a clear home in their educational program. While the museum’s exhibition Untold – dedicated to the genocide of the Roma and – was developed before the Recommendations were released, the accompanying school program for secondary students was explicitly shaped by their pedagogical framework. In particular, the program draws directly on the Recommendations’ core questions: Why teach? What to teach? How to teach?
For the museum’s educators, the answer begins with empathy. Personal testimony forms the heart of the school program, with life stories of Roma survivors who came to Sweden after the war. These stories allow students to move beyond statistics and engage with the lived experience of the genocide – a key principle of the Recommendations, which call for a dignity-focused approach rooted in individual voices.
Although it predates the IHRA Recommendations, the Untold exhibition aligns closely with their spirit. It aims to provide a comprehensive picture of the genocide of the Roma – tracing the roots of antigypsyism, the rise of racial biology, and the machinery of Nazi persecution, through to the long-delayed recognition of the genocide and the situation of Roma communities today. Many of the objects and testimonies included had never been exhibited before, and the exhibition’s very title speaks to the invisibility and marginalization of this history. Personal stories, particularly from survivors who found refuge in Sweden, are used to provide historical context and emotional connection.
The museum also addresses one of the more complex educational challenges identified by the IHRA: how to speak about different genocides without reducing them to competitive narratives of suffering. In a country where the Holocaust is more widely taught, the program uses structural comparisons to help students understand how antisemitism and antigypsyism manifested in parallel – through racial laws, propaganda, forced deportations, and mass murder. The goal is not to equalize pain, but to expose patterns of exclusion and persecution.
Importantly, the museum localizes its content to reflect the national context – another IHRA recommendation. Survivor testimonies are tied to Swedish experiences: how these individuals arrived in the country, how they rebuilt their lives, and what barriers they continued to face. The program links past to present by including discussions of contemporary antigypsyism in Swedish society today.
‘‘With the IHRA’s recommendations, the fate of the Roma is not just an aside to the Jewish Holocaust,’’ says Dan Hultqvist, Museum Educator at the Swedish Museum of the Holocaust. ‘‘For a long time, Roma have been mentioned only as one of the other ‘victim groups’ of Nazi crimes. Now the Roma are being recognized as being persecuted and murdered because of their ethnicity and not because of some attributed characteristic that the perpetrators largely used to legitimise the persecution and genocide.’’
In its quiet but deliberate way, the Swedish Museum of the Holocaust is proving that even in formal education settings, the genocide of the Roma can be taught with care, complexity, and humanity – and that doing so enriches, rather than fragments, historical understanding.
What unites these two very different institutions is a shared belief: that the voices of Roma survivors must be heard – and that memory should be inclusive, accurate, and shaped with those whose lives it represents. In both the Netherlands and Sweden, remembrance is being redefined not as a passive act of commemoration, but as a participatory process grounded in dignity, empathy, and accountability.
To explore how your institution can engage with this history more accurately, thoughtfully, and support meaningful remembrance and education – download the IHRA Recommendations for Teaching and Learning about the Persecution and Genocide of the Roma During the Nazi Era.
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