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Testimonies of Roma and Sinti

http://www.romatestimonies.com

Resource Type:  Database

The Second World War through the Eyes of Roma and Sinti from the Czech Lands and Slovakia.

Abstract: 
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Project description:

This database of Romani and Sinti testimonies is a project of the Prague Forum for Romani Histories at the Institute for Contemporary History, Czech Academy of Sciences.

The experience of the Roma and Sinti during World War II is still a neglected topic, although the consequences of the wartime genocide and persecution are still felt by Roma communities today. Moreover, even in the few publications about the Roma and Sinti Holocaust, the perspective taken from documents written during the war by the state administration and police forces often prevails. On the contrary, the key idea of our project is to convey to the widest possible readership the testimony of the Roma and Sinti themselves and thus their personal and irreplaceable experience of the Second World War. We hope that the Testimonies of Roma and Sinti project will contribute to greater awareness of their genocide and will be an irreplaceable source of information for researchers, relatives of the victims, or anyone else interested in this important topic.

First of all, we defined the project geographically: we focused on the testimonies of Roma and Sinti from the Czech lands (today's Czech Republic) and Slovakia. The second definition is that we are only processing printed testimonies into the database. A valuable, and extremely demanding, part of the database is the detailed abstracts of these testimonies prepared by Romani studies experts in cooperation with historians and linguistic stylists. These abstracts are important not only for Czech and Slovak readers, as many publications with testimonies are not easily accessible, but especially for users from abroad - whether researchers, members of Romani communities or any other interested parties - as the vast majority of the hundreds of published testimonies exist only in Czech, Slovak or Romani, and are thus inaccessible to most people from abroad.

Within the database, the testimonies are analysed according to several criteria, which allow detailed searches and their classification, for example, according to the type of war experience (internment, participation in armed struggle, hiding, etc.). In the analysis, we then focused mainly on geographical data. Therefore, maps are an integral part of the database, which allow us to show the war trajectory of individuals and groups, to show, for example, the locations of mass murders or guerrilla fighting, or to search for testimonies related to a place.

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