When Ceija Stojka sang Lovara songs for ethnomusicologists in Austria during the 1980s, she was not simply preserving a musical tradition. She was documenting a world that Nazi persecution had attempted to destroy.[1] While the destruction of European Jewish culture is explicitly acknowledged in the Eichmann trial and subsequent scholarship, Stojka’s testimony is significant in its preservation of lost culture and in raising important questions about agency, and respect of community practices and beliefs in testimony. The songs she performed belonged to the everyday life of her family before the Second World War: to travel, domestic gatherings, celebrations, and relationships between generations. Decades later, those same songs entered a different context. They became part of a broader effort by Roma artists, scholars, and cultural institutions to document the Roma Holocaust and to establish Roma voices within European Holocaust memory. This effort is evident in the public-facing commemoration of the Roma Holocaust, from multimedia events to music integrated in memorial spaces.
Music occupies an unusual place within the commemoration of the Roma Holocaust. Unlike many Jewish communities, which began establishing archives, museums, and memorial institutions in the decades after 1945, Roma communities confronted a prolonged period of political exclusion and historical denial. The Nazi genocide of Roma and Sinti received little public recognition for much of the Twentieth Century, and many survivors encountered continued discrimination after the war.[2] In this context, cultural practices such as music, oral history, literature, and visual art often preserved forms of historical knowledge that remained absent from official archives. Roma and Sinti communities continue to confront discrimination across Europe, including unequal access to education, employment, housing, and public services. Contemporary Roma organizations therefore link Holocaust remembrance with broader efforts against antigypsyism and for equal participation in European societies.[3]
The history of Sinti communities in Germany and Austria is central to this development. Although Roma and Sinti shared the experience of Nazi racial persecution, their postwar histories developed within different regional and political contexts. German Sinti activists played a particularly important role in challenging official narratives that excluded them from Holocaust memory. The establishment of the Central Council of German Sinti and Roma transformed public discussion of Nazi persecution by placing survivor testimony, family histories, and community experience at the center of historical recognition. This activism also shaped cultural commemoration, including the preservation of music and oral traditions that documented the lives of Sinti communities before and after the genocide.
The importance of music in Roma Holocaust commemoration does not lie in an abstract idea of music as universal expression. Rather, musical performance provides access to specific histories that written sources frequently overlook. Songs preserve language, family connections, regional identities, and memories of communities before persecution. They also reveal the ways in which Roma communities themselves have chosen to remember the Holocaust.[4] Contemporary institutions such as the European Roma Institute for Arts and Culture (ERIAC) emphasize artistic production as a central component of Roma cultural history, not merely as an illustration of historical experience. Within this framework, music becomes a historical source created and interpreted by Roma communities themselves.
The historical record of the Roma Holocaust has always existed in tension with the structure of the archive itself. Nazi persecution generated extensive documentation of Roma and Sinti communities, but these records primarily reflect the perspective of perpetrators and state institutions. Police registers, deportation lists, racial classifications, and administrative correspondence document the machinery of persecution while revealing little about the communities that Nazi officials sought to eliminate. The everyday lives of Roma families, their languages, artistic practices, and social networks appear far less frequently in official collections. This archival marginalization reflects a broader history of exclusion in European cultural institutions, where Roma musicians and artistic traditions have often remained outside the narratives of European art music while their contributions were more frequently categorized as folklore, entertainment, or ethnographic material rather than as part of European cultural history.
For this reason, scholars of Roma history have increasingly turned to oral testimony and cultural practice as historical sources. These sources do not replace archival research, but they answer different historical questions. A family song, a remembered melody, or a story transmitted across generations may preserve information about relationships, places, and traditions that never entered state records. The work of ethnomusicologists such as Ursula Hemetek has demonstrated the value of treating musical performance as a form of historical documentation. Her recordings of Austrian Roma communities preserve not only repertoire but also the conversations, memories, and social contexts surrounding that repertoire.[5]
This approach requires historians to reconsider what constitutes an archive. As Michel-Rolph Trouillot demonstrated, archives do not simply preserve the past; they reflect the unequal processes through which historical events become documented, classified, and transmitted. Traditional historical methodology has often privileged written documentation produced by institutions, leaving forms of knowledge preserved through oral tradition, performance, and community practice more difficult to incorporate into historical narratives.[6] Roma musical traditions developed primarily through performance, with knowledge transmitted through families and communities rather than through written notation. The absence of a written record therefore does not indicate the absence of historical consciousness. In many Roma communities, songs functioned alongside oral narratives as repositories of collective knowledge.
The distinction is particularly important when examining the cultural consequences of Nazi persecution. The destruction of Roma communities involved not only murder and deportation but also the disruption of systems through which families transmitted language, stories, and traditions. When survivors later performed songs associated with their childhoods, they preserved evidence of communities that existed before persecution. These performances provide historians with access to forms of social history that administrative documents rarely capture.
Romani scholars have increasingly emphasized the importance of interpreting these materials within their own cultural contexts. Anna Mirga-Kruszelnicka and other Roma researchers have criticized approaches that extract cultural materials from communities and place them within external frameworks of interpretation.[7] Contemporary Roma cultural institutions instead emphasize participation, authorship, and control over representation. The question is not simply whether music can tell historians something about the Roma Holocaust. It is also who preserves, interprets, and presents that history.
The exclusion of Roma artistic traditions from European cultural history has also shaped the ways in which Roma music has been represented. Musicologists have long examined the tension between recognition and exoticization in the reception of Romani performance. Roma musicians have frequently been celebrated for perceived spontaneity, emotional intensity, and virtuosity while being detached from the historical and social contexts that produced their music.[8] This process of exoticization transformed Roma musical practices into symbols of difference rather than recognizing them as complex artistic traditions with their own histories, genres, and systems of transmission. Contemporary Roma scholars and musicians have challenged these representations by asserting greater control over the interpretation and presentation of Roma cultural production.[9]
The distinction between Roma and Sinti remains important within commemorative practice. Sinti communities in Germany developed some of the earliest organized efforts to document Nazi persecution and to establish public recognition, while Roma communities across Europe have pursued their own commemorative initiatives shaped by different national histories and political circumstances.[16] Contemporary Roma and Sinti cultural organizations increasingly emphasize these shared experiences while also preserving the specific histories of individual communities. This approach has influenced artistic commemoration, where music, literature, and visual art frequently reflect particular languages, regions, and family histories rather than a single unified tradition.[17]
The development of Roma Holocaust memory also transformed museum and archival practice. Institutions increasingly recognized that Roma histories required different forms of documentation because many sources existed outside traditional collections. The European Roma Institute for Arts and Culture (ERIAC), founded in 2017 in Berlin, reflects this broader shift by placing Roma artistic production at the center of cultural preservation.[18] A related development appears in RomArchive, the Digital Archive of the Roma, which places artistic production within the framework of Roma self-representation rather than treating Roma culture as an object of external documentation.[19] Established as an international digital archive, RomArchive includes sections devoted to music, visual art, literature, film, dance, and the Roma civil rights movement. Its music section deliberately avoids presenting a single "Roma music" tradition and instead documents the diversity of musical practices among Roma communities across Europe and beyond. By combining recordings, biographies, scholarly commentary, and archival materials, the project demonstrates how music can function simultaneously as cultural history, artistic expression, and a source for research.
This approach has influenced commemorative practices across Europe, particularly around 2 August, the European Roma Holocaust Memorial Day. The date marks the liquidation of the Roma and Sinti family camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1944 and has become a major occasion for remembrance events. These commemorations frequently combine historical testimony with music, literature, and visual art. Their structure reflects a broader understanding of Roma Holocaust memory: remembrance is not confined to monuments or archives but also exists through ongoing cultural practices.
The emphasis on artistic production has also shaped historical scholarship. Researchers increasingly examine Roma Holocaust memory not only through questions of victimization but through questions of representation, authorship, and cultural continuity.[20] The work of scholars including Karola Fings, Klaus-Michael Bogdal, and Roma researchers such as Mirga-Kruszelnicka has demonstrated that the history of Roma persecution must be studied alongside the history of Roma activism and cultural production.[21] Music and the arts therefore occupy a central place not because they provide symbolic expressions of suffering, but because they document the ways communities preserved and interpreted their own histories.
Music has become an important part of Roma Holocaust commemoration because it preserves forms of historical knowledge that rarely appear in official archives. Songs, performances, and recordings document languages, communities, and traditions that survived despite Nazi persecution and decades of neglect within European memory culture. At the same time, contemporary Roma and Sinti artists and cultural institutions have used music not only to preserve the past but also to define the terms through which that past is remembered. Projects such as RomArchive, the work of Roma and Sinti cultural organizations, and annual commemorations across Europe demonstrate that Holocaust memory exists not only in museums and monuments but also through ongoing acts of cultural production.
For educators, this history offers an important reminder that Holocaust remembrance depends upon recognizing the diversity of survivor experiences and the different forms through which communities preserve their histories. The musical traditions connected to Roma and Sinti communities are not simply illustrations of persecution. They are historical sources that reveal the lives, relationships, and cultural practices that Nazi policies attempted to destroy and that Roma and Sinti communities continue to interpret today.[22]
Alexandra Birch, August 2026
Sources
[1] Ursula Hemetek and Mozes F. Heinschink, “Musik der Roma in Österreich: Dokumentation und Interpretation,” in Minderheiten und Musik: Ethnologische Perspektiven auf musikalische Traditionen, ed. Ursula Hemetek and Rudolf Pietsch (Vienna: Böhlau, 1992).
[2] Central Council of German Sinti and Roma, “40 Years of Recognition of the Nazi Genocide against the Sinti and Roma of Europe,” March 15, 2022, zentralrat.sintiundroma.de/en/40-years-recognition-nazi-genocide-sinti-roma-europe/
[3] European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights, “Roma and Travellers in the EU: More Jobs but Discrimination Persists,” October 2, 2025, https://fra.europa.eu/en/news/2025/roma-and-travellers-eu-more-jobs-discrimination-persists
[4] Ursula Hemetek, Minderheiten in der Musik: Musikalische Traditionen der Roma in Österreich (Vienna: Böhlau, 2001); Slawomir Kapralski, “Between mneme and anamnesis: On the memory and forgetting of the Roma Holocaust,” Journal of Baltic Studies 54, no. 1 (2023): 55–72.
[5] Ursula Hemetek, “The Role of Traditional Music in the Process of Political Recognition of the Roma in Austria,” in Music, Language and Literature of the Roma and Sinti, ed. Susan Ziegler and Ulrich F. L. Müller (Berlin: VWB Verlag für Wissenschaft und Bildung, 2000), 371–393.
[6] Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), 26–30.
[7] Anna Mirga-Kruszelnicka, “Challenging Anti-gypsyism in Academia: The Role of Romani Scholars,” Critical Romani Studies 1, no. 1 (2018): 8–28.
[8] Philip V. Bohlman, The Music of European Nationalism: Cultural Identity and Modern History (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2004).
[9] Svanibor Pettan, “The Roma of Kosovo: Music, Identity, and Politics,” in The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music, Volume 8: Europe, ed. Timothy Rice (New York: Routledge, 2010), 935–944.
[10] Wim Willems and Leo Lucassen, Gypsies and Other Itinerant Groups: A Socio-Historical Approach (London: Macmillan, 1998), 187–190.
[11] Anna Mirga-Kruszelnicka, “Challenging Anti-gypsyism in Academia: The Role of Romani Scholars,” Critical Romani Studies 1, no. 1 (2018): 8–28.
[12] Ceija Stojka, Wir leben im Verborgenen: Erinnerungen einer Rom-Zigeunerin (Vienna: Picus Verlag, 1988); Ian Hancock, “The Roots of Antigypsyism: To the Holocaust and Beyond,” in Confronting the Holocaust: A History of the Roma, ed. Anton Weiss-Wendt (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2013), 19–49.
[13] Lorely French, The Memoirs of Ceija Stojka, Child Survivor of the Romani Holocaust (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2022).
[14] Stiftung Denkmal für die ermordeten Juden Europas, “Memorial to the Sinti and Roma Murdered under the National Socialist Regime,” accessed August 2, 2026, https://www.stiftung-denkmal.de/en/memorials/memorial-to-the-sinti-and-roma-of-europe-murdered-under-national-socialism/
[15] Karola Fings, Sinti and Roma: A German History (London: Hurst, 2020), 190–210.
[16] Karola Fings, “The Struggle for Recognition: The Nazi Genocide of the Sinti and Roma and the Politics of Remembrance,” in The Nazi Genocide of the Sinti and Roma: History and Memory, ed. Karola Fings, Herbert Heuss, and Frank Sparing (Cologne: Centrum für Antisemitismus- und Rassismusstudien, 2001), 7–23.
[17] Ursula Hemetek, Minderheiten in der Musik: Musikalische Traditionen der Roma in Österreich (Vienna: Böhlau, 2001).
[18] European Roma Institute for Arts and Culture (ERIAC), “About ERIAC,” accessed August 2, 2026, eriac.org/about/
[19] RomArchive, “About RomArchive,” accessed August 2, 2026, https://www.romarchive.eu/en/about/
[20] Sławomir Kapralski, “Between mneme and anamnesis: On the Memory and Forgetting of the Roma Holocaust,” Journal of Baltic Studies 54, no. 1 (2023): 7–26.
[21] Klaus-Michael Bogdal, Europe and the Roma: A History of Fascination and Fear, trans. Brian Poole (New York: Columbia University Press, 2023).
[22] Ian Hancock, “The Roots of Antigypsyism: To the Holocaust and Beyond,” in Confronting the Holocaust: A History of the Roma, ed. Anton Weiss-Wendt (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2013), 19–49.
