experts come in who are not part of the community? How can we avoid Roma voices becoming invisible again in this whole process?” She said, “What really stuck with me the most about the workshop was the kind of solidarity that we developed towards each other in a very short amount of time. That really made every conversation an opportunity to learn.”
The fact that each participant had such a different set of experiences and expertise is by design and is crucial to the success of the project. “Let’s invite somebody who is an archivist, somebody who is a museum worker, somebody from school and somebody who is a historian, somebody from the community, an artist, a journalist, a young person from civil society,” said Misko, “because they really need to discover these other worlds. They need to discover the need of their work in these other contexts.”
The challenges remain
The next step for the project is turning these lessons and insights into a set of guidelines, designed from the practitioners’ perspectives, which will be available by the end of 2026.
But there are also less tangible results, like the fact that when the participants filed off to the train station at the end of the workshop, they didn’t rush off to their train. Some stayed, drinking coffee, and talking about their shared problems and how to solve them.
These conversations, started in one workshop, are continuing in classrooms, museums, and digital platforms across Europe. The workshop may have ended, but the work continues.