ROMARESIST

In the context of Word War II, Roma, Sinti and Travellers were the target of multiple persecutions and genocidal violence, the timing and intensity of which varied greatly in different parts of Europe. The often deliberate concealment and late recognition of those persecutions contributed to the marginalisation in national historiographies and memories of facts that led to the physical elimination of more than 200,000 people across Europe and the irreversible dislocation of pre-war Romani societies. In Western Europe, in the area including the Netherlands, Belgium, France and Italy, the composite nature of repressive practices seems to defy any global interpretation: house arrest, detention, internment, concentration, deportation to death camps or the concentration camp network. This project aims to establish the basis for a comparative and transnational study of the modalities and effects of a multifaceted persecution and to propose the hypothesis of variations in the intensity of genocide in the West. Based on a comparative study of repressive actions carried out in Western European territories and the European framework for the genocide of Roma, Sinti and Travellers, the research is based on an unprecedented collection of direct and indirect testimonies from the victims. It will be a question of elaborating a new history, based on singular destinies and family paths, focusing in particular on the modalities of survival and individual and collective resistance. The approach of this project is definitely interdisciplinary, both historically and anthropologically. The project combines research missions in Western European archives centres in order to identify forms of repression, the nature of social dislocation, conditions for survival in the face of persecution and individual and collective post-war memories. This project involves three European partners: the Georg Simmel Centre, CNRS-EHESS (Paris, France), the Libera Università di Bolzano-Freie Universität Bozen (Bolzano, Italy) and the Kazerne Dossin-Mémorial, Museum and Documentation Centre on the Holocaust and Human Rights (Mechelen, Belgium). The main challenge of this research is to achieve a more accurate definition of the facts of persecution against Roma, Sinti and Travellers in Western Europe by involving the descendants of persecuted families in the development of historical knowledge to build an inclusive history of genocidal violence in Western Europe. The aim of this project is to contribute to the official recognition of persecution and genocide by Western European states by disseminating and recording a history that is missing from the state collective memories in Western Europe.