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

Abstract

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. 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). 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. JOURNAL OF BALTIC STUDIES 2023, VOL. 54, NO. 1, 1–6 https://doi.org/10.1080/01629778.2023.2162681