Ep. 14: The Romani Experience during the Holocaust with Ari Joskowicz

Some historians have argued that the experience of Romani people during the Holocaust most closely approximated that of the Jews in terms of policy and execution.  Of course, there were also important differences.  But, Jews and Romani also went through the Holocaust together.  In this, really fascinating discussion, I talked with Ari Joskowicz about the Nazi genocide of Romani, their interactions with Jews, and the difficult challenge of preserving these histories.

Ari Joskowciz is an associate professor of history at Vanderbilt University.

Joskowicz, Ari.  Rain of Ash: Roma, Jews, and the Holocaust (2023)

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You can find a complete reading list with books by our guests and also their suggestions here.

Transcript

Waitman (00:00.892)
Hello everybody. Welcome back to the Holocaust History Podcast. I am your host, Waipman Born. And today we're talking about the intersection of two victim groups in the Holocaust. And we're thinking about the Holocaust broadly defined and that is the Romani, the Sinti Roma, um, pejoratively often known as gypsies. And we're going to talk about their experience, um, as well as how their experience compares and contrasts to that of Jews. Um,

And I have the best person to talk about this with me today is Ari Joskiewicz. Ari, how you doing?

Ari (00:36.977)
Great, great, thanks. Thanks for having me.

Waitman (00:38.972)
Yeah, thanks for coming. Can we start just as we always do? Tell us a little about yourself, where you're at, what you work on, and how you got interested in this particular topic.

Ari (00:50.897)
Yeah, I was trained in Jewish history, German history, European history, and I actually started originally writing about the 18th and 19th century. So not on Roma and not on this period. But there is something that brought me to this topic coming out of this earlier work, which is that I was from the very beginning interested not just in thinking about how Jews were

interacting with a majority, sort of some anonymous majority, but I was always interested in Jews and other groups that were marginalized and generally in the way marginalized groups relate to each other. So that that is the defining feature of modernity. And so when I started, so my first book was dealt with Jews and Catholics, but then I started teaching the Holocaust, as so many do, who are originally trained in Jewish history or German history.

um, and uh, you know by now, of course I have been doing this for well nearly nearly 20 years, but I I as I started doing that, um, the question for me came up fairly quickly that so there's something I really I I didn't know decently well the jewish holocaust and trying to You know say something about that and there was this awareness that i'm supposed to know something about another group and I think I don't know if you had that feeling too, um,

I mean, I have that about many other groups as well, I should say. I think we all have that, where we're not specialists.

Waitman (02:21.948)
Yeah. I mean, I always feel like, I always feel like, again, like you, there are groups that I feel like I have a conversant level of knowledge. But I always think that, you know, I should know more. I mean, one of the things that this podcast has been great about, you know, with the latest stupidity regarding trans people, one of the positives out of that for me was that I got to talk to Laurie Marhofer about it and learn.

more detail, but yeah, you're right. I mean, there's like any other historical topic, I suppose there's, there's always a more that we could know about everything.

Ari (03:00.401)
Yeah, that's that's right. I should say that when when you told me you're going to talk to me, that's the that is exactly the interview I went to with the same feeling. You know, I just don't know enough about this. Again, I know some outlines. I knew some of the figures she was mentioning, but I don't know the history. So I had that feeling teaching teaching the Jewish Holocaust. And then there would be a section on Roma that sort of where I'm sort of looking back now.

what I did over 10 years ago, sort of embarrassed about the things I probably said. But for me, the question also very quickly came up. Not just that I want to learn about this other group and do a better job teaching it, but very quickly I moved to, well, then how did these groups interact? And then actually my students also asked that question. Perhaps I was setting them up for these kinds of questions.

Waitman (03:52.764)
Well, it's interesting because, you know, that's, I think there's a challenge just to talk about the teaching aspect for a second. You know, like, I think often the temptation, and it's not a, it's not a abnormal temptation because there, you know, class courses are arranged in a certain way with class periods and X number of meetings, but often you have like this other victims class, you know, where, I mean, even, even,

Ari (04:16.721)
Yeah. Yeah.

Waitman (04:20.284)
In books about the Holocaust, even in the new version of my Holocaust East Europe book, I have an other victim's chapter. I'm not, I wish there was a better way of doing it. And I do try to incorporate other victims in the narrative itself, right? But certainly when you're teaching, the temptation can often be that you are automatically sort of dividing these groups up and talking about them individually.

without doing exactly what you're talking about now, which is sort of thinking about the fact, what we would call sort of right intersectionality, right? That these groups all interact in different ways together.

Ari (04:59.281)
Yeah, so I think there is that element, it doesn't really overcome the challenges, challenges, I should say. So I even if I'm still not too proud of my syllabus, I think, when it when it comes to Romani themes, I think I think there are paradoxes and challenges. And so one thing I ended up getting to as I was systematically writing about Jews and Roma is, is not just ways of

thinking about Romani history. I hope there are ways we should that I get to where we how we can rewrite the history of Nazi racial persecution in ways that are more inclusive, but also the paradox is that we cannot easily overcome. Um, and and, you know, if I just ask, I sometimes ask my students to, you know, after they've taken a class with me, and many of them will mention in their evaluations, you know, that that, you know, this is one of the surprising elements for them, and they were really happy to read that.

to learn about that. But then when I do a, okay, everybody raised their hand, would you go to a class that has the Romany Holocaust in the title? And unanimously, they say no. I mean, they're also really honest there, and they're not just trying to please me. And that creates a paradox, because it remains filtered through the Jewish Holocaust. And that's the thing people still sign up for. And that's true for a class in university, but it's also true for museums and other institutions.

Waitman (06:09.756)
Yeah.

Ari (06:25.937)
So, so there are, there are ways. So that's also why I thought it was, it's really productive to think about Jews and Roma together. I mean, we'll get to that too. It's not just that, that they are both victims. It's really that when we try to understand what happens with, with, with Romany victims, there is in, in an inevitable way, Jews, Jewish institutions, the interest in Jews, the curiosity in Jews, the...

familiarity with Jews, all of that is in the way, even though, or is both in the way and aids in a way the engagement with the topic, even though these two groups are also really fundamentally different.

Waitman (07:13.628)
Yeah, yeah. I mean, maybe, maybe we should start with two sort of basic questions. You know, one is, is the term itself, right? Because I, there are multiple terms, which I know you can talk about for this group of people, which is, which is again, and you, you point this out well in the book, you know, that just like Jews or Christians or African Americans, whatever, I mean,

Ari (07:29.809)
Mm -hmm.

Waitman (07:43.036)
This is not sort of this organic cohesive community. It's a group of different communities, just like anybody else. Right. So that in and of itself causes issues, perhaps or challenges. But first of all, sort of maybe you could talk a little bit about, first of all, what should we, what is the proper way of calling them? Cause we know that gypsy is often used as a pejorative term, though some Romani people have sort of re -appropriated that. But then also just the basic history of this group for those of our listeners that may not be as familiar.

with who these people are, sort of where they come from. Because I think one of the things, not to give away too much in the interview, but one of the things that I think is really telling about the Romani experience is a lot of the continuities between pre Nazi time, Nazi time, and post Nazi time in ways that maybe aren't the same for Jews.

Ari (08:37.585)
Yeah, so we should absolutely get to that. Let me just very, very broad terms speak about both terminology and who Roma are and that there's a connection here because you said terminology is complicated. That is a function of the diversity of the group. And there are people who wrote about hyperdiversity or superdiversity, which is a sociologist technical term, but ultimately, whether we use those terms or not, they are

profoundly diverse on so many levels, so the level of religion, Protestants, Catholic, Orthodox Christians, Muslims, usually the religion of their neighbors, not exclusively, however, they are sometimes tied together by a language called Romani or Romaness in other parts of Europe, depending on where you are, which is also a fairly diverse language, but also not all Romani groups speak it either.

anymore or not in any recent history. But it nevertheless functions as an identifying factor really for the group. Then we have these images of groups being itinerary, itinerant, I believe, especially if you think of UK context, US, Western Europe, I think that's an image that people have very often. And here also you have a wide diversity among groups. Some were indeed historically at least traveling.

with families for their occupation, whereas the majority by the time of the Holocaust certainly and even before were settled. And that is true certainly for much of Eastern and Southeastern Europe. So they are really, really diverse. They have so as far as origins are concerned, we can understand them also in terms of ethnic origin, migrations from India and...

entering Europe at some point in the late Middle Ages. All of that makes them, as far as I'm concerned, simply a European minority. So I think, you know, as it's in a process of telling one's story as groups do, as they, you know, create their boundaries, create, unify around a history. The narrative of Indian origins has been very central, I would say. Had been central originally, actually, for the people who tried to, you know,

Ari (10:59.153)
depict them as Asiatic outsiders, et cetera, but also becomes a strong self -identification. At the same time, because I come from Jewish history, for me, it is always profoundly strange to go back to the Middle Ages to explain who people really are. Basically, two times that you cannot really, right? You cannot actually create a generational line back to times when anybody in particular migrated. So...

So coming out of that, for me, it's there. They're basically a European minority. And so there are there's a sense of common tradition and common ethnic origin. But that was not there throughout history. So I think that we do have a sense that they were sort of identifying each other as Romani. At the same time, what that means might have might have been very different depending on who's really interacting with each other and not all groups, for example, would it to marry with each.

from each other's plates, et cetera. So that diversity is reflected in many different ways of describing oneself. And Roma is what indeed we use now, especially in American English, British English, sometimes people also say Romanese, sort of as the umbrella term. If you're just broadly speaking about all groups. When we are speaking about particular groups, we go by what they call themselves. So in Spain, gitanos.

In Germany, which is important for the conversation we're having because it focuses on genocide, it's take take starts in Germany, a good number of the the local groups would call themselves Cindy. And if you make that distinction, then Roma would be more sort of the Eastern European groups and Cindy would be sort of German lands, Sweden, Scandinavia and some other France, etc.

So one can make that distinction, but then there are indeed, I think this is what you sort of hinted at, there are groups who will use gypsy as a self -description. So I don't think that means we should use the term when we speak in broad terms, but yes, if you're speaking about one particular group that actually uses that, then that's something else. Then you say, you know, that's what people call themselves. That's just the name they give themselves. So in that sense, it is local.

Ari (13:24.625)
to some degree what the naming practices are. I personally grew up in Austria, where the majority are Roma or part of various Romani groups, but under the umbrella of Roma. Sinti are a minority, so people say Roma and Sinti. If you read anything from Germany, they will always say Sinti and Roma and switch it around. And then in the US, people just say Roma.

use that as the umbrella term, basically.

Waitman (13:56.366)
So now that we've got the terminology down, what's the, what's sort of a brief description of, you know, who they are and their experiences living in Europe, you know, pre -Nazis, you know, which leads us into the follow on question at the end of that, which is why do the Nazis target them as a group?

Ari (14:21.137)
Right, right. So I think what you're trying to get at is the deep history of their persecution, basically. They're targeting and indeed there are multiple moments of this. We have money, various decrees, imperial decrees, et cetera, that really target them. The continuities and who's exactly targeted is always a bit messy. So there are historians who say that the term gypsy is a police term. It is not a self -description of people.

Waitman (14:25.916)
Yeah.

Ari (14:50.513)
So the people targeted by that might largely be Romani people, but might not also. So it's especially true in Western Europe. And

Waitman (15:00.956)
Well, this is the challenge, right, with, with, we'll make it to this, but sedentary, non -sedentary, right? Like where like behavior can indicate you're part of a group, perhaps to the people, the outsiders, whereas it may not, that may not actually be correct.

Ari (15:07.025)
That too. Exactly.

Ari (15:14.993)
Absolutely. And that goes all the way to the Nazi period. So one example that illustrates this fairly nicely is what happens in the Netherlands. And so the Netherlands has its own categories and that's woonwachenbewoners, which means people living in trailers. The French have their own system, nomad, people are nomadic. And so the Dutch have their system when the Germans ask Dutch authorities under the, you know, whom they control to arrest

the people that Germans called gypsies on May 16th, 1944. They arrested several hundred people. They are deported to Westerbork, which people might listen to this podcast might know. It's a camp built originally for Jewish refugees becomes a central transit camp for Jews. And there the Germans basically say, well, half of these people are just not people we call gypsies. Who are you? What are you doing?

And they, you know, basically half get released and the other half gets sent to Auschwitz based on German criteria who are racializing this differently. Whereas the Dutch were also working with whatever police categories they have. So we can see their continuity. We can see these issues really very clearly there. And it's perhaps not by coincidence that it's Dutch scholars who have emphasized the element of that, that it's a police term that.

when people speak of gypsies or zigoina in the German context. So I should really mention something that I actually probably should have given more space in my book, I realize, and that is that there's a history of slavery. So the territories that were part of the Ottoman Empire and become Romania had outright slavery of Romani populations, which is a history, right? If we...

It's generally fascinating. One thing I should also add is Roma are, by all accounts, Europe's largest ethnic minority.

Ari (17:21.329)
If you consider that, it's amazing how little we know about them if you come out of any traditional education about European history. So you can avoid knowing that there is a form of slavery in Europe, which ends around the same time as it does in the United States.

Waitman (17:27.548)
Mm -hmm.

Ari (17:43.953)
same ballpark, a few years apart. So, yeah, I think we very often, you know, we, of course, are going to speak about the Holocaust and how little their story is told and what we can learn. But really, paradoxically, the Holocaust is the story that people know most about. But if they know anything, it's just the Holocaust. So, yes, their persecution has deep roots there.

Waitman (18:04.654)
Right. Yep.

Ari (18:12.049)
And as nation states start to develop new tools for policing, as they territorialize their... How you organize territories, basically, where borders become more rigid. Eventually, before World War I, you don't have... The passport regimes aren't quite as rigid. So a lot of technologies that will be developed. Often, Roma will be crucial early targets. So when it comes to fingerprinting.

basically biometric information and identity cards. Roma will be targeted across Europe as some of the earliest people to who will be affected by that.

Waitman (18:48.476)
And why is this? What does sort of the modern state find so problematic about them?

Ari (18:54.321)
So it's movement. They are theorized as, even before you get Nazi biological racism, as basically inherently criminal. They are not the only populations who are deemed so. So often these do overlap with other policies towards mobile poor people, I should say. The state becomes anxious about people whom it cannot fully control in their movement and identify.

So the image of Roma as, who are of course also reacting to repression by avoiding surveillance of the state and the state ramping up its surveillance in reaction to that in turn, I would say. You have, like the International Criminal Police Commission, which is the predecessor, what we now know as Interpol, was also really concerned with Roma as a transnational crime issue.

far as they were concerned. So they felt they needed international police cooperation to deal with groups that are in their mind acting across borders. So what we have is a whole history of both transnational cooperation, technocratic cooperation and nation states that start to create all sorts of offices as they professionalize police work in general that that will deal with Romany policies.

And I know you wanted to talk about continuities and the continuities are just so amazing. If you look at Romney history, I mean, they are they are baffling for somebody again who comes out of Jewish history. There are continuities that that go far beyond anything you will even see when it comes to we speak of anti -Semitism. There's sometimes like the longest hatred. People people theorize it in those terms. But we just get to institutions. How states.

governing bodies have dealt with populations. Jewish history is complicated. Romany history has continuities that are eerie in that regard. So basically, by the late 19th century, you get people who specialize in tracking groma. You have people in the police who make it their career. And we know this sort of people making it their career to track.

Ari (21:13.585)
marginalized populations from Jewish history or from the Holocaust. Somebody like Eichmann, say, right? Eichmann's career is based on the fact that he becomes the, well, eventually R .S .H .A. So he becomes for the central security agencies of Nazi Germany, their Jewish person. But you have that for Roma much earlier. Basically, people whose career it is to sort of know something about them, sort of a mix of anthropological and criminological knowledge that they claim for themselves.

And that will continue, certainly, into the Nazi period, but also continue after the Nazi period. So when I looked at testimonies that come through the judicial system, and prosecutors are saying, you know, they actually want to clear up a crime that was committed against Romon. So basically, say the Auschwitz, Frankfurt Auschwitz trial, there were follow -up prosecution attempts of various Auschwitz guards.

Waitman (21:50.844)
Thank you.

Ari (22:13.137)
interview Roma and Cindy in that context, they want to they are interviewing them because they're victims. How do they go about that? How do you find the victims? You have registry books, and then the prosecutor will write to the local criminal police office. And these offices will sometimes say things like, well, basically, we'll connect you to our gypsy expert, or they'll say in which I thought was, you know, they say our gypsy expert is unfortunately currently being retrained. So you know, we can't help you currently. Just

know, this is the 1960s. Can you think of a police office in Germany saying our Jew expert is currently being retrained? It's unthinkable, right? It's not because anti -Semitism disappears, but it's how institutions deal with these issues. You wouldn't see that. So Romani population

Waitman (23:03.868)
Well, and the regulation, the regulatory piece too, right? That, that, you know, that, that in the Nazi period, you know, being Jewish was illegal in a certain sense, you know, that, that the state had sort of ruled you to be, you know, a perfect, a perfect target of discrimination, et cetera, et cetera, legal discrimination, you know, laws on the books has explicitly said you can and cannot do these sorts of things as a Jewish person, um, which clearly are, are anathema after the, after the third Reich.

But regulations similarly that regulate how Roma people behave seem to have persisted for a long time after that, along with a lot of the officially held prejudices against them that continue to be okay to sort of hold in a way that sort of blatant overt anti -Semitism would not have been accepted.

Ari (23:59.185)
Exactly, exactly. And it's essential because ultimately, if you seek justice from a state crime, you're still relying on the state to actually enact the justice. I mean, you know, you need you know, you're made to have popular campaigns, etc. But if it's called justice, it comes from the governing body that has the monopoly of violence, ultimately. And it requires the state. So so

That is why for Romani activists, this had been a much more painful process into, to some degree into the present, but certainly into the 1980s in very, very tangible ways.

Waitman (24:43.036)
Well, there seems to be also, since we will talk about comparisons, you know, in that regard, there's a good comparison to the LGBT experience, particularly for gay men who, you know, homosexuality, particularly male homosexuality, right, remains criminalized by the same law from the empire through the Third Reich and then all the way up to 1997 or ish, you know, and, you know, while, while everyone else sort of

got the official reprieve and recognition of victim status. You know, for some of the men that have been prosecuted, their sort of criminal record remained valid because it was still criminal in the state's eyes.

Ari (25:27.761)
Absolutely. So there are great continu - great similarities here. I would say there's also an overlap between the persecution of Roma and the persecution of people called asocial, who are also marginalized and whose right to whose whose the crime against them is not perceived as political necessarily. So that will be true for Roma as well. And that's that they will get excluded from.

from provisions that are supposed to be retributive justice of some sort. The difference between LGBT communities and to Roma communities is that they are an ethnicized community or ethnic community, and thus it's a familial memory. And this is where they are similar to Jews, which again, as far as comparisons go, I both do transnational history and I do comparative histories to some degree and relational histories. It's useful to...

to have elements that are more similar. And often LGBT victims of Nazism might be actually ostracized by their own families. That is not the case for Romani victims who have a community in that sense much more like Jews, which is also why when they, it's not just obviously there are multiple Jews.

Waitman (26:39.388)
Right.

Ari (26:52.945)
groups that say, well, the Jews have done particularly well to explain what their story is and to create institutions that would commemorate them. But I think Romany, it made much more sense for Romany communities to at least use them as a model because indeed there are similarities there.

Waitman (27:12.86)
Yeah, so if we get to that move in, I suppose into the Third Reich period, because I think this is also one of those really, it's interesting both sort of for the lay person, but also scholarly in the comparative sense, right, of Nazi policy, the way that it's articulated, the way that it's carried out. You know, there was a great debate, which you mentioned in the book as well, but for our listeners between a very great.

Ari (27:34.417)
Mm -hmm.

Waitman (27:41.244)
very great scholar of the Holocaust, Yehuda Bauer, and another great scholar, Sybil Milton, over whether or not Romani people were actually victims of a genocide. And so I think it might be worth talking a little bit about sort of what are the Nazis trying to do with the Romani, with Roma people, taking a bit of understanding of Jewish Holocaust for granted of our listeners, and then how does that compare and contrast to the policies that they.

that they come about for Jews.

Ari (28:14.321)
So both types of persecution do emerge from Nazi understandings of what the state is, what it is supposed to look like, how it is a racial state, how...

the freedoms to state, the radical freedom the state should have in re -engineering populations to fit that model. How these ideologies really radicalized during, in anticipation of a war and then with a war. So I think there are great similarities here and it fits, the chronology is similar enough. So interestingly, Rama populations actually,

face systematic internment before Jews do. So Jews of course are, you know, coincidental victims in the sense that the first camps are made for political prisoners basically and many Jews will just be among them as political prisoners, but they're not arrested at this point, right? They're not Jewish camps the way people very often, you know, we are familiar with this history, but I think in popular understanding people hear the camps and they think of the camps that are liberated by the Americans 45 basically.

Waitman (29:09.309)
Mm -hmm.

Waitman (29:27.516)
Right. I mean, it's worth pointing out that particularly in the German concentration camp system, the camps were established and for much of their history are established as tools of political repression. And that really it's only after 1938 or so that you start to see Jews coming into the camps in large numbers. And when they do the first time, it's really to sort of scare them into leaving, really. It's to sort of...

Ari (29:28.081)
Um.

Waitman (29:56.7)
say this is what happens because many of them then get released with the hopes that they will take the lesson that we should leave, right? Just for our listeners to point out sort of the...

Ari (30:02.961)
That's right. That's right. So that so just chronologically, that's basically November 38. It's what people call Kristallnacht of the November program that will lead to these mass arrests. Now, Roman for Roma, actually, there is a first wave really of these camps in 36. The first one. So of particular types of camps, I should say. So these are not the camps run by the SS. They're run by municipalities on the outskirts of cities. They won't follow the Dachau model as architecturally. They are they follow

They're basically hyper -surveyed versions of what people had already perceived as gypsy campsites. But they are policed, and these centers will be crucial then for deportations also to camps. So they fit into that larger system of escalating violence eventually, systematic state violence. And controlling movement, exactly. So the very first ones are, to my knowledge, in Cologne in 1935, but it's really around the Olympic Games in 1936.

Waitman (30:51.132)
and controlling movement, right, because it prevents them from going places.

Ari (31:01.777)
that you will get these camps in multiple places. So Berlin has a famous one called Marzahn, but it's Frankfurt, Düsseldorf, Dortmund. It's just broadly across Germany that municipalities will follow what is a model of them as well, right? They're looking at each other. And I found that fascinating. And it gets me a bit already to interactions with Jews too. So I'll just throw that in because the...

It's not just that there is a particular chronology to the Romany to Romany persecution. It's so fascinating how it doesn't fit into our doesn't feature in our general chronology of what happens under Nazism. So why does it not feature? Why is that sort of an interesting fact that is a new fact for most people? I would say it's because the first some of the first historians of the Holocaust were Jews.

were Jewish survivors who did not perceive this as part of their history. If you look at newspapers of the time, if you look at just how Jews had reacted to all of this, they barely perceived it, likely because it's normalized violence. It's just what the state does to what they see as, and you need to see my air quotes here, these kinds of people. And

Waitman (32:19.74)
Well, it's worth pointing out, and again, this is just facts, right? Facts of humanity that, you know, many Jews probably viewed them, you know, with the same prejudices as non -Jews, you know? They tended to be settled people doing well economically, involved in society, and they looked at this group, you know, and thought, and many of them, you can make the same distinction with the way that,

Western European Jews looked at Eastern European Jews. Even within groups, there are prejudices and biases against each other.

Ari (32:50.193)
Exactly.

Ari (32:55.537)
Absolutely. So I think Jews have so Roma have similar ideas about Jews I believe then as their neighbors do and the same is true for Jews And I do have like I cite a judge who gives lectures to Jews in the mid -30s And he's sort of a Jewish judge I think he had been removed by at that time already and he he tells them don't feel so bad You know, at least we're hated but not despised like these people who are called gypsies so

So I think there's a level of where this doesn't fit. Also, even when people, when they're not Jewish historians, but they look at Jewish sources, they look at Jewish testimony as well. Right, it's what we're taught to do, listen to the voices of the victims. These things don't come up because it is not the story of these victims, because voice is something in the plural, really. It's not the voice of the victim, it's the voices of the victim we have to hear. So ultimately, the interaction tells us...

a lot about why certain histories get told and not told. So there.

Waitman (33:55.836)
Well, there's an interesting, just really quickly, because that one, before we move on, one of the things that struck me both listening to you now and also in reading it 1936, you know, the Nazis from a certain perspective do try to sort of tone down their anti -Jewish stuff, right? Cause they're like, this could be viewed as bad by society. So we're going to kind of, you know, move it to the side, sweep it under the rug. But.

Ramani, they're like, well, obviously everybody else will have no problem with this. We need to get these people off the streets. You know, it's, it's kind of like the broken windows policing, like get rid of vagrancy and, and no bit of a problem with this. And so it can be very open and obvious, which I think is a great example of the way that sort of these, these two persecutions parallel, but also different.

Ari (34:43.793)
Absolutely. Exactly. There's something I mean, if we know if you know the history of Olympic Games in so many places, like what what what authorities, you know, sell us cleaning up town really means removing poor people, unwelcome people, etc. And so this is a version of this, I would say. And indeed, they also tried to remove the Jews are not welcome here signs as international.

visitors come now for the Olympic Games. So I think you're absolutely right. It does underline something that is a big difference. And I guess I'm getting to the comparing already, which is really when so I would say both are racialized groups. Both are racialized victims of Nazi persecution. Jews are a racialized political enemy and Roma are a racialized social enemy, I would say.

So what is and it's really the outlier is our Jews in some respects. Also, when you look at sort of studies of prejudice, et cetera, because you have that conspiracy theory element, which is absolutely essential. I should say Jews, this is not unique, completely unique to Jews. Actually, a lot of the tropes come originally from anti Jesuit debates. I should say as somebody who had studied anti Catholicism. But but by the by the early 20th century, really,

there's a sense that Jews are, it's a conspiracy theory of how history works. So the idea of Jews as communists, as the embodiment of the communists, they both are the idea that most of the communists are Jews or even if they're not, they're behind it. That is incredibly powerful and would be incredibly powerful for the dynamics of genocide. That element is not as much here.

What you do have on the other hand is a longer, deeper history of basically stigmatization on a local level, I would say. And their targeting is a social problem that then gets racialized and where the state responds similarly with genocidal policies. So you mentioned the debates of Yehuda Bauer and there were some other scholars who...

Ari (37:06.865)
discussing these issues of genocide. And I should say these were so painful for Romani victims, their family members, right? Because, and we know this from current policies, right? Genocide is from current debates also, you know, the East and everywhere, Ukraine, actually, the term genocide has been is a legal term, it's a political term, it gets invested with so much.

so much baggage actually beyond what it also what it narrowly means that this was basically challenging their their victimhood. I would say on the on the level of scholarship, I would say there is there is a level where it goes back in a bit to what I just said about these camps as well, where you have to take a step back and think about your own categories, your sources and the categories you use. And if you're just making circular arguments.

So my perspective is that Jewish, the persecution of Jews and the persecution of Roma indeed does have different features, but they are, we need both of them to really understand modern genocide and to understand what's happening in Nazi Germany. So what the Jewish genocide indeed is louder in the sense that the state really puts it top of the agenda and advertises it to some degree. I mean, it also then tries to, it does both, right? It keeps speaking about it and doesn't want the ultimate actual crime.

to be public knowledge. But ultimately, it also advertises this. We're delivering the anti -Semitism we were promising you, which is... When it comes to Roma, that's much less of an issue because even historically, I think it is a crime that becomes much more legislative. So not the legislature, but the executive branch. And we generally... This is...

Waitman (38:39.964)
Right, yeah.

Ari (38:59.569)
again, comes if you look at debates about policing in general, it's just very hard to track what are much more decentralized effects. And we're you know, legislatures are, you know, they have to get elected, they want to make it central, whatever they're doing, they're advertising it, they're discussing it, it's loud. We're discussing laws, but practices, basically, local executive branch practices are much less in the news, that it's just much harder to discuss.

Waitman (39:26.012)
But it seems like it's, sorry, it seems like it's, if we're trying to characterize Nazi anti -Romani policy, it's an extreme radicalization along an already established sort of trajectory. Whereas Nazi policy vis -a -vis the Jews, particularly when we get to the final solution, is ultimately a fairly sharp break from.

Ari (39:51.249)
Yes.

Waitman (39:52.284)
ways in which Jews have been persecuted, even violently in the past. And I think that's an interesting sort of way to think about it.

Ari (39:56.593)
Exactly.

Ari (40:00.272)
Absolutely. And if we if we want to, if we think of what genocide studies sort of promises and probably can't keep is right prevention. It's basically, you know, you have a model here. We're not all we're both historians, not political scientists, but the promise is still somewhere there. Right. We're talking about that history because we don't want it to repeat because we want to be able to recognize awful things as they are happening. And if you if you don't accept that there are these different models, you're you're missing a whole lot.

You can't just work with trying to find the Jewish model somewhere else. I don't think you can just try to find the Romany model somewhere else. But I think what you have are actually two poles of how violence happens, how these things radicalize, how they're normalized. I think our debate is so much richer, even about that concept of genocide, when we think of both groups.

Waitman (40:59.068)
Well, when you think about what is to sort of use the Georgia Al -Gamban sort of zone of exception idea that it's really the fact that you have a Nazi state where everything is permissible, that they can follow these two different paths to essentially the same ultimately physical outcome for the people involved.

Ari (40:59.409)
Um.

Ari (41:21.969)
Yeah, no, I think that's it. And if you want a theory, you know, it's also fascinating. Jews did eventually there was at least a period when Jews featured quite a bit in theories of modernity. I would say, you know, you know, as the exception of modernity, thinking about modernity in their context, sort of basically history that go from the 18th century to the present and try to think about that. And, you know, there's theory with a capital T usually comes from France.

Waitman (41:48.7)
Great. Yeah.

Ari (41:50.321)
And it's fascinating for me how Roma are not usually theorized that way. You would think, and this is something that struck me also as I was researching this book, that the 1968ers were thinking about delinquency, modernity, the state, and, you know, all these things would have theorized all that. But ultimately,

It fits so nicely, even like Foucault, like this sort of like who are the outsiders who decide what is normal. But it's not the case. Roma are even marginalized in theories of marginality. And so, yes, I think you're right. And that's pointing to a Gumbin who's also ultimately somebody who like thinks of the camp as the modern institution and tries to create a grand theory around that. I think Roma are, you know,

Waitman (42:29.404)
Right.

Ari (42:45.393)
are at the center of that. And indeed, if people are not recognizing what happened to them in 1936, it's because people think it's just normal for these kinds of people to be in camps, in survey camps.

Waitman (42:55.58)
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I heard somebody, I want to get back to the history because I've gotten too, I've gone too far down the wonky theory road, but somebody mentioned that sort of one of the new front, one of the next frontiers in Holocaust studies is looking at sort of the, exactly that sort of a social category or category of criminals, but criminals that the Nazis sort of over.

overreact to and sort of create this own category of people who are, you know, not necessarily criminals at all, or are sort of petty criminals, right? And it seems like that this is, that's just sort of the next step on this pathway of recognizing precisely what you just mentioned, that some of the ways in which the Nazis persecuted their victims are really on the same trajectory as their prior, as this prior sort of

Western European state behavior, of which that's a group.

Ari (43:57.521)
Absolutely right. And I think criminals are when I speak about groups that are forgotten, I do usually mention people called criminals too. And again, if we come out of current debates about policing, you realize that that category is right. It's a category the Nazis use, but we don't call people criminals anymore in the sense of, you know, people defined by their worst moment as an essentialized identity. You might have somebody with a conviction.

but that's not a criminal. Like that's not the single defining feature that they have. So I think talking about criminals is so first of all, I completely agree. Second, the point of about criminals brings us also to the challenge with with Roma, which is it's one thing to talk about the right what the state thinks. And basically, you know, there's a majority that marginalizes them, thinks about criminals in particular way, thinks about people called gypsies, asocials, all these categories.

including disability as well, that was actually talking about big groups that we need to really think about. The thing about all these groups is that they are ignored not just by the state but by other victims.

So the history of the way we've dealt with this topic is indeed through the marginalization within among the people who actually do care about the obvious, right? There are enough people who do. But one way we write that history is basically there's a mainstream society that maybe has ceremonies, but they don't actually care or how much do they care we discuss. But we do agree that the survivor organizations do care.

But even they have their limits and criminals are really at the bottom rung there. And when, you know, the fight that Roma have for inclusion in many places consists like that for other groups of creating a boundary between themselves and these other groups.

Waitman (45:57.212)
So, so, yeah, sorry. So like, if we, if we didn't think about moving into this sort of shared victim experience and different victim experience, right. What are the Nazis doing to Romani populations? You know, and, and, and what are the sort of the, I suppose the key, the key moments, turning points, you know, behaviors by the Nazis, what are they doing to them? And then obviously sort of within this question,

is sort of how is this running in parallel to the Jewish experience and also at times intersecting.

Ari (46:33.713)
So I'll speak about the Nazis first, but I should add that I'll very quickly get to other regimes as well, because this is true for the Holocaust as well, obviously. For the Jewish Holocaust, it's true for the Romani Holocaust, certainly. Other regimes are essential. And for the Romani Holocaust, it will be Romania and the independent state of Croatia. But if we stick with Nazis and Germany for now, so you have first elements of isolation. You have these camps already. You have these...

you know, these, so you have policies that are basically carried eventually by a different office in the RSHA. So the listeners are not familiar with it, the Central Security Agency of Nazi Germany, but it's municipalities, welfare offices that are really more central here. Eventually, in May 1940, you have the first set of deportations to what is then already occupied Poland.

where Roma are deported to a camp where they will for the first time be actually next to Jews. So this is the first camp where Jews and Roma as Jews and Roma are together next to each other. And that is the labor camp Belzec. And that's a bit of a mess because there will be an extermination camp by that name, which is, it doesn't even show that this camp is enormous, actually. It's part of what sort of Himmler had.

planned as a massive labor camp system, in fact. So by the standards of 1940, that's actually a fairly large labor camp system. It's not just that, but there's a whole series next to each other, next to the armistice line between Germany and the Soviet Union, people being forced to dig these anti -tank trenches. So this is where Romer will for the first time be deported to these locations. Ultimately, as Germany is expanding, the policies that will apply to Jews,

Well, in some version, you'll find some version also applied to Roma. So there are efforts at either it's actually a mix. It's a fascinating mix to have a colleague who just wrote about the protectorate. So this is what today's Czech Republic is. And first assimilate forced assimilation policies that then switch to deportations to two camps from where they will also be deported to Auschwitz, which will be lead to the murder of approximately 70 to 80 percent of the

Ari (49:00.753)
the Roma of what is today's Czech Republic. And the Roma of that region now are mostly Slovak Roma who migrated when it was Czechoslovakia. So you have policies that will usually lead to deportations to some form of camp. There will be deportations to some of the ghettos, Jewish ghettos as well. Ultimately, the main sites where Roma will be murdered are areas of the Einsatzgruppen, so palaces.

summer of 1941, the invasion of the Soviet Union and then these mobile killing squads that will be crucial here. You will have three locations, I would say. Well, two are actual locations. One is a region. So Auschwitz will be central. Auschwitz -Birkenau. There's a camp called B2E, which is in Birkenau, which is the so -called Gypsy or Gypsy family camp. And this will be the site where most Roma from Germany.

proper, Austria incorporated Austria and the protectorate will be murdered. Then you have Camp Yosenovac, which is where sort of the independent state of Croatia murders Roma next to Jews and Serbs. So again, very different constellation there. And then you have Romania and the deportations to Transnistria. And Transnistria is not a single place one should say. It's a vast territory. It's what Romania gets.

from the Ukraine for joining the war, all the way from Odessa to basically the border with occupied Poland. It's a massive area and there are multiple camps there, but 20 ,000 or more Roma are deported by Romania to these areas and a large number of them will die there largely of simple starvation and the hygienic situation there.

Um, so, so I think those are basically the, you know, the main locations where mass murder will happen. Those four, I would say. Um, and then, and then you have just, just various decentralized camp systems. And so there are many more stories one can tell, say, uh, French Roma. So when French Roma and Sinti or Romanies are deported, they will

Ari (51:28.689)
The ones that are actually deported to Auschwitz are deported in incorporated areas. The northern parts would become part of a military command of Belgium, will be deported with Belgium, Roma basically. But in the areas that stay under the sort of civil administration or at first unoccupied zone and eventually fully occupied zones, there the camps are really run by the so -called prefecture, prefectio.

That's the local regional police command. And these Roma will be arrested. Well, it's basically French police that arrests them, controls these camps, will sometimes release them before liberation, but will also keep them in camps until 1946. And most of France is liberated in 44, after all. So we're talking about a year and a half after liberation, some Roma are still in these camps. So that gets us at how complicated this story ultimately is.

um where yes it's a nazi story and we know this now for jewish history for the murder of the jews too it's it's much more than a german story that is absolutely true for the persecution of roma so everything we know now about debates about other european populations you know being involved in pointing out victims denouncing victims killing victims

I think all these things are likely also true for Roma. Some Romani populations are protected also by their neighbors. Here, you know, it's a slightly different history from Jews, also in terms of locations, where this happens. One typical scenario where this happens is where Roma are Muslims and Muslim communities sort of claim them as they say that basically these are not the people you call gypsies. They're the people we call Muslims.

that's how you should treat them. And that happens in Bosnia to some degree, and it happens in the Crimea, in Crimea. So that's, I don't know, that's a very brief brief overview.

Waitman (53:34.716)
Yeah. So can you talk a little about about the actual interactions? Because one of the I think there were some of the really interesting parts of the history, but also of the book. You know, for example, would where where Jews and Roma are are side by side. But also one of the things that I think is really interesting that you point out is sort of. And the funny thing is, I was I was reading the page prose for the Inosuke book and and.

You know, one of the Jewish survivors is talking about after they move into the ghetto in Lviv, um, they, they move a bunch of, but excuse me, they move a large number of Jews into a place that it's crowded, et cetera, et cetera. But he says, we were living like gypsies, you know, just like something that you mentioned in the book about the ways, the ways in which the terminology is used, but not, but it's sometimes divorced from the people themselves. So those two, two things to think about.

Ari (54:22.193)
Yes.

Ari (54:33.072)
Right, right. So one thing I trace is basically how groups interact, see each other. And this is easier to do for Jewish sources where I have more written sources. And indeed, this like the gypsies can mean various things, but mostly it means of, you know, under particularly poor conditions. You know, one of the fathers of nationalist Jewish history did not cause

success, you know, to express how awfully Jews are being treated in the Russian Empire is like the gypsies. That's how to how to how to frame it. Elie Wiesel in the Yiddish version, when he wants to express, you know, how, you know, things are chaotic, you know, what's left on the street, the baggage, it's like the gypsies looks like a gypsy cow. So we have the so what what what remains are people seeing each other in the abstract. But what you also get with

real persecution happening, whether 39 or 41 as markers really, people also start to see them, each other as really embodied people and as real people. And what I describe in the book is, well, first of all, are some of these interactions and some of them are just incredibly striking. And one that I, so in my mind, I keep getting back to you because it's such a haunting, incredibly haunting image is, so what we know is the Groinovsky report,

pseudonyms is just basically one of the first reports of mass killings in this case, the Khamnur concentration camp, extermination camp, white lager, technically. This reaches the Warsaw Ghetto. It's one of the first times the Warsaw Ghetto realizes there's this, you know, when they have confirmation that mass murder is really happening. And yes, some of it is about the murder of Jews, but a large part of this text is actually about the murder of the

The remains of the over 5 ,000 Austrian Roma who were deported to the Lodz ghetto where typhus breaks out. They only stay in Lodz for a month and a half are deported to Helmholtz and are all murdered. Every single one of them, all those who did not die already, typhus are murdered. And you realize that it's amazing how we could forget that, right? When they hear, when Jews hear about what is happening,

Ari (56:59.985)
They are also hearing about what is happening to another group and it is a warning sign. And in this report, so the person who is giving the report is a grave digger also, is among those. And he describes what happens to other grave diggers there who are forced to dig the graves of these Roma who are being murdered. And he describes how these...

this one set of other grave diggers are forced to dig these graves. It's January, it's cold. I think they also, there's a sort of a hint of they think it's this colorful clothing that the Roma are wearing is interesting to them. But either way, so these people are, they dig the graves, the people are murdered, they're shot, they're in the graves, they take their clothes. And at the end of the day, the Nazis murder the grave diggers. And it's this image, right, of the two victim groups together where one group,

victim group is wearing the clothes of the other group. And I think that really is as entangled as it gets. When it comes to these interactions and the traces they leave, what struck me was really that the interactions that would leave deep impressions and would motivate people to express solidarity are often seeing the other being murdered, hearing the other being murdered.

or smelling the other group being murdered. And this is true on both sides. So Roma will be some of the last people in this camp that I mentioned in Auschwitz, B2E. They will be some of the last victims seeing Jews being selected and sent to the gas chambers. And then, you know, they can smell, they will notice that the crematoria are active. Jews will have such memories too sometimes. There's lots of memories of

auditory, there are lots of auditory memories, so memories of screaming. This will be true in Auschwitz, where on August 2nd 1944, over 4 ,000 of the remaining Roma will be murdered in a single night. And you can't see anything, it's night, people are also forced to be in their barracks, but what they hear is the resistance of the Roma. And it will be true for the Lodz Geta, which we already mentioned, or Łódź, which is where

Ari (59:18.673)
lots of testimonies speak of those Roma who are on the other side of a barbed wire fence, they don't really know what's going on and they hear these screams. Now, so afterwards when I have testimonies often in the context also of commemorative activity and people express how shocked they were to know what's happening to the other group, those are the experiences. Now what these experiences don't give people is any actual knowledge about how people live. It's basically just...

you know, it's about the knowledge of a dreadful death. But it doesn't mean you know anything. You don't even people don't know what language the other group spoke, never mind knowing names of other people. So it's a very abstract kind of knowledge, which is somewhere in between that they're both so incredibly very real. And there is something symbolic that is remaining about them, because you don't know who they are, basically. The people who do interact with each other,

in a much more active way, tend to do that because the Roma force, because the Nazis forced them to interact with the other population, usually one population managing another population. So in the Lodz ghetto, it's Jewish police that is guarding that perimeter between the Jewish and the Romani side, Jewish doctors who go in and some of them die and who are forced to deal with the typhus. There's Jews, basically a Jewish side has to deal with a lot of elements of that camp, including sewage, the dead.

On the other hand, you have some Jewish police that, you know, Roma are sometimes part of the smuggling networks that let ghetto survive. And then, you know, it's Jewish ghetto police that basically is one of their main problems. On the other side, there are memories of Roma also as capos, so as as functionary prisoners who are in charge of Jewish populations. And in my book, I mentioned Eddie Wiesel because he was one of the people who...

about that at length and later had was very influential in building the Holocaust Museum in Washington DC and part of the debates about how Roma should be included. And he is so so he is part of that that larger group that has interactions that are that are traumatic in their own right. So you get that paradox, that knowledge.

Waitman (01:01:37.436)
Well, this is one of the things that came up because, you know, one of the things that we talk about, I think, is often as scholars, and I think we often try to fight, is this idea of competitive suffering, right? Or what I refer to as the Olympics of suffering, right? Which is sort of like a, you know, were gay people persecuted worse than, I mean, if you're in Auschwitz and you die, you're equally dead kind of thing.

Ari (01:01:45.457)
Mm -hmm.

Waitman (01:02:05.884)
Um, but what I thought was interesting, uh, working through your book was that this is something that was sort of, was not, it was ongoing at the time between the two groups of like sort of who had it worse. Um, which I would, I think is a really interesting, I think, I think again, it speaks back to your, your overall theme of, of ways in which these groups are interacting and how we see, um, their experiences. Cause that's, that's a, that's a contemporary thing. It's not a sort of post.

which is also part of the story, the post of, you know, we're not getting the recognition that we think we should be getting, but also with something that was taking place in the historical event itself.

Ari (01:02:44.849)
Absolutely. I mean, and so I do argue against comparisons to some degree when it's grand comparisons. And my argument is we learn much more for these kinds of situations where the way we know about the subject is really tainted by relations of the two groups, where we actually look at relations. So how do people actually interact with each other rather than compare them in the abstract? And so I try to argue on the one hand against that. On the other hand, there is something about

human beings indeed who compare, about victims who obviously compare. If you want to understand what's happening to you, it's like you're seeing what's happening to the people on the other side of the border fence. You know, Jews know, if these people are being murdered, who are deemed against the social problem of the regime, we're probably going to be killed too. And the other way around, Roma know, look, everybody knows what the Nazis think about the Jews. Now we're going to camp next to them, with them.

What does that mean for us? I mean, you can, it's just pretty obvious that people are, it's just part of contextual knowledge of who you are, where you are, and what's gonna happen to you. Which is why I was, I mean, it's also because I'm just a comparative historian to some degree, where the normative question, so people sometimes ask, can you compare the Holocaust? And first of all, I wonder if they know what the word compare means, which is not equate. Can you compare the Holocaust to another event? And, you know.

highlighting even all the differences is a form of comparison. But apart from it being that you also wonder, it's not even a show me a place when people didn't basically, it's not a normative question. It's not a should question. It's just a is question. It's like, it's like, I can, I can just trace comparisons not to post, as you say, it's when when the comparisons start January 30 1933, I presume. So,

Waitman (01:04:16.188)
Right, yeah.

Waitman (01:04:41.404)
Well, it's one of the things that I thought, again, to sort of pull an example out of the book that I think is really, really powerful. I think, I think it was Belzec, the Belzec labor camp. Anyway, one of the places, uh, the Roma were allowed to bring their families and the Jews weren't. And both sides thought that was like a bad thing. Right? I mean, like the Jews were like, Oh man, you know, like, I wish I could have my family here, but.

the Roma were like, this makes it more difficult for me because my family's here and I have to sort of try to manage them and deal with them. And I thought that was an exemplary way of pointing out that, you know, my perspective is not always seeing sort of the reality of what's going on.

Ari (01:05:28.337)
Yeah, that's a big one, especially for Auschwitz -Birkenau. So I think Beersitz is a bit strange because the Jews who come there are indeed all men. And they're deported. It's a pull function. That is, the Nazis feel they need this labor camp and they basically grab people from Lublin ghetto, some from Warsaw and some other ghettos to bring them there. On the Romani side, it's a push effect. The Germans want to move them out. So these are West German

Roma who are deported, Sinti mostly actually, all Sinti from what I know, who are deported there, some Polish Roma as well actually. And it's a push factor how they end up there. So the Jews do have a sense if they're released, they can end up with their family again, whereas it's just not clear what that means on the Romani side, given how they end up there. But indeed, they see their children die next to them. And this will be even much, this will be in Auschwitz -Birkenau,

this effect is much stronger because you have so many testimonies of Jews who actually mentioned this. They mentioned the jealousy, but they also very often, the same testimonies that mentioned the jealousy mention also the regret of having felt the jealousy. So it's a very honest account usually that I found where people say, you know, I was so jealous. And some of them, it depends on how long they were there and when they were there, but especially if they were there past August 2nd, 1944, they say,

I and I feel awful about that. I know what happened to them later. And the people who are who are murdered on August 2nd are mostly women and children and the elderly, I should say. The others have been deported out in part for labor, for first labor somewhere else. So, yeah, and it's the accounts of that that Romany camp are also really about how dreadful that camp is in terms of the hygienic conditions, et cetera, which is

which exacerbates what will happen to the children. There are many children there. It's a particularly young population that is deported with many children and the children die within weeks very often. So for Romany families, it's really the experience very often of seeing the children die, seeing for the younger survivors, seeing siblings die, which is

Ari (01:07:50.417)
whereas the Jewish memory is often of selection, the last time you see them, not seeing them starve next to you.

Waitman (01:07:59.836)
Well, there's something to be said, I think, you know, certainly when one becomes a parent, you know, obviously caring for your child is another level of stress in normal life, right? You can't just do what you want for yourself and, you know, like you have to put their needs first, think about protecting them from the world, et cetera, et cetera. And so you can imagine how for the Roma in Auschwitz,

that just having your children on the one hand, it's great that your children are there also because they're not murdered, but it adds a different level of stress and worry that in a weird way for someone who knows their family's already been killed in Auschwitz, you only have to deal with yourself. You only have to worry about yourself. And I mean, I'm not saying again, this is a great example of where comparison isn't trying to make one better than the other because.

Clearly it's awful if your family has already been murdered, but there is a certain, okay, I just have to worry about keeping myself alive at this point versus worrying about my family.

Ari (01:09:08.113)
It's just, it's just a profoundly different experience. It's the experience of helplessness of seeing a child die, one's own child die and not being able to do anything about it is just a profound, just it's just a profoundly different, different experience than the helplessness also of not having been able to, you know, in this chaotic moment of selection, perhaps, not having also guessed what would happen. And

Waitman (01:09:10.844)
Yeah.

Waitman (01:09:36.54)
All right.

Ari (01:09:40.465)
Uh.

Waitman (01:09:40.604)
Yeah. So maybe, maybe we can on that awful note, maybe we can move, move in a little bit in the post -war period, because one of the things that of course I'm really interested in, because a lot of my sources are legal. And a lot of the, I think a lot of the really good information to include survivor testimony that we get from the Holocaust comes ultimately from, as the result of legal investigation, whether or not.

it comes from within that we get sort of the justice result that we might want. How do we compare and contrast the post -war search for justice for these two groups? Cause I think that's another place where A, it's interesting and B, it's another one of these continuities and breaks in terms of how these two groups are treated.

Ari (01:10:29.681)
Yeah, and this is where I should probably say, we originally met in an archive dealing precisely with this type of judicial testimony. Ludwigsburg, a German city, which for historians usually is not a city but an archive also. Yeah, no, no, it's actually lovely. It's lovely. Right next to that archive actually is Baroque gardens, et cetera.

Waitman (01:10:35.836)
That's right, yep.

Waitman (01:10:45.596)
That's right. It's right. Yeah. It's a very nice city though, even of itself.

Waitman (01:10:54.108)
Exactly.

Ari (01:10:56.017)
Um, if one makes it there, well, after, after reading all the testimony, um, so, uh, but broad broadly, if we're talking about legal reckoning, there are multiple elements to this. And I can talk about, about all these aspects. I think what you're addressing is basically criminal law at the criminal law aspect. The other aspect is compensation. Uh, and, and I should say a lot of the debates, uh, in, in for Romney or if

Waitman (01:11:17.884)
Right.

Ari (01:11:25.041)
organizations activists survivors Etc and to some degree historians as well had been about questions of compensation and that is not getting compensation or not adequate compensation and and so we can address that too I actually find the criminal side criminal law side quite interesting too because there is clear indications that from very beginning Roma did think of the criminal law as well that is

you know, the people who did this to them should be punished. Um, but this is where, well, I should say criminal law was a disappointment to everybody across the board. So this is not not unique to Roma. I would I tried to work out all the unique elements of it because I do think there are additional elements of the frustration. And so the multiple levels of frustration, there's the famous frustration of people just not being convicted. Then there's a frustration that comes with testimony actually, because testimony,

Waitman (01:12:02.428)
Yep.

Ari (01:12:21.937)
as an experience for victims is usually something pretty dreadful. And we know this not just from the Holocaust, there are great studies also from, you know, the genocide trials or like Rwanda and other places. It is, you know, it might be legally necessary, but it is not a, it's not a therapeutic act. Certainly it's not a liberatory act for most survivors because it is a legal.

context where there is perhaps cross examinations.

Waitman (01:12:50.716)
Well, and you get the defense attorney claiming that, asking you what date did that happen on and being insulting and everything else. And so it's not a cathartic recounting of events.

Ari (01:12:59.153)
Exactly. Yeah.

Ari (01:13:05.745)
Exactly. So that is true, I think, to some degree for everybody. What I tried to do for the book, actually, is look at crucial moments when you really see not just law at work, but the legal imaginary being inspired. That is, trials that make people think there is a new type of justice that is possible. The Nuremberg Trials, the first international military tribunal, which are the famous international version of it, are one moment, right? This is the moment when you think, hey, there's a

There's, you know, there's a credible violence happening in the past. There's a victory in a war. And after that, an international tribunal can happen and there will be a reckoning. Then the other one I look at is the Eichmann trial, which is again, it's a very different type of trial. It's the nation, it's the victims. So the state that says it speaks for the victims, creating a trial that really focuses on testimony.

And the Nuremberg trials did not. And this is also, I think, where I have to have to be a bit of a corrective in Romani history, because a lot of people mentioned that there were no Romani witnesses in the first Nuremberg trial. There were actually later in the doctor's trials, but not in the big one. But that is not an aberration. This was generally not a testimony trial with some exceptions, famous exceptions. But generally, apart from the Soviets calling a few people, it's not really this is not what Nuremberg is about. It's a document trial.

Eichmann trial will really be different. This is where the hope comes in that, you know, this is not something you get from Nuremberg. This notion that the trials are there for the victims to tell their stories, that's the Eichmann trial really. So the age of the witness is one historian put it. So I tried to look at the hopes that come up through that.

there be a Romany version of this? What does it mean for people to imagine that testing that things are possible this way? Then you get the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial, which is not the only, but becomes one of the symbols really of maybe the nation of the perpetrators can have a national legal reckoning with some of its perpetrators. So there's a particular type of hope there. And I show how

Ari (01:15:27.889)
in that history of these three trials, Romany, the juxtaposition between Roma and Jews is not is in a sense creates. Well, it creates strange bedfellows, perhaps it creates disappointments and it creates moments that are really where the loss is precedence that cannot be fulfilled for the room for Roma. So it starts in Nuremberg, where I would say so.

you know, generally historians have been very critical of Nuremberg. A doesn't deal with the Holocaust the way we today would deal with the Holocaust. Um, Pete has a fairly intentionless story. Uh, that means, right, for those less in the field, but it's, it's really, it's premeditated crime. And this is not surprising perhaps for trial. If you know how trials work, you show premed, this is really what the prosecutor's job is in a way, uh, to, to show.

premeditated nature of the crime and they do it here by, you know, citing the Nazi party program, looking at their Stürmer, so because Streicher is on trial, but it's also just generally useful. So the editor is on trial. You know, they really construct a story basically that would eventually be criticized by historians, a very seamless basically. The Nazis had the idea in the 1920s, all they needed to wait for was the right opportunity.

and they basically executed a blueprint they already had. Or then an emphasis on very particular units within Germany. The SS is illegal, but you know, so many other units are not. And we now know this is a much broader participation. So, you know, sophisticated historians have for good reasons criticized all these. You know, these are shortcomings of the trial. That's not how victims felt. As far as victims are concerned, I mean, the Nazis wanted to kill them and you're showing it.

They had many issues, including no voice, etc. But intentionalism, etc. That was not their concern. So what it sets up ultimately is an expectation in legal proceedings, really, that that intentionalism is something you have to prove. And so now we would actually probably challenge that for Jewish history, for persecution of Jews as well. But it certainly does not pan out for the Romany genocide in this way. You cannot create a paper trail of this.

Ari (01:17:52.721)
basically the Nazis showed here, you know, they sit in their party program that they're targeting Roma, which they didn't. You know, you can't do just Hitler speeches or something like that. None of that is going to work. So the Nuremberg trial ultimately sets up something also for compensation laws where

Roma just cannot fulfill what is already incorrect, but at least plausible narrative of how genocide works. And then the second thing that comes out of the Nuremberg trial is this massive documentation. So yes, they don't discuss the Holocaust properly, but they have all these volumes of documents that are actually arranged thematically. So, you know, when the first histories of the Jewish Holocaust appear, like the Final Solution by Gerald Reitlinger, he just uses...

most of what he uses are actually these sources. They're authorized, they're official, this is what you want. You can prove that it's there, it's often translated in fact. This German wasn't actually that perfect. And he, you know, but you don't have that for the Romney case. So the expectation is A, you have an intentionalism, B, you will have, you know, a nicely documented, pre -prepared set of documents that you can use. And when courts look at what should happen to Roma,

They quickly say, well, that's not here. So that's clearly not genocide. In a way, you know, this is why it's so unfortunate that that mirrors a bit what you'd had in the Yehuda -Bauer debates. You know, really not thinking about how documentation is made, how our knowledge is produced. So these criminal trials really set up the debates in really profound ways that go beyond the trials, I would say, and really set up the whole administrative

apparatus on how we deal with with the genocide. And I mean, I can speak more about the other two trials as well. There's just there's just so many fascinating elements. I won't won't go into the full detail. It's just what is so fascinating. You know, one way of writing that type of history tends to be to just say, you know, the Roma were just absent. And that's why they've been marginalized. But it's their simultaneous presence and absence that I find fascinating. Just absence seems to be, you know, it's.

Ari (01:20:12.753)
That's not a very rich story you can tell. But they are present and they're present in such unexpected ways very often. The Eichmann trial, for example, is the first one to have a full point in the indictments, an independent indictment for the mass murder of the Roma and for crimes against humanity against the Roma. And then the court...

deals in very interesting and actually completely inadequate ways with the whole subject. So it's both inspiring that they do that. Ultimately, it's also very typical and that only Jewish victims will be interviewed. And the thing they will really ask us the main witness to speak about the Romani camp is how whether they were anti -Semites, basically, instead of speaking about them as other victims, what they highlighted was whether Roma were anti -Semites. So deeply problematic, considering that people know nothing about what happened there. And that's the one thing.

Waitman (01:21:07.58)
Well, this is one of the things that I think, you know, I think it was interesting to make that point that you just did about absence being less interesting because it sounds in many ways like it's less absence, but more overlooking. Absence suggests that they're just not there. Whereas overlooking is more like they're there, but we, whoever we are, aren't looking in that direction.

Right. So we are, we sort of are, we're not seeing them. So which is, which is sort of different than them being not in that space, you know? So it's, it's, and, and again, to speak, speaking of sort of, you know, on a certain level, it makes sense. You know, if you're, if you're a Jewish victim of the Holocaust, you're focused on being a Jewish victim of the Holocaust. You know, if you're a, if you're a victim of the T4 program, that's just what you're focused on. So you're not focused on other people. Um,

Ari (01:21:37.201)
Yeah.

Right.

Waitman (01:22:05.18)
But again, this interesting idea, and we don't have time to cover it all, but one of the things that you also bring up, which I think is a nice way to sort of wrap up and bookend this, is the very interesting way in which, because there are, I think it's fair to say in a certain sense, a lack of Romani institutions of memory due to lots of different issues, one of which is regarding sort of written sources and the value of writing and those kinds of things.

And so you have to look for, in many ways, Romani, even first person Romani sources in institutions that are predominantly focused on Jewish suffering, whether it's the Holocaust of the Mdisi or the Shoah Foundation archive. And one of the things that I think we should probably end on, which is this idea of inequality. And I don't mean that in a

in a sort of intentionally, you know, critical way, but there is an inequality in resources and focus between institutions that look at Jewish victims versus Romani. And that also creates structural ways and difficulties and challenges in trying to sort of capture these experiences.

Ari (01:23:30.545)
Absolutely. And I think it does all tie together, right? I mean, so what you have in these trials is not just, as you say, it's actually also the inability to think. I mean, it sounds so fancy to how we know, right? But it's really how we know about the suffering of others. I mean, it's if you don't wonder how we tell our stories of our past, you tend to repeat stories that do violence to other groups. The way I did so.

one of the words I use is asymmetrical for these. And yes, so it's institutional, it's in the just psychologically. And so on all these levels, like, you know, who needs to care about what? And Romani activists do need to care about Jewish history, even if they're not trained in it, and that's not their central concern. It just comes up. If you, I can guarantee also, if you write an article for one of our journals,

on the Romani Holocaust, one of your reviewers will deal with Jews. I mean, that you will never submit an article on, I bet, no, you did not expect a reviewer of your Janowska book to randomly be a historian who deals with Roma, who would just say, you know, this reminds me of something I know about Roma, which seems so odd. We don't even, it's not even, we don't even have to think about that. So.

Waitman (01:24:43.644)
Right, yeah.

Ari (01:24:55.345)
Yeah, so I think these asymmetries are indeed everywhere. And it's what makes this for me a topic that really helps me rethink very fundamentally about how we write histories of the past. And yes, that final point you made that actually is in a way the really one of the bottom lines of the book for me and where I also think I'll go for future work. And that is really the role of institutions, of resources, not the way of putting it.

resources for the writing of history because the word memory is really tricky. It's a good term because we all sort of, you know, we can throw so much into it. So many concepts can be just, you know, mixed up, blended up there and it's just all somehow memory. It's both things we build and things we store and things we say and everything's sort of memory. But really the word memory is...

also a distraction because it suggests that it's for free. And really everything I described takes immense resources and training and really just, you know, for anything that reaches us from much of the era of the post -war period, you really needed somebody who was indexing it and for people to pay for institutions to exist for half a century, basically half a century of salaries. And

and to make institutions exist. So really, it's both, you know, it's indeed sad that these Romani institutions don't exist and that there should be and you know, it's one certainly important element of what, you know, will create more equality is plain institution building. But at the same time, it's also perhaps not so surprising because it really takes so much. And it takes, it takes

a governmentalized approach in Europe with massive governmental support. In the US, it's often this sort of fundraising. It's the US tax code that creates the possibility for all these museums, etc., where tax -free donations and endowments create all these, create so much of what we do. Anybody who, like us, has worked for a while in the field, if you'll just look at the research grants you've got, if you look at what

Ari (01:27:14.449)
all of this is infrastructure that has to be there. And it's an integrated infrastructure. It's from the journals to the training we get, and the endowment universities have endowments too in the US and or massive governmental support in other countries. But it's these are permanent institutions that need to be there. It's not a one time thing. It's not about, you know, good intentions simply. And I think way too often, the history of memory is written simply as a history of concepts. And that's

absolutely important. It's a history of representation also absolutely important. We're not trying to replace any of that. But really what you know what what is forgotten is is to make any of this happen any good intention to happen. Anybody who really you know at a time when nobody thought about Roma do important work on Roma it still needs an infrastructure. Otherwise it's just going to be a diary entry that we can celebrate but nothing

Waitman (01:28:07.036)
Yeah.

Ari (01:28:13.265)
nothing's going to come out of it.

Waitman (01:28:14.748)
Well, and the, the, you know, the popular culture analog to this is, you know, why doesn't someone make a movie about X, Y, or Z? It's like, well, because it takes lots of money and, you know, and resources and the, the filmmaker and the film company have to think the people are going to be interested enough, you know, but it's the same, it's the same kind of principle. And we, and that's what I thought about when you're talking about memory, because, you know, we'll often talk about films as.

as signifiers of various kinds of memory and those kinds of things. But it's also, they're also are functional, they're institutions in themselves, right? And so it's the same thing as, you know, when you have a government that says, we're going to create an archive, like the, like the interview of, of enslaved peoples in United States after, by the WPA, like when the government says we're going to raise money, then it's a self -filling prophecy that historians will then be like, Oh, I have this great set of resources.

because those resources have been created, right? And even though the memory of enslaved people in the United States wasn't created by the government, the resources that let historians access those memories are created. And without that institution, you wouldn't have those memories. But I've taken way too much of your time already, but I should probably close with our normal question, which is, what is one book,

Ari (01:29:12.689)
Absolutely.

Ari (01:29:16.113)
Yes.

Ari (01:29:20.689)
That's right. That's right.

Waitman (01:29:42.172)
Um, on the Holocaust writ large that, that you would find it particularly engaging or important that you might recommend to our listeners.

Ari (01:29:50.673)
Yeah, so there are many also from both colleagues and friends, I should say that I can could mention. I mentioned one of somebody I have never met, actually. And that's Ivan Yablonka's A History of the Grandparents I Never Knew, which was originally published in French and then published, I think, in 2016 in the US in English. And it's a history that's just so very different. He's a sociologist. It's indeed about the grandparents he never knew.

They were communists from Poland. So you deal with another group that actually surprisingly ignored very often. So, you know, this overlap of, you know, Jews who are helped by the Red Help and this Paris context where Polish Jews end up in this Yiddish speaking environment, but also communist environment. And what I love about that book is he

just so much legwork. I mean, it's an incredibly readable book and just incredibly informative book, but also just the... You can see him work around the limits of the sources he has. So how does he figure out what life was like for his grandparents in this one cul -de -sac? He lives in the Stedin Street somewhere in Paris, and he reconstructs basically every single inhabitant of that building.

and what their fate is and what that would have told us about the interactions they've had with them. So even though he doesn't, right, it's not it's not somebody who just has, you know, had the luck of finding, you know, thousand letters from from their from their ancestors and then, you know, write a book about it. No, it really works with the very limited resources. And I mean, I've generally found that. And I don't know if you have that, too, but but often when when I'm very limited in what I find.

I have to be the most creative. It's not by coincidence that it's often the early modern historians who are very limited in what they, the sources they have, not like modern historians like us who usually have to just manage the overabundance, but that they do some of the most creative work. And I felt there was some element of that here for Holocaust history, really, where it is just such a, it sort of combines method, storytelling, and experiences we don't usually have.

Waitman (01:31:56.252)
Mm -hmm.

Ari (01:32:12.817)
in a really fascinating way.

Waitman (01:32:15.42)
Well, that's a great, that's a great recommendation. I think I've had some other folks on here who mentioned sort of, um, experiment, experimental is the wrong word, but kind of like, you know, out of the box thinking, I think, um, I think Omer Bartov mentioned Austerlitz as an example of sort of, you know, interesting ways, interesting ways of, of course, and of course he himself with his, with his latest book has sort of done something interesting there as well in terms of thinking about, uh, how to, how to write this history. Um,

Ari (01:32:29.969)
Okay.

Ari (01:32:35.953)
Yes. Yes. Right. Yes.

Waitman (01:32:43.228)
Once again, thank you so much, Ari. This is amazing. I'm sure that everybody has learned quite a bit. And there's an awful lot to think about both topically and also more generally as historians and how we think about the past. So thank you so much for coming on. I appreciate it.

Ari (01:32:59.985)
Thank you so much again for having me. This was a great pleasure. Thank you so much.

Waitman (01:33:04.796)
And for everybody else, once again, thank you for listening. I will put links to, to Ari's book as well as his suggestions in the show notes. Again, please, if you have a time, if you have the moment, give us a like and a comment and a rating on Spotify or Apple TV or Apple podcasts that's always helpful for us. And once again, thanks for having, thanks for coming on. Ari.

Thanks again, thanks for having me. Thanks for coming on, this is amazing.