Half a million European Roma were exterminated by the Nazi regime; many more were subjected to a policy of racial discrimination similar to that suffered by the Jewish people. However, the persecution and torment of Roma in Hitler's Europe has little presence in the history books. The Roma and the Holocaust places the Roma genocide in the context of the widespread violence of the Second World War, while offering an explanation that places it within a broader trajectory of anti-Roma persecution in modern societies. The book explores the separation and destruction of families, the sterilisation of adults and children, the plunder of property and deprivation of livelihoods, slave labour, medical experiments, the horror of extermination camps and the mass murder that the Romani people were subjected to. María Sierra uses the first section of the book to provide a much-needed critical overview and synthesis of the fragmented research and scholarship in the area that has been conducted in various languages. In the second section, Sierra shines a light the autobiographical accounts of several Roma survivors of the Nazi genocide in order for the voices of the victims who have claimed recognition and rights for the Roma people to be heard. This journey through the memories of Philomena Franz, Ceija Stojka, Lily Van Angeren, Otto Rosenberg, Walter Winter and Ewald Hanstein, in addition to other testimonies, is contextualized within the framework of other Holocaust survivors' memoirs and has been approached from a history of emotions perspective. With the Romani people having been denied recognition as victims of Nazism after the end of the war, this book crucially helps to bring about agency for the survivors, supporting their struggle for the right to memory in the process.

For many decades, the Holocaust in South-Eastern Europe lacked the required introspection, research and study, and most importantly, access to archives and documentation. Only in recent years and with the significant help of an emerging generation of local scholars, the Holocaust from this region became the focus of many studies. In 2018, under the European Holocaust Research Infrastructure umbrella, the Elie Wiesel National Institute for the Study of the Holocaust in Romania organized a workshop dedicated to Holocaust research, education and remembrance in South-Eastern Europe. The present volume is a natural continuation of the above-mentioned workshop with the aim of introducing the current state of Holocaust research in the region to different categories of scholars in the field of Holocaust studies, to students and—why not—to the general public. Our scope, not an exhaustive one, is to present a historical contextualization using archival resources, to display the variety of recordings of discrimination, destruction and rescue efforts, and to introduce the remembrance initiatives and processes developed in the region in the aftermath of the Holocaust.

This book details the history of the Jews, their two-millennia-old struggle with a larger Christian world, and the historical anti-Semitism that created the environment that helped pave the way for the Holocaust. It helps students develop the interpretative skills in the fields of history and law.

Diaries, testimonies and memoirs of the Holocaust often include at least as much on the family as on the individual. Victims of the Nazi regime experienced oppression and made decisions embedded within families. Even after the war, sole survivors often described their losses and rebuilt their lives with a distinct focus on family. Yet this perspective is lacking in academic analyses. In this work, scholars from the United States, Israel, and across Europe bring a variety of backgrounds and disciplines to their study of the Holocaust and its aftermath from the family perspective. Drawing on research from Belarus to Great Britain, and examining both Jewish and Romani families, they demonstrate the importance of recognizing how people continued to function within family units—broadly defined—throughout the war and afterward.

In 1997, Saul Friedländer emphasized the need for an integrated history of the Holocaust. His suggestion to connect ‘the policies of the perpetrators, the attitudes of surrounding society, and the world of the victims’ provides the inspiration for this volume. Following in these footsteps, this innovative study approaches Holocaust history through a combination of macro analysis with micro studies. Featuring a range of contemporary research from emerging scholars in the field, this peer-reviewed volume provides detailed engagement with a variety of historical sources, such as documents, artifacts, photos, or text passages. The contributors investigate particular aspects of sound, materiality, space and social perceptions to provide a deeper understanding of the Holocaust, which have often been overlooked or generalised in previous historical research. Yet, as we approach an era of no first hand witnesses, this multidisciplinary, micro-historical approach remains a fundamental aspect of Holocaust research, and can provide a theoretical framework for future studies.

New from Bradt is The Holocaust: Europe’s Sites, Museums and Memorials, a unique travel guidebook to European locations that tell the story of the greatest crime ever perpetrated – the Nazi genocide of 6 million Jews and other persecuted groups. In recent years countries once reluctant to delve into the dark corners of their past have begun to document the history of the Holocaust and its aftermath. Europe has many new ground-breaking museums and memorials that tell us as much about the present as they do the past. Chapters are dedicated to each country or region occupied by Nazi Germany, plus nations like the UK and neutral Sweden, which played a vital role both before and after the Holocaust. Organised around city hubs in each country, this Bradt guide helps visitors explore numerous destinations, whether infamous, well known or comparatively unexpected. This is much, much more than a guide to notorious sites such as Auschwitz-Birkenau, Buchenwald or Dachau. You can take a walking tour in Vienna, to view the new wall of names. Or visit the Memorial des Martyrs de la Deportation in Paris, Anne Frank House in Amsterdam or the Jewish Museum in Ferrara. And you can learn how babies were smuggled out of the Kovno ghetto in potato sacks in Lithuania or read about Bavaria’s Kloster Indersdorf, a remarkable children’s home that cared for survivors. Written by a journalist and travel writer specialising in Jewish history, Bradt’s The Holocaust: Europe’s Sites, Museums and Memorials provides the traveller with not only a list of must-see sites in each country but also a comprehensive list of organisations that run tours, commemorations and volunteer schemes. Suggestions of where to eat and stay (including Kosher restaurants and hotels) ease the traveller’s way, as do descriptions of local Jewish organisations and tips on how to pace potentially difficult journeys into Europe’s dark past. Bradt’s The Holocaust: Europe’s Sites, Museums and Memorials is the first comprehensive travel guide to the genocide and the first to help the traveller understand the Holocaust by seeing the places where it unfurled.

This book explores the legacies of the genocide of Roma in Europe after the end of the Second World War. Hundreds of thousands of people labelled as ‘Gypsies’ were persecuted or killed in Nazi Germany and across occupied Europe between 1933 and 1945. In many places, discrimination continued after the war was over. The chapters in this volume ask how these experiences shaped the lives of Romani survivors and their families in eastern and western Europe since 1945. This book will appeal to researchers and students in Modern European History, Romani Studies, and the history of genocide and the Holocaust.

The culmination of four years of ethnographic research at the Roma Community Centre in Toronto, Writing the Roma is the first book to provide an overview of the identities, origins, history and treatment of Roma refugees. Cynthia Levine-Rasky traces the historical and cultural roots of the Roma in Europe, through their genocide in the Holocaust, their persecution in Eastern Europe in the post-Communist era, to their settlement as refugees in Canada. What emerges is a book that challenges the stereotypes surrounding this non-territorial nation while exposing the ways that Canadian immigration policies have affected Roma populations.

Using Italy and the Roma as a case study, this book proves that non-discrimination provisions are not sufficient to protect the cultural identity of minorities: a system encompassing also the use of collective rights is better suited for this purpose.

The main issues arising from the encounter between Roma people and surrounding European society since the time of their arrival in Medieval Europe until today are discussed in this work. The history of their persecution and genocide during the Nazi era, in particular, is central to the present volume. Significantly, some authors sought to emphasize the continuing history of prejudice and persecution, which reached a peak during the Nazi era and persisted after the war. Current questions of social integration in Europe, as well as that of ethnic definition and the construction of ethnic-national identity constitute another principal pillar of the book. The complexity of issues involved, such as collective memory, myth-making and social constructionism, trigger intense debate among researchers dealing with Romani studies.