On the Fringes, in Plain Sight: Negotiating Romani Visibility¹

Małgorzata Mirga-Tas’s 2022 series of monumental textile collages entitled Siukar Manusia (Romani: Good, Wonderful People) depicts ten representatives of the first postwar generation of Romani builders engaged in the construction of the Nowa Huta district in Kraków. While overwhelming in size, the images manifest captivating intimacy. Against a satin navy blue backdrop, we can see the portraits based on photographs from family archives that show Romani men and women in everyday situations and configurations. The fabric collages by Mirga-Tas reclaim the forgotten—and nearly invisible—Romani history of Kraków’s industrial district built also thanks to the efforts of the Roma who arrived there after the war from the Spiš and Podhale regions. Moreover, the collages reinterpret the monumentalized images of the “New Roma”² from visual materials of the 1950s propaganda in which Romani builders of Nowa Huta symbolized the success of “productivization.” At the same time, these works take the Roma out from invisibility of the intimate constellations of ordinary people’s families and friends.

One of the series’ protagonists, Krystyna Gil (1938–2021), is a special figure for many reasons: a Romani woman who survived the Holocaust and worked for years to commemorate it, the founder and president of the Association of Romani Women in Poland, and a Nowa Huta activist. Mirga-Tas portrays Gil as a middle-aged woman wearing a red blouse and a floral-patterned skirt. Like other Siukar Manusia works, the image exudes a domestic atmosphere: the woman sits in a chair in a relaxed position, her hands resting on the armrests. A lamp with a yellow lampshade stands beside her, warming the collage’s uniform dark background and giving the scene perspective. However, unlike other Siukar Manusia works, Mirga-Tas did not base this portrait on a photograph from a private collection. In fact, the author modeled Gil’s textile likeness on a very public image: a frame from Gil’s testimony for the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, a North American institution which began collecting Holocaust survivors’ video testimonies in the late 1970s.³

Mirga-Tas included an almost identical portrait of Krystyna Gil—this time without the lamp—in the series of over thirty images that constitutes the central band of Re-Enchanting the World (Przeczarowując świat), an installation created for the Polish Pavilion at the 2022 Venice Biennale and curated by Wojciech Szymański and Joanna Warsza. This twelve-part work is a variation of the Hall of the Months in the Renaissance Palazzo Schifanoia in Ferrara and may be interpreted as an artistic attempt to make Romani history visible. In the upper section, the artist references Jacques Callot's 17th-century engravings Gypsies/Departure from Egypt, reclaiming historical depictions of the Roma, created by non-Roma, in a decolonial gesture for herself and Romani history.⁴ The lower band features images of daily life in Romani settlements in Spiš and Podhale, including the artist’s village, Czarna Góra. As a base for these images, Mirga-Tas used photographs taken by Kraków ethnographers who represent a discipline that has racialized and exoticized the Roma from its very beginning.⁵ In the central band, the artist showcases portraits of women important to her and to Romani herstory, as well as images of her family members and other allies.⁶ Like the Nowa Huta portraits, Mirga-Tas created these collages using private photographs. Once again, modeled on a frame from a commonly available video testimony, Krystyna Gil’s portrait has an ambiguous status as it situates itself at the intersection of the private and the public.

This double nature of Gil’s representation in Mirga-Tas’s installations will prove to be of an utmost significance here. Gil's intimate yet monumental portraits convey the fundamental paradox of video testimonies as documents: while recorded in the quiet of libraries or private apartments and rooted in the close dynamics of conversation, as historical documents accessible in archives, they are exposed to viewing and interpretation within entirely different frameworks. In this text, I explore the modalities of Romani (in)visibility in the context of Holocaust commemoration and knowledge production. One testimony will serve as my case study: Krystyna Gil’s interview for the Fortunoff Archive, from which Mirga-Tas took a frame and used it for her installations. Conducted on May 13, 1995, the interview was the first of many that Gil would give to various institutions and on numerous occasions over the next years, making her one of the most recognized witnesses of the Romani Holocaust. I put “(in)” in parentheses for several reasons. First, for the Roma, excessive visibility, exoticization, and stereotyping frequently function as a way to make them invisible.⁷ Second, in testimony, (in)visibility becomes a dynamic field: in the over one-hour-long recording, Krystyna Gil in a sense becomes a witness to the Romani Holocaust: she reclaims the history of the “forgotten Holocaust,”⁸ highlights the institutional and economic conditions of remembrance, and testifies to women’s agency during and after the war. Gil’s account demonstrates that video testimonies constitute important historical sources, not just because of their factual content but also as documents capturing how Holocaust knowledge is produced and disseminated.⁹ Gil was interviewed by Michał Sobelman, a historian, translator, press spokesperson for the Embassy of Israel, descendant of Polish Jews who survived the Holocaust, and March 1968 emigrant. Sobelman and Gil have almost nothing in common: they differ in social background, gender, and ethnicity. Still, thanks to these differences, their conversation has a unique performative potential, and Gil’s testimony becomes a field of dynamic negotiations, tensions and confrontations, but also sudden instances of understanding and solidarity. These glitches in Gil’s testimony—affective disruptions, incongruities, or infelicitous encounters that challenge our expectations¹⁰—allow one to capture the fundamental modalities of the invisible Romani Holocaust and Romani experience in the majority culture.

Therefore, I would like to consider Roma invisibility in four aspects. In the interview, Gil says that the Romani Holocaust happened and continues to happen “on the fringes.” We can understand this phrase in two ways. First, it describes the specific geography of the Romani Holocaust and its hardly-won presence in historical research. Most Roma were killed not in Auschwitz but on the peripheries of towns and villages or in forests, and the commemoration of these events remains on the margins of public remembrance. Second, Gil’s textile portrait by Mirga-Tas—an image taken from a non-Romani archive—manifests another issue: the Roma rarely appear in the Holocaust visual archives centered on Jewish stories of survival. Each time, the Roma must negotiate the visibility of their different experience. Third, the perpetual condition of being in plain sight may be viewed as another form of Romani—and Jewish—invisibility, which Gil both testifies to and resists in her account: the mimicry required to navigate majority society. For the wartime generation of Roma and Jews, this condition will always resonate with the notion of “good looks,” a trait that proved critical for survival during the Holocaust. This will finally lead me to the fourth issue: how can we commemorate the Romani Holocaust to make it visible, visible on Romani terms?

The Dispersed Holocaust

Survival lies at the heart of the testimony of Krystyna Gil, née Ciuroń. As a five-year-old girl, she and her grandmother survived the Nazi massacre of a Romani community in Szczurowa, a village in Lesser Poland. According to her account, on July 3, 1943, at three o’clock in the morning, German gendarmes and the Polish Blue Police surrounded the Romani settlement on the village outskirts. The first transport consisted of men who were taken on carts acquired from local peasants to a nearby cemetery where they were executed, and their bodies were thrown into a mass grave. The gendarmes and police then returned for the women and children. Krystyna Ciuroń ended up on a cart with her mother, younger siblings, and three aunts. When Justyna Ciuroń, Krystyna’s grandmother, approached the cart, a German gendarme stopped her. Justyna’s daughter handed Krystyna over to her, saying, “Mum, take her with you. If you are left behind, you shall at least have her.”¹¹ In this way, Justyna and Krystyna Ciuroń became included in the last, third group of victims. Their cart was stopped in the center of the village, three hundred meters from the cemetery, by a Polish woman who, in an attempt to save her Romani employee, invited the gendarmes into the tavern.While the Germans were away from the cart, a Polish men from Polnische Polizei des Generalgouvernements, the so called Blue Police, allegedly said, “Run if you can.” This allowed Krystyna and her grandmother to escape. When they returned home, they found that Krystyna’s grandfather, Michał Ciuroń, had been shot in his bed, and their Polish neighbors looted their belongings. “People had stolen everything because they knew that Gypsies would not be coming back,” Krystyna Gil recounts. For this reason, Justyna Ciuroń decided to immediately flee from the village, spending the rest of the war with her granddaughter in hiding in several locations across central Poland.

Krystyna Gil does not mention this, but Engelbert Guzdek, a German gendarme from the post in Dąbrowa Tarnowska, led the execution in Szczurowa. Guzdek’s later nicknames, “The Bloody Phantom” and “The Executioner of Powiśle,” reflect his notoriety.¹² He commanded the so-called Jagdkommando unit composed of German gendarmes and the Polish Blue Police, infamous for its cruel treatment of civilians, especially hunts for Jews hiding near the Vistula River.¹³ A 1969 investigation by the Chief Commission for the Investigation of Hitlerite Crimes in Poland determined that Guzdek arrived at Szczurowa for the execution with three other Germans: Paul Stosch, Robert Jahn, and Finder, and several “blue” policemen from the nearby Otfinów.¹⁴ Local policemen, commander Tadeusz Strycharz and Ludwiczak, also participated in the execution.¹⁵ Village firefighters dug the grave at the cemetery.¹⁶ A total of ninety-three people were killed. Besides Krystyna and Justyna Ciuroń, Petronela Ruwińska, Ludwika Ciuroń and Franciszka Duda survived.¹⁷

Krystyna Gil’s case allows us to understand two issues. The first one is the specific geography of the Romani Holocaust. Until recently, historical research and Romani activism focused on the fate of Austrian and German Roma and Sinti communities, as well as the history of the largest ghettos and camps where European Roma died: Łódź, Warsaw, Ravensbrück, and Auschwitz. This stemmed from two reasons. First, German Roma and Sinti survivors were the most politically active ones.¹⁸ Second, scholars had access to primarily German archives. The latter documented mainly deportations and Nazi biopolitics, namely sterilization and medical experiments conducted on German Roma and Sinti by the Center for Research on Racial Hygiene and Demographic Biology in Berlin led by criminal biologist Robert Ritter.¹⁹ Consequently, after the war, Auschwitz became the symbol of the Romani Holocaust, and August 2, the day of the liquidation of the Roma family camp block in Auschwitz (B II e) in 1944, was chosen as the Roma Genocide Remembrance Day. On this day, ceremonies are held at the site of the former camp to commemorate it.²⁰ However, this narrative has undergone significant decentralization over last past two decades.²¹ Historians have drafted an expanded cartography of the Romani Holocaust, revealing its far less organized and more dispersed nature across Eastern and Southern Europe. Polish ethnographer Jerzy Ficowski,²² one of the first scholars to research the fate of the Roma during the Second World War, addressed this issue as early as the 1950s:

It would be erroneous to think that the destruction of the Gypsies was limited to murdering them in concentration and in extermination camps. Gypsies used to be shot in the forests during almost the whole period of German occupation …. In comparison with the mass murders of the Gypsies in Auschwitz, those were relatively minor executions, but they were so numerous that they caused the tragic deaths of thousands of Gypsies outside the camps.²³

The vicinity of Szczurowa itself provides a telling example in this regard. Within a twenty-kilometer radius, three other villages witnessed massacres of the Roma in the same period. In July 1942, two large executions took place nearby: twenty-eight Romani men and women were murdered on the outskirts of Bielcza, and twenty-nine people were shot in a forest in Borzęcin. In July 1943, the same group led by Guzdek executed forty-nine Romani people at a local Catholic cemetery in Żabno.²⁴ As Jerzy Ficowski comments in the third edition of his pioneering book, Cyganie w Polsce (Gypsies in Poland) (1989; first edition published in 1953),²⁵ “It happened everywhere, they hunted and killed single families or single individuals who had managed to escape from transports or execution squads.”²⁶ More than 200 such executions across Poland have been documented.²⁷ Polish–Romani poet Papusza (Bronisława Wajs) describes this dispersed rural Holocaust in her poem “Smutna pieśń” (A Sorrowful Song), drawing from her own experiences when she was hiding in the Volhynia forests:

There was no life for Gypsies in the cities
and they killed, they killed us in the villages.
What to do? Gypsy women walked with their children into the forest
far into the forest, so the German dogs would not find us.²⁸

The forest, which represents a space of both the hunt and refuge, has become an important symbol of the post-Holocaust Romani imagination. It is present for example in paintings by Ceija Stojka, a Romani–Austrian artist and survivor (Untitled, 1993; Untitled, 1995; Die 3 letzten Luftballons. In Auschwitz ist noch Platz, 2008),²⁹ or in the work of younger Romani artists, such as Valérie Leray (Castel “de la pierre,” Coudrecieux 2006 / Internment Camp for Gypsies 1940–1946)³⁰ and Małgorzata Mirga-Tas, who created the Monument for Murdered Roma (2011/2016) in a forest near Borzęcin. Mirga-Tas’s work incorporates a quote from Papusza’s abovementioned poem.³¹ Located in the forest next to the road, the wooden memorial clearly reflects the dialectic of remaining “on the fringes” and “in plain sight” of the Romani Holocaust. The figure of a hiding woman is completely exposed and directed toward the road, suggesting that no hiding place is safe. Meanwhile, a falling man—a figure associated with heroism in Polish culture—is obscured from view behind the memorial plaque so that no one can witness his sacrifice.

Krystyna Gil explains this issue in her testimony:

but a large number of persons was buried at unknown sites. The only thing we know [about our family’s grave] is the location because the grave is there. But many people were buried and there are no graves. For example, the son of my grandmother. … We don’t know where he was buried. If we knew, we would have arranged for a grave to be built to commemorate him … So in the forests you kind of get the feeling that they are somewhere but there is no sign that Roma people are there.³²

Gil describes the specific nature of the dispersed Romani Holocaust to Sobelman because he comes from a remote cognitive frame: he often confuses the name of Gil’s home village and seems to overlook the provincial, peripheral context of her experiences. Faced with the lack of common ground, Sobelman resorts to his symbolic capital. Later in the interview, he asks Gil about her impressions of the 1988 film And the Violins Stopped Playing (I skrzypce przestały grać),³³ a Polish–American production describing the story of a Polish–Romani violinist from occupied Warsaw who ends up in Auschwitz. The film’s narrative belongs to the domain of the “central” geography of the Holocaust, with two main points on the map: Warsaw and Auschwitz. However, Gil testifies to different experiences: those of the East European Romani Holocaust “on the fringes,” which took place outside the camps, in multiple single locations, frequently on the outskirts of villages and towns, in fields and forests where Romani women and men were hunted and murdered, often with the involvement of their non-Romani neighbors. As Gil’s testimony vividly demonstrates, in the countryside, the Romani Holocaust had a rather intimate character and was a matter of communal effort. It engaged entire villages in discrete acts of killing: providing carts, digging graves, informing the Germans about Romani residents’ alleged crimes (for instance in Bielcza or Żabno), and looting the abandoned property. To a large extent, the rural Romani Holocaust proves invisible: in Poland, most sites of genocide remain unmarked³⁴ and systematic archival research is a task for the future.³⁵

Krystyna Gil’s testimony highlights another issue alongside the expanded geography of the Romani Holocaust: the frequently-debated question of whether the persecution of the Roma during the Second World War qualifies as genocide. In case of German and Austrian Roma and Sinti, the answer seems more obvious, as archives point to racially motivated and premeditated violence against them.³⁶ However, in the case of less organized executions carried out on the occupied lands of the Soviet Union, there is no clear interpretation. Some scholars argue that the German politics regarding Soviet Roma lacked genocidal intent, claiming that only nomadic Roma faced persecution, which resulted from their “asocial” status rather than ethnicity.³⁷ Nonetheless, historians such as Martin Holler or Mikhail Tyaglyy studied mass executions of Romani communities in the Soviet Union based on sources beyond German archives, particularly documentation from the Extraordinary State Commission for the Establishment and Investigation of the Atrocities of the German Fascist Invaders and Their Accomplices (ChGK). Their research demonstrated that the Roma were killed regardless of their social status or lifestyle. Both settled and nomadic groups became victims. Various forces committed these crimes: Security Police’s Einsatzgruppen, the SS, the Wehrmacht, field gendarmerie, and civilian administration.³⁸ As Anton Weiss-Wendt summarizes, “The Nazis variably defined the Roma in racial and social terms. This duality enabled a malicious interpretation, according to which the sum total of the Roma’s purportedly inherent social traits amounted to a certain negative racial type.”³⁹ Although significantly less organized, differing in methods depending on a geographical context, and not grounded in racial stereotypes as strong as antisemitism, the persecution of the Roma aimed at their systematic extermination. Sybil Milton, followed by Sławomir Kapralski, even argues that the very ordinariness of the Romani Holocaust proves that the Roma genocide was seen as the “natural” order of things.⁴⁰ Moreover, the Jewish and Roma Holocausts were chronologically connected: Jews were murdered first, immediately after the German forces entered, while the Roma became targets later, along with the Jewish survivors who were hiding.⁴¹

The case of Szczurowa confirms conclusions drawn by researchers examining crimes against Soviet Roma: the Romani people in the village died due to their ethnic identity, not their social status. The Roma in Szczurowa (from the Bergitka Roma group, or Carpathian Roma) constituted a settled community, deeply woven into the social fabric of the village where they resided for over a century.⁴² The Ciuroń, Siwak, Rakoczy, and Białoń families worked as musicians and blacksmiths. Krystyna Gil’s grandfather, Michał Ciuroń, was a renowned violinist and spent several years performing in the United States. Both Krystyna’s maternal grandmother, Justyna Ciuroń, and her father were ethnic Poles, which demonstrates that intermarriages occurred quite often.⁴³ Moreover, the murders of Roma in Lesser Poland took place in relation to the persecution of Jews. Before the war, 1,971 people had lived in Szczurowa, including 132 Jews and approximately one hundred Roma.⁴⁴ In May 1941, the Jewish population increased to 394 as a result of refugees’ influx, primarily from Kraków.⁴⁵ In July 1942, Germans ordered the deportation of Jews from Szczurowa to the Brzesko ghetto, with Polish peasants transporting them in carts. A few Jews who managed to avoid the deportation hid on the riverbank of the Vistula. The mass murder of Szczurowa’s Roma occurred at around the same time as hunts for Jews at the Vistula.⁴⁶ Finally, as with Soviet Roma, the fate of the Romani community depended largely on local specificities: their integration with the local population and Polish local authorities’ decisions. The case of Szczurowa prompts reflection on the attitudes of Polish neighbors, especially those serving in the Blue Police or fire brigade.

Furthermore, the fact that we know victims’ number and names today results from the integration of Szczurowa’s Roma.⁴⁷ This proves a rare exception in the context of the Romani Holocaust. At some point during the interview, Michał Sobelman asks, “Do you know roughly how many Roma people, how many Gypsies, died during the Second World War here in Poland? Has any research been done?” Krystyna Gil elaborates:

Gypsies did not register their fixed addresses. They just stayed at a given place, they were there but it’s not known how many there were and how many died. If we had been dealing with sedentary [Roma], we would have known how many there were. The way things are, we don’t. The same goes for the Auschwitz camp. It is not certain how many persons died there. Has the number given been reliably established? Is it lower or higher compared to others? Is it the right number? There were incoming transports that were not recorded anywhere. They were not. Bodies were taken directly to the crematorium and it is not known how many were cremated. The same here. So we shall not get to the bottom of this. Our history shall probably not get to the bottom of this.⁴⁸

Indeed, the total number of Romani victims of Nazism remains unknown, with figures ranging from 96,000 to 500,000.⁴⁹ Most researchers believe 200,000 to be the most reliable figure. Jerzy Ficowski estimates that 8,000 out of 20,000 Polish Roma were killed.⁵⁰

On the Fringes

Krystyna Gil’s testimony represents the only Romani account out of thirty-two recorded in Polish for the Fortunoff Archive and the only Polish-language account among forty-eight testimonies of Roma in the collection, which consists of over 4,400 recordings in total.⁵¹ Michał Sobelman conducted thirteen interviews for the archive, and Gil was his only Romani interviewee. This situation illustrates the special way in which the testimony of Krystyna Gil as a Romani survivor depends on the context in which it could have emerged. Ari Joskowicz notes that the memory of the Romani Holocaust remains in a “profoundly asymmetrical” relationship with the memory of the Jewish Holocaust, and, “even today, Romani history cannot be written without taking account of Jewish archival and memory politics.”⁵² This asymmetry is visible both on the institutional level and in the basic scripts of representation and commemorative practices. Video testimonies of Romani survivors are available thanks to Jewish archives: they were recorded by the largest institutions, such as the Fortunoff Archive, the USC Shoah Foundation, or the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM), as an addition to the personal histories of Jewish survivors. The history of Jewish Holocaust and its memorialization form the fundamental matrix which enables the interpretation and commemoration of the Romani Holocaust. The fact that Krystyna Gil’s testimony is the only Romani account recorded in Poland for the Fortunoff Archive, coupled with the interview’s context and the persona of the interviewer himself, evidence this status quo.

For Michał Sobelman, the second generation Polish Jew who emigrated to Israel in 1969 amid the March 1968 antisemitic campaign, Jewish history and collective memory constitute the primary interpretive framework. Throughout the testimony, the Jewish Holocaust remains a constant point of reference for Krystyna Gil as well. She directly compares her experiences to the Holocaust: “Both Jews and Gypsies lived through almost the same ordeal during the war.”⁵³ At one point, Sobelman explicitly asks her, “Are you interested in Jews’ martyrdom during the Second World War?” She replies, “Yes. Why? Because their fate was similar to ours.”⁵⁴ However, the situations of Jews and the Roma also serve as a source of distinction. When Gil describes her need to frequently return to postwar Szczurowa to be close to her murdered family and friends, despite the destruction of the local Romani community, Sobelman comments, “While people sort of ran away, Jews, for instance, were leaving Poland to stay away from the country where their families had been killed.” Gil replies, “It was like a magnet that attracted people.”⁵⁵

Furthermore, Sobelman and Gil discuss collective memory of both genocides. At the end of the recording, Sobelman asks:

You know that Jews were the primary victim of Hitler’s bestiality …. Jews honor the memory of all murdered Jews and there are museums, research is being conducted and there are institutions tasked with doing that. In that context, don’t Gypsies who were also victims, even though few people are aware of it, along with Jews, feel upset? Don’t you personally feel upset that the fate of Gypsies has been forgotten both by history and by people?

In her response, Gil uses an almost poetic phrase that I have already quoted: “The extermination of Gypsies seems to have taken place on the fringes.”⁵⁶ This concise statement summarizes the decentralized nature of the Romani Holocaust and the power dynamics determining its commemoration. The consequences of the genocide are everlasting, as the Roma still face exclusion and racist violence. Among other things, this exclusion results in the marginalization of Romani Holocaust within the official politics of memory and collective memory. In this context, Gabrielle Tyrnauer writes: “memory and memorializing are also expressions of power.”⁵⁷ Visibility and political agency prove critical for acknowledging the histories of excluded groups, but fighting for them becomes more difficult when the consequences of this violence are present also today.

In turn, Ari Joskowicz claims that we should seek reasons for Roma’s institutional and discursive exclusion in the economy of knowledge production. Krystyna Gil’s testimony provides insight into this issue. She recounts a planned visit to Washington, D.C. As a member of a Romani delegation, along with Roman Kwiatkowski and Andrzej Mirga, founders of the Association of Roma in Poland (1992), she was to participate in the Days of Remembrance ceremony at the Capitol on April 29, 1995.⁵⁸ Gil ultimately resigned due to financial constraints.⁵⁹ The seemingly trivial circumstance serves as another example of “the economic context for memory work,”⁶⁰ essential for the Romani struggle for recognition of their historical persecution. Particularly in the light of the history of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. and the fact that a very limited number of the Roma became part of the museum’s program board, only after long protests. The invitation sent to the Polish Romani delegation for the 1995 Days of Remembrance also resulted from these efforts. In the 1980s, Romani survivors were not invited to such events, which prompted activists and survivors to attend without formal invitations.⁶¹ Even today, in the USHMM’s permanent exhibition, the exonym “Gypsies,” commonly rejected by Romani communities, is used, albeit in quotation marks.

Krystyna Gil comments on the economic aspect of the forgotten Romani Holocaust also in the context of unpaid war reparations for the Roma⁶² and the absence of strong Romani organizations. She herself could not reclaim the plot of land in Szczurowa where her family home once stood. “Nobody reckons with a Gypsy,”⁶³ she states with resignation.

Moreover, in this light, we should remember that the very way we refer to the persecution of Roma during the Second World War has political significance. Efforts to find a term that would reflect its character and uniqueness, like Shoah for the Jewish Holocaust, have not led to consensus. Ian Hancock, a Romani–British linguist, proposes Porrajmos, but the fact that it is a word associated with sexual violence in many Romani dialects prevents its wide acceptance.⁶⁴ French researcher Marcel Courthiade suggests Samudaripen, which stands for “complete destruction” in Romani and is similar to the Yiddish Churbn. It has not, however, gained universal recognition and, consequently, political effectiveness. In Polish, the term romska Zagłada seems neutral. English does not offer a good corresponding phrase; the equivalent Romani Holocaust sparks opposition, especially from those emphasizing the uniqueness and singularity of the Jewish Holocaust.⁶⁵ Ari Joskowicz—whom I follow in this text—postulates to use the term “Romani Holocaust” despite its problematic etymology and complicated contexts, as a political statement in order to make Romani experiences more visible.⁶⁶

In Plain Sight

As the quotes from Gil and Sobelman’s conversation aptly demonstrate, there are significant differences between the witness and her interviewer: social class, ethnicity, and gender. Sobelman is not familiar with the specifics of Romani history, traditions, and intergroup differences, and his cognitive framework often traps him in stereotypes. He does not ask Gil which group she belongs to or if she speaks Romani. Although Gil comes from a non-nomadic Romani settlement, Sobelman inquires about her longing for “Gypsy caravan life” and asks about palaces owned by wealthy Roma in Zgierz near Łódź (who belong to Polska Roma, a group distant from Carpathian Roma in terms of customs and family connections). These questions exoticize and project otherness on Gil’s experience. We can consider them as the interviewer’s “ontological deafness,” or condition where “dominant discursive frames prevent [the majority society] from hearing what is really said,”⁶⁷ as Nicole Immler and Éva Kovács describe. Gil navigates those situations well, for instance, when Sobelman asks her about nostalgia for nomadic life, she wittily responds, “Well, I do get some idea when I go camping with my grandchildren.”⁶⁸

Still, the tensions and ruptures in their conversation should not appear as flaws. As Noah Shenker observes, “the messier, more unplanned moments that emerge throughout the testimony process … represent … unexpected and essential traces of meaning.”⁶⁹ These glitches, affective disruptions, shifts, inadequacies, and unfortunate encounters challenge our cultural assumptions about testimony, memory, Holocaust representation, trauma, and identity.⁷⁰

The role of interviewers is rarely scrutinized in the analyses of Holocaust testimony. Nevertheless, attentiveness to clashes between interviewee’s and interviewer’s positionalities allows one to better understand the witness’s experiences. The fact that Sobelman is himself a member of ethnic minority and experienced exclusion and violence are of key significance here. In their conversation, therefore, instances of distinction often occur simultaneously with moments of solidarity.

At the beginning of the interview, Sobelman asks Gil if she prefers to be called “Roma” (Romka) or “Gypsy” (Cyganka). When she responds that “maybe ‘Roma’ somehow sounds gentler,” Sobelman follows up with the next question: “When somebody calls you ‘Gypsy’ in the street, do you take offense?” Confounded, the witness explains:

It’s slightly diminishing but you cannot take offense. If somebody calls me a “Gypsy” and I actually am one, I tend to turn a deaf ear. It seldom happens in my close environment: I have been living among Poles for so many years. I’ve been living in this apartment block since 1956. No one has yet called me “Roma” or “Gypsy” there.

The interviewer clarifies: “I’m just asking because you know sometimes even the word ‘Jew’ makes for an unpleasant association in Polish also, mainly to the person uttering the word ‘Jew’ and not to the Jew himself.”⁷¹ Sobelman references his personal experience as the child of Jewish Holocaust survivors who lived through the March 1968 antisemitic campaign in Poland⁷² and then emigrated to Israel. He is well aware that the word “Jew” can serve as a slur. In his autobiographical essay entitled “Wyjazd. Marzec 1968 – refleksje świadka” (Departure: Witness’s Reflections on March 1968), Sobelman writes: “On the football pitch, after a wrong pass or missed goal, I would first hear mild insults like ‘loser,’ ‘moron,’ or ‘jerk,’ but finally, the word ‘Jew’ would inevitably follow. At a very young age, when I was no older than eight or ten, I understood that nothing seemed worse than being a ‘Jew’ in Poland.”⁷³

Assuming that these situations have an identical nature, Sobelman concludes that the term “Gypsy” is neutral, and only those with anti-Roma sentiments use it in an offensive way—much like “Jew” used as a slur or an “injurious word,” as Judith Butler calls it.⁷⁴ Thus, he refers to Gil as “Gypsy” for the rest of the interview. However, unlike “Jew,” “Gypsy” is far from being neutral: it is used by the majority group and has pejorative connotations.⁷⁵ Gil attempts to explain precisely this issue to Sobelman, stating that “maybe ‘Roma’ somehow sounds gentler,” while “Gypsy” feels “slightly diminishing.” She simultaneously recounts that in Nowa Huta, no one has (yet) called her using ethnic terms. This brings her closer to Sobelman’s experience of blending in, hiding in plain sight.

The interview provides context for Gil’s words, particularly the part about hiding with her grandmother after leaving Szczurowa. They spent the rest of the war in the Kielce region, where Justyna Ciuroń came from, in villages of Rzemienowice and Pawłowice where they were liberated by Soviet forces. The witness recalls staying with a Polish farmer and encountering two Jews who briefly joined them in their hideout but were later killed by Poles after leaving. Gil describes how she “didn’t look like a Gypsy” as a child and passed as “white,” non-Roma, which enabled her to move freely in the village. Sobelman quickly recognizes this experience of surviving on “the Aryan papers,”⁷⁶ and asks, “You didn’t have the look?” “And your grandmother? … She didn’t look like a Gypsy either? … So you were beyond suspicion? You were very lucky.” Deeply rooted in Polish, these elliptical expressions, “to have the look,” “to be beyond suspicion” omit “Jewish look,” “look of a Romani woman,” or “suspicion that somebody is a Roma/Jew,” respectively. They reflect the violence of identification beyond one’s control. The omitted part can be heard loud and clear, even though no one says it aloud. The expression “to have the good looks,” which means “not to look like a Roma or Jew,” shares this violent origin. Recognizing similarities of their histories, Sobelman inquires Gil whether others mistook her a for Jew during the war.⁷⁷ The memory of such violent marking proves crucial for both participants: it returns in Sobelman’s memory of the word “Jew” used as an insult and Gil’s praise for her neighborhood: “No one has yet called me ‘Roma’ or ‘Gypsy’ there.” This stands in contrast to Szczurowa, where Gil returned after the war with her grandmother and attended a metal industry technical high school. Asked about her peers’ attitudes toward her as a Roma, she describes: “When we were getting along, they would call me ‘Krystyna, Krystyna,’ but when one of them got upset with me, they would call me ‘you Gypsy girl’.”⁷⁸

In 1954, Krystyna Gil moved to Nowa Huta, a developing industrial district on Kraków’s outskirts, and it turned out to be a leap into a new life for her. As she recalls, “I came to here to Nowa Huta … to see how Gypsies lived. I was always very attracted to that Gypsy cheerful way of life.” Sobelman asks, “Where did they work? Did they build Nowa Huta?” “Yes, from scratch,”⁷⁹ Gil replies. She describes how she met her husband there: Augustyn Gil, a Roma from Jurgów in Spiš who worked as a foreman. She also tells Sobelman about her husband’s uncle, Walenty Gil, honored by Józef Cyrankiewicz for his outstanding achievements in work at a steel mill. Kraków’s socialist district, whose construction started in 1949, drew thousands of rural migrants, including the Roma encouraged to settle there as part of the “productivization” program and planned prohibition of itinerant lifestyle, which ultimately took place in 1964. Ironically enough, the Roma who came to Nowa Huta were not the nomadic ones targeted by efforts of the state but rather settled Carpathian Roma from Spiš and Podhale in southern Poland, who sought opportunities for a new life and escape from poverty. This unique invisibility of Romani identity in the early years of Nowa Huta—or perhaps a sudden lack of its significance—defines how Gil recalls her move to Kraków. In her story, Nowa Huta represents a Romani New World: a reality of open possibilities, free from exclusions and the community’s constraints; a space of ethnic, gender, and class equality.⁸⁰ “It felt like heaven,” she confesses in another interview.⁸¹ To Sobelman, she outlines her family’s social mobility: “Nowadays, my grandchildren go to school, some of them have already graduated. Others will now be graduating from a vocational school, including my granddaughter.”⁸² Finally, she speaks of her job as a tram driver and her work as an activist within the Romani community. She served as the president of the Nowa Huta branch of the Association of Roma in Poland (its office was located in her private apartment)⁸³ and helped both children and elderly Roma. Gil’s testimony brings Nowa Huta’s Romani history out of invisibility: it revives the memory of a utopian postwar project where, at least for a moment, all lives held the same value and people could live in plain sight without fear of being recognized, called out, or marked as “alien."

Precarious Commemorations

Krystyna Gil describes how the site of the murder would draw her “like a magnet.”: “I go there twice a year. Because it is quite tiring for me and nearly 80 kilometers away but we are there on 3 July and, obligatorily, on All Saints’ Day: myself, my husband, our children and grandchildren.”⁸⁴ Her private commemorative practices encourage reflection on how to memorialize the Romani Holocaust while ensuring its visibility within the national “memoryscape.”⁸⁵ We can distinguish three strategies of commemoration which I call the communist–colossal, ethnographic–exoticizing, and performative–precarious.

Currently, three monuments of 1966, 1993, and 2014 commemorate the mass execution of Roma at the cemetery in Szczurowa. The first one constitutes a large boulder with the following inscription: “Mass grave / of ninety-three residents of Szczurowa / murdered by the Hitlerites / on July 3, 1943 / Honor their memory.” We can place this monument in the communist–colossal strategy. Authorities erected it on the occasion of the celebration of the millennium of the Polish state (1966) as part of the centralized memory policy. The Council for the Protection of Struggle and Martyrdom Sites (Rada Ochrony Pomników Walki i Męczeństwa) implemented the policy in the 1960s through the units of the official union of war veterans Society of Fighters for Freedom and Democracy (Związek Bojowników o Wolność i Demokrację, ZBOWiD) under the slogan “Let not one drop of blood be forgotten.”⁸⁶ A similar monument, the memorial in Zasław (1963), honors Romani, Jewish, Lemko, and Polish victims of a labor camp with the inscribed text: “In tribute / to the victims of Hitlerite barbarism / murdered during the occupation.” Witold Cęckiewicz’s famous Monument to the Victims of Fascism located in the area of the former camp in Płaszów (Kraków) commemorates “martyrs” without ethnicity. The communist–colossal strategy of the 1960s promoted monumentalism and anti-fascist rhetoric and was characteristic for commemorative practices across the entire Eastern Bloc. Its rhetoric omitted victim’s ethnic identity, neutralizing and concealing the racial nature of Nazi genocide.

Krystyna Gil was not the only one who traveled to Szczurowa every year. The Roma from nearby Tarnów have regularly visited the cemetery’s memorial site since the 1960s. Since 1996, the International Roma Caravan Memorial has stopped in Szczurowa. This grassroots commemorative initiative emerged thanks to Adam Bartosz, an ethnographer and the then director of the Regional Museum in Tarnów, and Adam Andrasz, the president of the Cultural and Social Association of Roma in Tarnów. Memorial’s participants, both Romani and non-Romani, visit sites of the Romani Holocaust in the four abovementioned villages and towns: Szczurowa, Bielcza, Borzęcin, and Żabno. Until 2018, the year of the Memorial’s last edition in full form, some participants traveled in traditional Romani wagons borrowed from the Ethnographic Museum. After initial disputes over the Memorial’s informal style, which combined visits at the Holocaust sites with concerts and social gatherings, Krystyna Gil became its regular participant and gave her testimony at the Szczurowa cemetery every year since 2007.

The Roma Caravan Memorial fits an ethnographic–exoticizing commemorative model, though only partially, which I will elaborate on below. This initiative is part of Adam Bartosz’s long-term efforts to document Romani presence in Polish culture and history, including the pioneering 1979 exhibition Cyganie w kulturze polskiej (Gypsies in Polish Culture). The exhibition featured ethnographic objects, the representations of Roma in the majority culture, and information on the Romani Holocaust. In the exhibition, two strategies overlapped. First one was the ethnographic–exoticizing one: the Roma were presented as research subjects of an objective discipline and people with specific customs and material culture, including orientalizing portraits of Romani women or racist “Gypsy” masks from nativity plays. Second strategy was the performative–precarious one, evident in the fact that Romani communities from Tarnów, Dębica, and surroundings attended the exhibition opening upon invitation. Moreover, the event was held in Romani and some of the exhibited objects were performatively taken over by Roma participants, for example a custom-made tent was crowded with Romani women who used it as their private space. The 1979 temporary exhibition evolved into a permanent one entitled Cyganie. Historia i kultura (Gypsies: History and Culture), which opened in 1990 at Tarnów’s Ethnographic Museum. Notably, the museum functioned as a starting point for the Roma Caravan Memorials.⁸⁷ Using a nomadic format, museum wagons, and Romani music concerts, the Memorial invoked the stereotype of a picturesque and exotic Romani culture, which was intended by its creators to serve educational and integrative functions.⁸⁸ The press only reinforced such an image. For instance, after the Nineteenth Memorial in 2017, Gazeta Wyborcza published an article entitled “Jadą wozy kolorowe...” (The Colorful Wagons Roll In) whose title evoked a popular song from the 1970s.⁸⁹

Simultaneously, the Memorial utilized many elements that matched the performative–precarious strategy based on recurring, even small gestures and ontologically “weak” forms. These included regular visits to execution sites, also the unmarked ones, and their commemoration: in 2007, a birch cross was erected on the Bielcza outskirts, 2011 saw the unveiling of Małgorzata Mirga-Tas’s wooden memorial in Borzęcin, and in 2014, the Memorial erected a plaque with victims’ names in Szczurowa. Other examples of performative practices included ritual retelling of the events at each visited site; reading the names of the victims and placing individual pieces of paper with the names on the grave at the cemetery in Szczurowa (2012); drinking alcohol in honor of the murdered; and leaving lit cigarettes at the memorial.⁹⁰ Krystyna Gil’s annual attendance and retelling of her story of survival matched this strategy. Finally, primarily thanks to Adam Bartosz’s skillful cooperation with the media, the Memorial introduced the usage of the term “Roma” into the public discourse, which was not that common in the 1990s. It also developed a language to describe the dispersed Romani Holocaust. Thus, at the turn of the 1990s and 2000s, Polish regional and national press wrote about the “forgotten and neglected sites of the Gypsy Holocaust,” “lands sanctified by the blood of murdered compatriots,” “places of Romani martyrdom,” and the “trail of martyrological memory.”⁹¹ Referencing the Holocaust as the “model” genocide and incorporating the tragedy of the Roma into the national martyrdom made possible to conceptualize the Romani Holocaust as a specific historical event and a subject of Polish collective memory.

The precarity of commemorations of the Romani Holocaust became even more evident when unknown perpetrators destroyed Mirga-Tas’s monument in Borzęcin in April 2016. Vandals almost tore the wooden panel from its foundations and chopped the figures with axes. This devastation exposed links between the unaddressed memory of genocide and Polish complicity, and increasingly strong xenophobic and anti-Roma sentiments in society, which only intensified due to the anti-refugee political campaign during the parliamentary elections in the fall of 2015. The destruction occurred around April 20, which also seems significant, as this date marks Adolf Hitler’s birthday and has symbolic functions within far-right circles. A group of intellectuals and artists sent a letter to Andrzej Duda, the President of the Republic of Poland, who allocated funds for the memorial’s restoration. Mirga-Tas kept the main board with traces of mutilation and created new figures of a woman and a man. The remnants of the destroyed monument—severed heads and limbs of the figures, fragments of the mauled information board with the quote from Papusza’s poem, and wooden shards—were kept by Adam Bartosz who handed them over to the artist. Mirga-Tas used them for a new artistic project. She made casts of the remnants in three materials: soap, porcelain, and wax, in various colors. Eventually, the wax casts, in a pink color of the (white) body, formed the installation entitled 29. Ceroplastic Exercises (29. Ćwiczenia ceroplastyczne), curated by Wojciech Szymański at the Center of Polish Sculpture in Orońsko in 2020.⁹²

The memorial remnants’ casts not only indexically connect to the destroyed bodies of the wooden figures but also symbolize the massacred Romani bodies of the 1942 victims, as the “29” in the title stands for the number of victims of the Borzęcin execution. The casts represent both the consequences of and resistance to this double crime, first, committed by the occupiers, and then, by neighbors. Mirga-Tas’s sculptures recreate ephemeral yet tangible features of the body: the remnants are simultaneously dead and peculiarly alive; they seem full of power, like relics.⁹³ Moreover, Mirga-Tas decided to use wax after several attempts with other materials, having experimented with soap and porcelain. The project’s abandoned versions have strong corporeal characteristics as well: obviously, soap refers to the imaginary of the Holocaust and the body transformed into another matter, while porcelain has the appearance and texture of bones. Finally, as Szymański notes in his curatorial statement, Roma cultures used wax as a material in apotropaic practices. As Mirga-Tas says in an interview, “When I started making the casts, I felt that I could create so many of them that no nationalist would ever destroy them again.”⁹⁴

It seems that such performative–precarious commemorative forms—communal and repetitive, but also manifesting the “weak agency” of their reproducible, multiplied, and unspectacular form—would best serve to make the Romani Holocaust visible. They would remind us of the dispersed character of the Romani Holocaust and its abiding consequences: everlasting exclusion and daily violence towards the Roma. In 2021, in Olszewnica Nowa, the Zapomniane Foundation in collaboration with Romani NGO JawDikh! put a wooden marker and a wooden matzevah at the site of execution of 120 Jewish and Romani people. This wooden marker can serve as a good example of such precarious–performative commemoration.⁹⁵ Started with this initiative, the precarious–performative mapping of the Romani Holocaust remains a task for the future.

***

I met Krystyna Gil at the Nineteenth International Roma Caravan Memorial in July 2017. As every year, she visited the Szczurowa cemetery to commemorate the victims of the 1943 murder. Surrounded by family and friends, Gil gave a short speech in which she said: “They were murdered [because] they were Roma, that was their only crime, they were guilty of being Roma.” By 2017, Gil had already become a “professional” witness: she had recorded several other testimonies, including the ones for the USC Shoah Foundation and the Documentation and Cultural Center of German Sinti and Roma (Dokumentations- und Kulturzentrum Deutscher Sinti und Roma) in Heidelberg.⁹⁶

She had also turned into a symbol of the struggle for public recognition of the Roma experiences during the war.⁹⁷ In the recording for the Fortunoff Archive, Gil, in a sense, becomes a witness: not only because she speaks about her experience publicly for the first time, but also because, within the framework in which she does so, she must negotiate her visibility — as a Romani woman explaining her experiences to a Jewish interlocutor, as a woman testifying to her emancipation, and as a worker recounting her story to an urban intellectual. Gil’s testimony provides insight into the dynamics of producing knowledge about the past, complex relationships between memory and power, as well as political, institutional, and ethical contexts of the invisibility of the Romani Holocaust in (inter)national memory politics and imaginaries.