Searching for Entanglement

Even as it has become increasingly accepted that the genocide of Roma and Sinti was interconnected to the genocide of European Jews, few scholars have written histories that integrated different victim groups into a coherent narrative. Even fewer have considered how the victim groups viewed one another or examined to what extent the persecuted understood their own experience as part of an integrated genocide with common roots and similar routes. That is certainly true for the former Czechoslovakia, the subject of this special issue. This study sketches out the general state of scholarship on the subject and establishes the context for the articles that follow. In all the regions we focus on – the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, the Slovak State, and the territory of interwar Czechoslovakia annexed by Nazi-allied Hungary – we found that state administrations and parts of the population frequently viewed the genocides of the Roma and Jews as interconnected processes. Many Roma expected to face the same fate as the Jews, and many ultimately did. Despite some similarities, notable differences emerged from our collective regional comparison. While searching for the entangled personal experiences of Roma and Jews during the war, we found the most examples, often involving mutual assistance, in the Slovak State. Slovakia was also the only region where a commensurate number of Jews and Roma lived before the war and where these communities had long been socio-economically intertwined. In the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, by contrast, the testimonies of Jews and Roma indicate that the first intense encounters commonly occurred in ghettos and concentration camps, particularly in the so-called family camps of Auschwitz II-Birkenau. In Carpathian Ruthenia, Roma were also likely slated to be deported to Auschwitz, as almost all Jews had been, but the advance of Soviet troops prevented mass destruction

First world war · Poison control · Suicide prevention · World War II · Central European national history · Human Factors and Ergonomics · Romani and Gypsy Studies · Soviet and Russian History