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Bridging Holocaust history and memory studies, this article explores the multiple and asymmetrical entanglements of Jewish and Romani (or "Gypsy") accounts of Nazi genocide. These entanglements exist in large part due to the fact that testimonies of the Romani Holocaust are commonly filtered through the lens of Jewish survivors or stored in archives dedicated to the Jewish Holocaust. Modern Jewish-Romani relations thus represent a rare-and arguably unique-case in which one minority controls such a significant portion of the public memories of another.
Keywords: Jews; Roma and Sinti; Holocaust; testimony; archives
How does one recognize a "Gypsy"? This was the question an interviewer put to a Jewish Holocaust survivor in a testimony to the USC Shoah Foundation in 1997. Martin Aron, who was deported from Transylvania to Auschwitz in 1944, had mentioned that "Gypsies" were present as soon as he entered the camp. According to Aron, it was "mainly the Gypsies who seemed to be in charge there," as they dragged the recent Jewish arrivals out of their train cars. Although Holocaust interviewers and commentators seldom interrogated Jewish witnesses' depictions of Romani prisoners, in this case the American interviewer decided to probe further, asking: "How did you know they were Gypsies?" The resulting conversation revealed how difficult it was for a man who was a child at the time of his deportation to express how he had identified the people in question as "Gypsies." As the interviewer probed further the otherwise eloquent man grew increasingly befuddled: "They were, eh, on more or less...they would ah...mustache sometimes, and they had their own way of...you could tell. We, we have familiar, we've seen the Gypsies before."1
Many Jewish Holocaust survivors from across central, eastern and southeastern Europe would indeed have "seen the Gypsies before," just as Aron had, while growing up in their hometowns. Others encountered Roma in camps and ghettos. Yet, in both cases most Jews were familiar with Roma only in the most superficial sense. In much of prewar Europe, Roma tended to live at a social distance from Jews.2 Jewish-Romani interactions in ghettos, concentration and death camps were subsequently shaped by the Nazis' strategy of playing different prisoners against each other-a strategy reflected in Aron's negative depiction of Romani prisoners.
Aron's testimony also points...