A NEW SEASON
OF THE EHRI PODCAST
EHRI
The fourth season of the EHRI Podcast series For the Living and the Dead. Traces of the Holocaust features six new episodes around the theme Roma and the genocide. New podcast host Lovro Kralj – EHRI Reseach and Content Officer – interviews seven experts who share their insights while narrating the story of a person or object that really took their breath away.
Episode 1
In this episode, podcast host Lovro Kralj talks to Milovan Pisarri, who discovered the small document that is the centre piece of this episode. Milovan is a researcher at the Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory in Belgrade, Serbia. This paper slip contains a declaration, in Serbian, that a woman called Milica Glišić was removed from the “Gypsy list.” On the reverse of the slip,
a four-word sentence in German accompanied by a date reads: “Aus dem Lager 12.II.1942 entlassen” (“Released from the camp on 12 February 1942”). It is signed by the camp commandant Andorfer, SS Untersturmführer.
Milica Glišić was a 25-year-old Romani woman with an eight-year-old son. Together with approximately 600 other Romani women and children, she had been interned in the Judenlager Sajmište in Belgrade in mid-December 1941.
The small note saved Milica’s life.
The document is preserved in the Yugoslav archives alongside other similar records that enabled numerous Romani women and children to be released from the camp and to return to their homes, places that were looted and empty. The men had been killed a few months earlier by the Wehrmacht in mass executions.
Episode 2
In this episode, we look at a memorial erected in 1977 at the local graveyard near Hrastina in northern Croatia. The memorial is dedicated to a group of Roma and Sinti victims who were killed by the local Croatian fascists, Ustašas, on the night of 24-25 April 1945. This is among the last mass killings of Roma and Sinti in Europe during the Second World War, as the massacre took place only days before the end of the war. However, for decades, the events in Hrastina, as well as the monument itself, were a subject of misremembrance since the identities of both the victims as well as the perpetrators were obfuscated. The monument was dedicated to those who were “racially and politically” persecuted without stating that they were Roma and Sinti, and the crime was attributed to the SS rather than the Ustašas. This episode unpacks the massacre in Hrastina and how the subsequent misremembrance of its victims and perpetrators evolved.
Episode 3
In this episode, we focus on the photograph of a wedding which, at first glance, captures a moment of joy. However, behind it lies
a far more complex and painful story. Through this photograph, taken in the Romanian town of Pitești in 1941, we uncover the story of a Roma family whose lives were shattered during the Second World War. The family was torn apart by war and deportations to Transnistria, the territory between the Dniester and the Bug rivers where tens of thousands of Roma were sent to die.
We are joined by Petre Matei, a researcher at the Elie Wiesel National Institute for the Study of the Holocaust in Romania. In his research, he has conducted numerous oral history interviews with Roma and Jewish survivors and published widely on the Roma genocide, including as coordinator of a project documenting the testimony of Roma survivors of the deportations to Transnistria.
Episode 4
In this episode, we look at a photograph taken in 1980 on the grounds of the former Dachau concentration camp. It shows survivors during the hunger strike that became a turning point for the German Sinti and Roma civil rights movement. At the center of the photograph is Hans Braun,
a German Sinto who survived Auschwitz-Birkenau and Flossenbürg concentration camps. His story offers
a powerful and deeply personal insight into the persecution of Sinti and Roma under National Socialism as well as the subsequent, decades-long, struggle for recognition of the status of Roma victims of Nazi genocide.
In this episode we are joined by Karola Fings, historian at the Research Centre on Antigypsyism at Heidelberg University. She researches the Nazi persecution of Sinti and Roma and was the initiator and head of the project “Encyclopaedia of the Nazi Genocide of the Sinti and Roma in Europe.”
Episode 5
In this episode, podcast host Lovro Kralj talks with Hungarian researcher László Csősz about a memorial headstone dedicated to Roma victims of wartime violence in the village of Doboz, which is in Southern Hungary. This small white headstone with inscriptions is special as it is one of the earliest known efforts in Central Europe to commemorate the genocide on Roma.
László Csősz has recently led a project titled “Mapping the Genocide of the Roma in Hungary” about the history and memory of various places of life, execution sites and deportations of Roma across Hungary, during which he came across the fate of the Roma in the Doboz cemetery.
Episode 6
In this podcast episode, we learn about the life, art and writings of Roma survivor Ceija Stojka, one of the first Roma survivors to publicly bear witness to the genocide of her people. Deported as a child, Stojka survived three concentration camps: Auschwitz, Ravensbrück and Bergen-Belsen. Like many other Roma victims, she carried her memories in silence. That is, until she reached her fifties and began pouring her trauma into paintings and poems. Stojka died in Vienna in 2013 at the age of 79, but her groundbreaking work lives on to inspire, inform and commemorate a history that the world has long refused to see.
Anna Mirga-Kruszelnicka, Director of ERIAC (the European Roma Institute for Arts and Culture in Berlin), talks us through Stojka’s life, work and influence on Roma genocide remembrance by means of one of Stojka’s most striking paintings: ‘Persecutions in the Forest of Auschwitz’ (1994).
Listen below on the episode webpages, or on your preferred podcast app (Buzzsprout, Spotify, Apple Podcasts).
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