About Database

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.