Leaving a trace: action-research with Roma and non-Roma young people between history, memory and present

Luca Bravi, Maria José Casa-Nova, Maria Alfredo Moreira, Maria Teresa Tagliaventi (Eds.) Leaving a Trace Action-research with Roma and non-Roma young people between history, memory and present 10638.2 L. BRAVI, M.J. CASA-NOVA, M.A. MOREIRA, M.T. TAGLIAVENTI (Eds.) LEAVING A TRACE Itinerari e dialoghi di Storia dell’educazione This book seeks to reflect theoretically and empirically on the process and results of the European project TRACER (Transformative Roma Art and Culture for European Remembrance), financed by CERV (Citizen, Equality, Rights and Value) Eu programme. The main protagonists have been young people, mainly Roma and Sinti, living in different places and countries of Europe, with their own history that anchors them to different communities, but joined by belonging to discriminated minorities and to a transnational people who recognise themselves as a community characterised by diaspora. The project's goal has combined historical knowledge of the genocide that occurred during World War II with an analysis of the construction of prejudice and the role that racism has had on the collective consciousness of a modern society. The methodology used is participatory action-research in public history educational context, a process able to make the protagonists aware of a path of knowledge, promoting training actions towards other people and leaving traces of memory in the present through artistic events. The volume presents the theoretical foundations and practical activities that refer to the public history as a tool for inclusion, participation and social recognition of European communities representing minorities in their countries: a multidisciplinary and participatory action-research aimed at building active citizenship in formal and informal educational contexts. Luca Bravi is researcher at the Department of Educational Sciences, Languages, Interculturality, Literature and Psychology of the University of Florence. He teaches History of Educational Processes and History of Communication. Maria José Casa-Nova is professor and researcher in the area of Sociology of Inequalities, Department of Social Sciences of Education, Institute of Education, University of Minho. Maria Alfredo Moreira is professor and researcher in the area of Didactics and Teacher Education, at the Institute of Education, University of Minho. Maria Teresa Tagliaventi is a researcher at the Department of Education Studies of University of Bologna, where she teaches Sociology of education, Welfare state and Social policy. Edizione fuori commercio ISBN 978-88-351-7031-0 FrancoAngeli La passione per le conoscenze 10638.2_565.1.2 30/09/24 09:38 Pagina 1 Itinerari e dialoghi di storie dell’educazione Collana diretta da Gianfranco Bandini, Tiziana Pironi, Gabriella Seveso La collana si rivolge a un pubblico nazionale e internazionale interessato ai problemi della storia dell'educazione, sia quelli di consolidata tradizione accademica sia quelli più innovativi e di frontiera. Accoglie e riflette le più recenti riflessioni storiografiche, che hanno visto una vera e propria rivoluzione delle metodologie, degli strumenti, delle tematiche oggetto di indagine, anche con una sensibilità cresciuta in senso interdisciplinare: i testi saranno sia di carattere teoretico sia relativi a studi e ricerche nell’ambito della storia dell’educazione, delle istituzioni educative, dell’educazione formale e informale, delle politiche scolastiche ed educative. I volumi sono disposti lungo un ampio arco cronologico che rende ragione dell'attualità e importanza dell'approccio storico a partire dagli studi di storia antica fino alla storia contemporanea e del tempo presente. La collana accoglie testi originali, traduzioni e pubblicazioni di fonti. Si rivolge agli specialisti del settore, agli studenti universitari ma anche un più ampio pubblico interessato a approfondire i profondi legami tra il passato e il presente dei processi formativi, nella consapevolezza che la dimensione storica costituisce uno strumento ermeneutico imprescindibile per comprendere e progettare le sfide educative e pedagogiche dell’attualità. Comitato Scientifico María Esther Aguirre, UNAM Messico Anna Ascenzi, Università di Macerata Annemarie Augscholl, Università di Bolzano Valter Balducci, École Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture de Normandie Alberto Barausse, Università del Molise Carmen Betti, Università di Firenze Paolo Bianchini, Università di Torino Francesca Borruso, Università di Roma Tre Antonella Cagnolati, Università di Foggia Luciano Caimi, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore di Milano Lorenzo Cantatore, Università di Roma Tre Carlo Cappa, Università di Roma Tor Vergata Copyright © 2024 by FrancoAngeli s.r.l., Milano, Italy. ISBN 9788835168393 Il presente volume è pubblicato in open access, ossia il file dell’intero lavoro è liberamente scaricabile dalla piattaforma FrancoAngeli Open Access (http://bit.ly/francoangeli-oa). FrancoAngeli Open Access è la piattaforma per pubblicare articoli e monografie, rispettando gli standard etici e qualitativi e la messa a disposizione dei contenuti ad accesso aperto. Oltre a garantire il deposito nei maggiori archivi e repository internazionali OA, la sua integrazione con tutto il ricco catalogo di riviste e collane FrancoAngeli massimizza la visibilità, favorisce facilità di ricerca per l’utente e possibilità di impatto per l’autore. Per saperne di più: Pubblica con noi I lettori che desiderano informarsi sui libri e le riviste da noi pubblicati possono consultare il nostro sito Internet: www.francoangeli.it e iscriversi nella home page al servizio “Informatemi” per ricevere via e-mail le segnalazioni delle novità. Copyright © 2024 by FrancoAngeli s.r.l., Milano, Italy. ISBN 9788835168393 Front 15,5x23_Layout 1 08/10/19 12:37 Pagina 1 Luca Bravi, Maria José Casa-Nova, Maria Alfredo Moreira, Maria Teresa Tagliaventi (Eds.) Leaving a Trace Action-research with Roma and non-Roma young people between history, memory and present Copyright © 2024 by FrancoAngeli s.r.l., Milano, Italy. ISBN 9788835168393 The volume Leaving a Trace. Action-research with Roma and non-Roma young people between history, memory and present is a publication produced within the Project “Transformative Roma Art and Culture for European Remembrance” (TRACER), funded by Citizens, Equality, Rights and Values (CERV) programme of the European Commission. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them. The TRACER project Partners:  University of Bologna – Department of Education “Giovanni Maria Bertin”, Italy.  University of Florence – Department of Education, Languages, Interculture, Literatures and Psychology, Italy.  C.A.T. – Social Cooperative, Florence, Italy  Chi Rom e…chi no – Association, Naples, Italy.  Opengroup – Social Cooperative, Bologna, Italy.  Stowarzyszenie Romow w Polsce – Association, Oświęcim, Poland.  Ribaltambição – Associação para a Igualdade de Género nas Comunidades Ciganas, Figueira da Foz, Portugal.  Alto Comissariado para as Migrações (ACM) / Agência para a Integração, Migrações e Asilo (AIMA), Portugal.  Research Center on Education (CIEd) – Institute of Education of the University of Minho, Braga, Portugal.  Organization coordinaton: Lisa Cerantola (University of Bologna) Web: https://tracerproject.eu/it Copyright © 2024 by FrancoAngeli s.r.l., Milano, Italy. This work, and each part thereof, is protected by copyright law and is published in this digital version under the license Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) By downloading this work, the User accepts all the conditions of the license agreement for the work as stated and set out on the website https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0 Copyright © 2024 by FrancoAngeli s.r.l., Milano, Italy. ISBN 9788835168393 5 Index Stories, memories and lives. Building a multicultural Public History of Education in an action-research project by Luca Bravi and Maria Teresa Tagliaventi pag. 7 FIRST PART Memory and history for inclusion in the educational context 1. Historical memory, identity and minorities. An actionresearch project with Roma and Sinti young people by Maria Teresa Tagliaventi » 15 2. Looking back at history to understand the present by Luca Bravi » 30 3. Breaking the prejudice through places of Memory by Silvia Bencini and Luca Bravi » 38 4. Representation of Roma persecution in school curriculum development in Europe by Ivana Bolognesi, Maria Alfredo Moreira and Luca Bravi » 65 SECOND PART Transforming the present through history and memory 5. Transforming and training through action-research on the history of Sinti and Roma by Maria José Casa-Nova and Daniela Silva » 85 6. Knowing the history in the educational context by Luca Bravi » 100 Copyright © 2024 by FrancoAngeli s.r.l., Milano, Italy. ISBN 9788835168393 6 7. Visiting history. “Crossing” the camp of Auschwitz by Silvia Bencini pag. 111 8. Reporting the history and transforming the present by Emma Ferulano » 121 9. Presenting the history. Building memory through art by Inês Aydin and Liliana Moreira » 131 10. Leaving a trace in the present by Maria José Casa-Nova, Maria Alfredo Moreira and Maria Teresa Tagliaventi » 145 Authors’ biographies » 153 Groups of young leaders involved in the TRACER project » 156 Copyright © 2024 by FrancoAngeli s.r.l., Milano, Italy. ISBN 9788835168393 7 Stories, memories and lives. Building a multicultural Public History of Education in an action-research project by Luca Bravi* and Maria Teresa Tagliaventi** This book seeks to reflect theoretically and empirically on the process and results of an international project that lasted two and a half years (TRACER - Transformative Roma Art and Culture for European Remembrance), financed with European funds under the CERV (Citizen, Equality, Rights and Value) programme. The main protagonists are young people, mainly Roma and Sinti, living in different places and countries, with their own history that anchors them to different communities, but joined by belonging to discriminated minorities and to a transnational people who recognise themselves as a community albeit characterised by diaspora. The project's goal combines historical knowledge of the genocide that occurred during World War II with an analysis of the construction of prejudice and the role that racism has had on the collective consciousness of a modern society. The methodology used is participatory action-research in public history educational context1, a process able to make the protagonists aware of a path of knowledge, promoting training actions towards other people and leaving traces of memory in the present through artistic events. The project therefore addresses fundamental dimensions for cultural recognition and, consequently, for respect and empowerment, including: ˗ build a collective memory that involves different populations and different cultures and that acts as a mesh that binds European society together; * Department of Education, Languages, Interculture, Literatures and Psychology (FORLILPSI), University of Florence. ** Department of Education “Giovanna Maria Bertin”, University of Bologna. 1 Bandini, Public History of Education. Copyright © 2024 by FrancoAngeli s.r.l., Milano, Italy. ISBN 9788835168393 8 ˗ include more vulnerable populations and communities still discriminated against in the knowledge process; ˗ involve young people and adolescents (Roma and non-Roma, male and female) in an active and not passive learning process; ˗ promote a different historical identity of Roma and Sinti in the majority society; ˗ create impactful events, imagining alternative processes to promote memory, through forms of artistic expression. Roma and Sinti have often narrated their history, which has not been appreciated by the collective public memory, through art: “Djelem, Djelem”2 (“Walking, Walking” in Romanés - the Roma language), composed by the musician Žarko Jovanović in 1949 and chosen in 1971, at the first International Congress of the Romani Union, as the anthem of the Roma and Sinti people, reminds us to extermination in one sentence of the refrain: “I too had a family, but the Black Legion murdered it”. In the 1970s, when the international community had not yet officially recognised the racial extermination of the Roma, music became a medium for the transmission of the pain and persecution suffered. The same goal that Ceija Stojka3, deported to Auschwitz with her family at a very young age, produced through her paintings4, in which she described life and suffering outside and inside the camp; his brother Karl (he too was a painter and dedicated his works to the memory and the story of the persecution)5 committed a vivid memory through poetry6: «We, Roma and Sinti, are like the flowers of this earth. They can trample us, they can eradicate us, they can gas us, they can burn us, they can murder us, but like flowers we still always come back». The history of the Second World War, with the Holocaust, was being used in the present as a means of analysing the terrible events that took place and as an explanation of the current discrimination against the Roma and Sinti people. 2 https://www.oocities.org/~patrin/gelem.htm (Last access: August 2024). 3 Stojka, Wir leben im Verborgenen. 4 https://www.museoreinasofia.es/en/exhibitions/ceija-stojka (Last access: 2024). 5 Stojka (Ed.), Gas. 6 https://perspectives.ushmm.org/item/oral-history-with-karl-stojka (last access: August 2024). Copyright © 2024 by FrancoAngeli s.r.l., Milano, Italy. ISBN 9788835168393 15 1. Historical memory, identity and minorities. An action-research project with Roma and Sinti young people by Maria Teresa Tagliaventi* 1. Through TRACER... TRACER1, Transformative Roma Art and Culture for European Remembrance, is an international project funded under the European Commission's Citizens, Equality, Rights and Values (CERV) programme. The name is an acronym that evokes the main components of the project but is also significative of its purpose, which is to leave a trace. The aim of the project is to involve groups of Roma and non-Roma youths and teenagers, mainly in Italy, Portugal and Poland, in the construction of a shared memory of the Sinti and Roma holocaust in Europe during World War II and to promote a shared reflection, in a diversified public, on the history and origin of racial discrimination through different types of artistic performance (graffiti, music, theatre, video, etc.). The project is complex, involving various consequential steps and ethical and methodological choices, which will be analyzed below. In TRACER, the process becomes as important as the actions, and outputs also relate to a personal change of the people involved. The ingredients of the project are history and memory, education, young people (mainly Roma and Sinti young people), action research, workshops and social art, as a way of remembering and denouncing. The project contributes to the promotion of Article 21 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union by supporting related * Department of Education “Giovanna Maria Bertin”, University of Bologna. 1 https://tracerproject.eu/node (Last access: September 2024). Copyright © 2024 by FrancoAngeli s.r.l., Milano, Italy. ISBN 9788835168393 16 social policies and national strategies through innovative actions focused on the participative construction of the memory of the holocaust of Sinti and Roma minorities in Europe. In parallel, the initiative aims to support both the enactment of the EU Roma Framework for equality, inclusion and participation 2020-2030 and the adoption of the Common Basic Principles for Roma Inclusion, so as to provide a framework for the successful design and implementation of actions for fostering the inclusion of Roma populations in the life of local communities. 2. Memory and identity In 1985, Francesco De Gregori, an Italian singer-songwriter, launched a song with an emblematic title and contents: «La storia siamo noi» («We Are the History»). With the phrase «History does not stop at a door», the author emphasises how history is unstoppable, constituting a force that cannot be closed or contained, and that continues to live beyond physical and symbolic barriers. The song is also an appeal to responsibility, memory and civic awareness, and for this reason its contents recall the ingredients of TRACER. De Gregori emphasises how “no one should feel excluded”, reiterating that history is not just a narrative of a few (especially the powerful, the majority groups, the dominant ones), but belongs to everyone, since everyone, through their actions, every day, consciously or unconsciously, contributes to writing history. The concept is not to be taken for granted. Indeed, the historical documentation we have today is affected by the dominant political power during the course of events and also by the power relationships in place at the time of studying history. What we call history is hardly ever a disinterested effort to narrate events, but it is a narrative based on conscious choices so that later generations can read past events with a specific point of view. The construction of knowledge therefore is not neutral, but political, based on values. Often the official, better-known history is flanked by a silent, sometimes unwritten history of men, women and children who do not belong to the majority groups and who have not had the power to narrate their own story and that of the community they belong Copyright © 2024 by FrancoAngeli s.r.l., Milano, Italy. ISBN 9788835168393 17 to, except within their own community. This history not only remains hidden, but also risks succumbing before a more shared collective narrative, because it is the majority culture that defines and uses the tools of meaning-making. In recent years, historical documentation has also been opened up to different and multiple sources in an attempt to capture, albeit in a fragmented and sporadic manner, the other and minority views. This sometimes allows distorted narratives to be corrected, sometimes to fill historical gaps, other times to broaden views of the same event. History, however, has not only the function of storytelling but also that of supporting collective memory. Remembering, for any individual, means “re-actualising the memory of a social group to which he or she belongs or has belonged in the past”2, and constructing, over time, a group identity that is the result of a temporal construction in which the dimensions of the past, present and future are combined3. In our historical period, which is essentially focused on the present, the past helps to read the everyday experienced reality and to give a new orientation to future perspectives. This is even more important if the past concerns minority communities, such as those of Roma and Sinti, whose history is the fruit of a denied narrative, since it is based on relations of hostility, exclusion, marginalisation and ghettoisation from majority societies and cultures. The history of the Roma and Sinti communities shows, more than any other history of minorities, the paradoxes of the links with the societies with which these communities relate. One of these paradoxes is the habit of describing minority history as another history, often disconnected from the narrative of the majority culture4. History, on the other hand, if it is inclusive, sustains and reweaves social ties, reconstructs and puts together a collective memory that is a collection of memories, events and narratives shared by the various communities that experienced that event. It also offers the possibility of reconstructing an identity based on the narrative of the community of belonging and the narratives of the majority communities. So, the history of the Roma community, which the TRACER 2 Jedlowski, Introduzione, 26. 3 Halbwachs, La memoria collettiva. 4 Bravi, Percorsi storico educativi. Copyright © 2024 by FrancoAngeli s.r.l., Milano, Italy. ISBN 9788835168393 18 project deals with, cannot be distinguished from European history and the history of other European peoples. 3. Which history? The TRACER project investigated a precise historical period, characterised by the mass violence that generated the Holocaust during World War II. The reasons behind this choice are several. The holocaust, the terrible event that saw the systematic persecution and extermination by the Nazis of millions of people, including Jews, Roma and Sinti, political dissidents and the disabled, is still an event that is difficult to understand. As Bauman5 emphasises, it was not the result of a momentary madness, but was conceived and enacted within a rational modern society, in the advanced stage of development of a civilisation. That is why it is a problem of this society and this culture, and it is a problem for everyone. Dealing with the subject of the Holocaust means reasoning about the way institutions and members of contemporary society act, in which “evil”, according to Arendt6, takes the ordinary form of everyday life. The Shoah and the Porrajmos (genocide of the Roma people) were made possible by a network of complicity and omertà that covered much of Europe. There were millions of German, Italian, French, Dutch, Polish, Czech, Hungarian, etc., citizens who actively contributed to the process of isolation, identification and segregation of Jews, Roma, Sinti, homosexuals, political opponents and millions of other citizens. Through their indifference, unconditionally accepted that, step by step, racial laws were ratified, ending up considering them right and fair. According to Bauman7, the holocaust did not result from «an infraction of order but from an impeccable, perfect and unchallengeable domination of order» in which one group, fighting for the acquisition of power, prestige and wealth (using Weber's thought...), used a 5 Bauman, Modernità e Olocausto. 6 Arendt, La banalità del male. Eichmann a Gerusalemme. 7 Bauman, Modernità e Olocausto, 211. Copyright © 2024 by FrancoAngeli s.r.l., Milano, Italy. ISBN 9788835168393 19 powerful educational and communication system to rationalise racism, and define those who are “different” as pathological, dangerous and worthy of elimination. The racial doctrine formulated by the Nazi ideology advocated the stigmatisation of “foreign races”, considered genetically subordinate, and marginalised specific groups as “inferior” by genetic heritage within that same race8. And also fitting into this idea of the “different” as being “pathological” is the history of the Roma and Sinti people, who have always embodied the symbol of diversity and for this reason have been subject to a process of stigmatisation. The Roma and Sinti people suffered discrimination long before the Nazi persecutions of the last century. According to Bravi9, the history of the Roma people is a history of institutionalised segregation, as it is based on laws in Europe that have always attempted to limit the freedom of movement of this people and to lead them, through assimilationist policies and educational systems created ad hoc, to be socialised into majority societies. One of the reasons why the Roma were interned in concentration camps is their asociality. According to Taguieff10, the idea that certain categories of human beings are not civilisable, i.e. are unable to recognise the founding values of a society, is a historical embodiment of the tendency towards “barbarianisation”. This is the highest degree of distancing and exclusion: the barbarian is not only different, inferior, but also dangerous as he is uncivilised. The Nazi regime, as it was structured before and during World War II, finished long ago, but its heritage is not dead. What took place in the concentration camps was the result of a process on which indifference, intolerance, hatred, prejudice and discrimination acted, all of which are still very much present in our society, evident even in the never exhausted anti-gypsyism. For this reason, with the TRACER project, tackling the topic of Porrajmos, i.e. the genocide of the Roma and Sinti people, adds a piece to the knowledge and memory of those events, but not only. This 8 Bortone and Pistecchia, Tre passi per attraversare Auschwitz. 9 Bravi, Tra inclusione ed esclusione. 10 Taguieff, Il razzismo. Copyright © 2024 by FrancoAngeli s.r.l., Milano, Italy. ISBN 9788835168393 20 project becomes a tool for analysing the cultural process that led to the concentration camps and for decoding current discrimination, particularly that affecting certain minorities. In Italy, the most evident discriminations are linked to the presence of Roma camps, real ghettos where Roma and Sinti populations reside, made institutional since the war in the former Yugoslavia. The persecution of Roma is one of the most neglected chapters in the history of the Nazi regime. It was recognised very late in all European countries, so this caused a delay in acknowledging these communities as part of European history, resulting in serious damage. The damage affects both the Roma community, which is not always aware of the history that binds it to Europe, and the non-Roma communities, who wrongly consider Roma as foreigners and therefore as people who cannot have the same rights as all citizens of the states in which they live. The history of the Roma people is often not included in school curricula, and the Roma Holocaust, also known as the Porrajmos, is a topic that receives little attention. Consequently, many Roma young people are unaware of this tragic chapter in history. Even the Roma community is not aware of what happened during World War II, and non-Roma people also lack knowledge of the Porrajmos. Reconstructing this moment in history means retrieving part of unknown events about the persecution of these populations in Europe and to transpose a population, which is still subject to prejudice and to policies of marginalisation, to the centre of European History. 4. Roma and Sinti communities and history The Roma is the largest minority in the European Union (between 12 and 15 million people) and the status of transnational people makes it difficult to understand and appreciate the history of the communities in the various countries of which they are citizens. Roma are among the people who are most vulnerable to human rights violations in the European Union (EU). The EU Fundamental Rights Agency (FRA) has consistently demonstrated this using robust statistical data since Copyright © 2024 by FrancoAngeli s.r.l., Milano, Italy. ISBN 9788835168393 21 2008. As evidenced in various research11, despite efforts at the national, European and international level to improve the social and economic integration of Roma in the European Union (EU), many still face deep poverty, profound social exclusion and discrimination. This often means limited access to quality education, jobs and services, low-income levels, sub-standard housing conditions, poor health and lower life expectancy. These problems often present insurmountable barriers to exercising the fundamental rights guaranteed in the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights. The scourge of anti-Gypsyism has proven to be a formidable barrier to efforts to improve the life chances and living standards for Roma, with many facing discrimination, harassment and hate crimes because of their ethnic origin. TRACER worked mainly with Roma and Sinti communities living in Italy, Poland and Portugal. The young Roma and Sinti who participated in the project are representatives of different groups, living conditions, cultures, histories and school levels. Their reality is extremely heterogeneous and varied and the greater or lesser inclusion status of the different communities also depends on the social policies implemented in the different countries of residence. The Roma community in Poland is one of the oldest in the European area. According to the 2011 census12, there were 12,560 people who registered Roma as their primary identification, and 17,049 registering Roma as either their primary or secondary nationality. The actual figure is thought to be considerably larger, perhaps reaching as high as 50,000 and even more because of the Roma refugees who have left the Ukrainian territory due to the current war situation. The National and Ethnic Minority and Regional Language Law approved in 2005 defines Roma as a minority ethnic community in Poland. The Polish Roma community suffered the Nazi genocide very violently. The invasion of Poland (1939) not only marked the beginning of World War II, but also the policy of racial extermination aimed at Jews and Roma. For this reason, the Polish communities were among the most affected. Auschwitz I (1940) immediately registered Roma people 11 FRA 2018, 2021, 2022: https://fra.europa.eu/it/themes/roma (Last access: August 2024). 12 National Census of Population and Housing 2011 https://stat.gov.pl/en/national-census/national-census-of-population-and-housing-2011/ (Last access: August 2024). Copyright © 2024 by FrancoAngeli s.r.l., Milano, Italy. ISBN 9788835168393 22 among its prisoners, but, above all, the construction of AuschwitzBirkenau (1942) marked the fate of the physical elimination of the Polish Roma. Roma currently living in Italy are characterised by the heterogeneity of groups, dialects and specific linguistic varieties and cultures. According to the Council of Europe’s data and the main Italian Roma associations, about 170-180,000 RGT people are actually living in Italy. A majority of them (about 60 %) are Italian citizens. Of the foreigners, 50% come from the former Yugoslavia and the rest from Romania, with smaller presences from Bulgaria and Poland. Not being recognised in Italy as an ethnic minority, the Roma community has different rights according to their nationality status: as Italian citizens, citizens of EU member states, non-EU citizens and stateless persons and refugees. Italy is a nation where two stories of the Roma communities come together. In Prato and Bologna, two of the cities where the project was implemented, there are mainly Italian citizens (Sinti) who have been in the area since the 15th century. The community of Bologna and Prato preserves the memory of a racial persecution which began in 1920 and continued until the deportations to the Nazi concentration camps between 1943 and 1945. In Naples, the Roma communities arrived in Italy in the late 1980s and the beginning of the 2000s. They are mainly Roma from the territories of Eastern Europe. In their history there is the deportation to the concentration camps in Croatia controlled by the Italian and Croatian fascists. One important symbolic element is the Jasenovac camp where thousands of Roma were killed. As regards Portugal, Roma have been part of Portuguese society since the end of the 15th century. The first written document in which Roma people are mentioned dates from the beginning of the 16th century. The way in which the document refers to Roma people evidences a knowledge of their culture that clearly points to a permanence in Portuguese society. They were recognised as Portuguese citizens by the Constitutional Charter of 1826. According to data collected by the Observatory of Roma Communities, there are about 37,000 people, although this number is below the existing population, as the data were collected from estimates carried out by each municipality in the country between 2014 and 2016. Copyright © 2024 by FrancoAngeli s.r.l., Milano, Italy. ISBN 9788835168393 23 They are mostly sedentary, with some roaming in the south of the country. Portugal did not participate directly in World War II, as it maintained a position of neutrality, but hosted thousands of refugees, mainly Jews. The subject of the genocide of the Roma people is unknown to most young Roma. 5. A participatory action research: goals and actions It is the choice of methodology that distinguishes TRACER from other projects. TRACER is action research and as such promotes a process that combines research (in this case historical) and action; in other words, it brings together knowledge and planning for change. According to Besozzi and Colombo13, the aim of action research is «to promote an action of change on/for the subjects involved, subjected to a judgement of validity by the group itself: in practice, it is a matter of leading the participants, through a series of stimulations and self-reflections, to change something in their own definition of the situation, to increase their own competences regarding the topic examined, to mature a new phase of growth». The key actors of this process in TRACER are Roma and nonRoma youths and adolescents (mostly Roma and Sinti) from Bologna/Modena, Florence/Prato and Naples (Italy), Figueira da Foz and Braga (Portugal), Oświęcim and Kraków (Poland). They were involved through a sequence of actions in a process of co-construction of knowledge and implementation of change. The target of the project is also the subject of the research. The knowledge produced collectively by young people and adolescents deconstructs the role of “specialist”, normally assigned to the scientist, and is shared with other peers, younger students, teachers and a diversified public. A fundamental principle of action research is the promotion of autonomy and empowerment of social actors. This principle becomes more important when the protagonists are young people who live in situations of marginalisation and who, due to stereotypes and 13 Besozzi and Colombo, Metodologia della ricerca sociale nei contesti socioeducativi, 112. Copyright © 2024 by FrancoAngeli s.r.l., Milano, Italy. ISBN 9788835168393 24 prejudices, do not have the opportunity to be considered social actors by the majority society. The Roma communities are still marked by the choice of being invisible from the outside, in order not to be recognised as Roma, as a result of the prejudices they suffer daily. Action research is based on a structured process involving investigation (in this case historical), action (training or activity), reflexivity, and (trans)formation in a continuous cycle that reproduces itself. Pic. 1. The action research cycle Like any action research, the objectives of the project are several. The project aims to: Copyright © 2024 by FrancoAngeli s.r.l., Milano, Italy. ISBN 9788835168393 31 girls and boys of Arab-Palestinian and Turkish origin for whom the consequences of some historical events (that are far from their own cultural experience) are not immediately obvious, like for example the symbolic value linked to the knowledge of the Jewish Holocaust in the German context, as a founding element in the construction of post-war democracies3. For minorities, the approach to the public memory elaborated by the majority can assume an imposition that erases and marginalizes their own story of the past and can risk producing conflict. Building active citizenship for everyone requires recognizing the centrality of the memories belonging to each community that constitutes the society of a country: opening a space in which to narrate the past corresponds to creating a place where different people can express themselves; it means building an educational environment in which everyone can have the right to speak and to be recognized. First of all, the Pedagogy of Recognition means the construction of this common area of narration in which the listening of past events that minorities consider central to their group can take place, but which are often neglected by public memory. The relationship between collective memory and history is linked to the possibility of telling, disseminating and sharing a narrative: societies select what to remember and what to forget by virtue of the social and political context they live in the present, as well as in relation to the possibilities and control they have over the communication tools that characterize the different social classes4. The Pedagogy of Recognition is structured on the possibility of recovering minority narratives, with the main intent of making stories a topic of critical and collective debate, that is an educational process. The reflection about the social connections in the construction of memories has a fundamental origin in the book Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire (The Social Frameworks of Memory) by sociologist Maurice Halbwachs5. It was the first text to investigate the roots of community identity that are formed on the basis of selection and removal 3 Gryglewski, Anerkennung und Erinnerung. 4 Foster, Pearce, Pettygrew, Holocaust education; L. Bravi, Percorsi storico educative. 5 Halbwachs, Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire. Halbwachs died on March 16, 1945 in the Buchenwald concentration camp. He was arrested and deported in the summer of 1944 by the Gestapo, because he tried to protect the escape of his wife of Jewish origin (Yvonne Basch) and their son. Copyright © 2024 by FrancoAngeli s.r.l., Milano, Italy. ISBN 9788835168393 32 of past events. The historian Yuval Noah Harari has reflected on the construction and diffusion of collective narratives as the identity glue that characterizes the Homo Sapiens species, compared to other living beings. In a TED talk (Technology Entertainment Design) entitled “What explains the rise of humans?” (London, June 2015)6, Harari addressed the theme of human narratives as an element of sharing and construction of collective roots in constant evolution, because it allows collaboration between individuals. Such collaboration/sharing, described as a specific condition of human beings, is characterized by abstract thought: if animals are able to collaborate in small groups to respond to concrete and immediate needs, according to Harari, Sapiens have acquired the ability to build extensive collaborative contexts, also in reference to ideal goals and immaterial values7. Narration represents an important tool for the dissemination of history: the transition from orality to writing has produced an increasingly wide-ranging dissemination and the ability to preserve narratives for a longer time. Collective storytelling does not necessarily or naturally direct itself towards positive objectives (human rights and democracy, for example) but it has the characteristic of building prevalent majority narrations. The criticality of narrating the past according to a majority point of view has been a topic of historiographical reflection at least since the post-war period, when greater attention was paid to the issue of minorities8 and restorative justice by international laws9. The analysis of “dominant narratives” has recently been reactivated, starting from the debate that arose on the “Cancel culture”10, as the practice of erasing, revising or inventing aspects of the past to support the dominant opinions in the present. The communication of the past (the action of telling about history) is not sufficient to activate educational processes aimed at peace and democratic values, nor the 6Y.N. Harari in TED talks «What explains the rise of humans?»: https://www.ted.com/talks/yuval_noah_harari_what_explains_the_rise_of_humans?subtitle=en (Last access: August 2024). 7 Harari, Sapiens. 8 The period after the two world wars has marked a constant reflection on this issue, although international law has not yet reached a definitive definition of "minorities". 9 Van Ness, Heetderks Strong, Derby, Parker, Restoring justice; Zagrebelski, C. M. Martini, La domanda di giustizia; Patrizi, La giustizia riparativa. 10 Gordon, Education in a Cultural War Era; Owens, The case of cancel culture; Rizzacasa d’Orsogna, Scorrettissimi; Dei, “Cancel culture”. Copyright © 2024 by FrancoAngeli s.r.l., Milano, Italy. ISBN 9788835168393 33 participation of minorities who are often excluded from such a story, especially if they live in a context of marginalization or stereotyping in the present11. What we can define as educational paths of memory must necessarily be composed of the following elements: - historical narration (historicization); - a methodology made of pedagogically connoted tools that can direct the story of the past, towards the objectives of fighting against prejudice and racism and strengthening the direct participation of minorities alongside the majorities. 2. History and the permanence of prejudice To understand the process of permanence of prejudices about Roma and Sinti in the present, it is useful to remember that Nazi racial research on “Gypsies” defined them as a dangerous group in reference to two factors considered hereditary: «asociality» and the «instinct for nomadism». After the Second World War, the description of Roma nomadism was exactly the same as the Nazi and fascist one: it remained linked to the idea of a people defined folkloristically as «son of the wind», without roots in the past, capable of living only in the present. Stereotypes remain prejudices and do not really describe the Roma, but positive and negative folkloric characteristics were unfortunately conveyed by researchers and scholars in the post-war period. The idea of a primordial nomadism was still linked to asociality and Roma continued to be described as people not capable of living in peace with other communities. This denigrating description was the result of a social context that described «Gypsies» as dangerous people. Hermann Arnold was one of the most important international expert on “Gypsies” during Seventies; he wrote the two books Vaganten, Komödianten, Fieranten und Briganten12 and Die Zigeuner13. During the Second World War period, Arnold was in contact with Robert Ritter and Eva Justin, the two main Nazi scholars who had developed the 11 De Luna, La Repubblica del dolore. 12 Arnold, Vaganten. 13 Arnold, Die Zigeuner. Copyright © 2024 by FrancoAngeli s.r.l., Milano, Italy. ISBN 9788835168393 34 concepts of racial inferiority of the “Gypsies” and who had condemned Roma to extermination in Auschwitz. Between the 1960s and 1970s, Arnold continued to propose the need to sterilize Sinti and Roma in his books. In 1972, historian Donald Kenrick and Grattan Puxon published the volume The destiny of Europe’s Gypsies14 and described the central role played by Ritter and Justin in defining the policies of elimination of the Sinti and Roma during Nazism; Ian Hancock, a professor of Roma origins at the University of Austin (Texas), proposed further documentation in the volume The pariah Syndrome. An account of slavery and the persecution of the Gypsies15. Finally, historians Michael Burleigh and Wolfgang Wippermann pointed out the connivance and fraternal friendship of Hermann Arnold with Eva Justin and Robert Ritter in the volume The Racial State. Germany 1933-1945, recalling some articles by Arnold himself in neo-Nazi newspapers16. In the 1960s and 1970s, Hermann Arnold and Walter Haessler were the European experts of Roma studies. Walter Haessler is the author of the text Enfants de la Grand-Route17, which was his doctoral thesis in psychology. The volume collects the genealogies of nomadic families in Switzerland that correspond to a group that should be correctly named “Yenische”, but they were labeled according to the concept of «nomadic and dangerous Gypsies». The volume positively describes a social state program of welfare that was coordinated by the Swiss association «Pro Juventute», which had as objective the elimination of the nomadism of the “Yenische”. In 1926, Dr. Alfred Siegfried was the director of the “Pro Juventute project”; he had collaborated closely with Robert Ritter. The Swiss project described nomadism as a defect to be eradicated through re-education and identified “Yenish children” as its target, considering adults irrecoverable subjects. The actions were based on the intervention of the police to take children away from their parents, changing their surnames so that it was impossible to establish new contacts with relatives. “Yenische” were entrusted to 14 Kenrick, Puxon, The destiny of Europe’s Gypsies. 15 Hancock, The pariah Syndrome. 16 Burleigh, Wippermann, The racial State, 316-317. 17 Haessler, Enfants de la Grand-Route. Copyright © 2024 by FrancoAngeli s.r.l., Milano, Italy. ISBN 9788835168393 35 orphanages, peasant families or religious institutions. Children often suffered violence and abuse18. Mariella Mehr was one of those children legally kidnapped and taken away from her parents. She was also a particularly resistant child and her indomitable character led to the decision, as happened in many other cases, to commit her to psychiatric institutions, where she was subjected to electroshock several times. Sterilization of boys and girls had also become common practice so that successive generations of Yenisches could no longer exist in Switzerland. In 1972, the Swiss press denounced the scandal about the project of re-education of Yenish children: it had been going on since the 1920s. The role of two direct testimonies was important: Teresa Wjss, from whom five children had been taken away and Mariella Mehr who had herself suffered the violent practices of the project. In 1987, Pro Juventute presented its official apologies to the Yenische community in Switzerland and delivered medical documents to the victims: these documents reported the use of electroshock and sterilization practiced on very young boys and girls. Mariella Mehr finally told the story of her specific persecution through her books and poems19. The story of the Pro-Juventute project shows how prejudices remained both before and after Second World War: during the Nazi period, Roma nomadism was defined as an element of racial inferiority and after the Second World War, the same nomadism was described as a massifying and negative cultural element that generated policies of marginalization, based on the same Nazi stereotypes. 3. Memory as a process for democratic citizenship History represents a useful tool for starting processes of inclusion and participation of minorities, provided that the narrative can be used to reflect on the processes of prejudice construction20. The European 18 Galle, Kindswegnahmen. 19 Mehr, Daskind; Mehr, Ognuno incatenato alla sua ora. 20Recommendation CM/Rec(2020)2 of the Committee of Ministers to member States on the inclusion of the history of Roma and/or Travellers in school curricula and teaching materialsCopyright © 2024 by FrancoAngeli s.r.l., Milano, Italy. ISBN 9788835168393 36 project TRACER, funded through the Citizens, Equality, Rights and Values (CERV) program, was developed starting from these reference concepts aimed at the direct participation of the Roma and Sinti communities in the European context. The history of the persecution and extermination of Roma and Sinti during fascism and Nazism is still little known and disseminated. This condition of lack of consciousness is the origin of the current stereotypes directed towards this people: for this reason, knowledge of history identifies the process of prejudice construction and allows their destruction. The process of deconstructing stereotypes about Roma that is activated by TRACER project provides the fundamental participation of Roma and non-Roma people. Knowing history is the tool to relate the past with the present of Roma young people living in Europe. The Pedagogy of Recognition allowed TRACER project to focus its action on training and developing an educational process through history. Pedagogy of Recognition corresponds to building places of equal and democratic participation in educational and training contexts. History has become an instrument of active citizenship, through its public and collective narration; in this context, history and its narration return to concretely represent a possibility of education and training in a European perspective. Bibliography Arnold, Hermann. Die Zigeuner. Olten und Freiburg: Walter Verlag, 1965. Arnold, Hermann. Vaganten, Komödianten, Fieranten und Briganten. Stuttgart: Georg Thieme Verlag, 1958. Bandini, Gianfranco, Paolo Bianchini, Francesca Borruso, Marta Brunelli and Stefano Oliviero (eds.). La Public History tra scuola, università e territorio. Firenze: FUP, 2022. Bertella Farnetti, Paolo, Lorenzo Bertucelli and Alfonso Botti (Eds.). Public History. Discussioni e Pratiche. Milano-Udine: Mimesis, 2017. Bravi, Luca. Percorsi storico educativi della memoria europea. Milano: Franco Angeli, 2014. https://search.coe.int/cm#{%22CoEIdentifier%22:[%2209000016809ee48c%22],%22sort%22:[%22CoEValidationDate%20Descending%22]} (Last access: August 2024). Copyright © 2024 by FrancoAngeli s.r.l., Milano, Italy. ISBN 9788835168393 37 Burleigh, Michael and Wolfgang Wippermann. The racial State. Germany 19331945, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991, pp. 316-317. Cauvin, Thomas. A textbook of practice. London: Routledge, 2022. De Luna, Giovanni. La Repubblica del dolore. Milano: Feltrinelli, 2011. Dei, Fabio. “Cancel culture: strategie della memoria e politiche identitarie”. In Cambio. Rivista sulle trasformazioni sociali 13 (2023), n. 25: 59-71. Foster, Stuart, Andy Pearce and Alice Pettygrew, Holocaust education. Contemporary Challenges and controversies. London: UCL Press, 2020. Galle, Sara. Kindswegnahmen. Zürich: Chronos, 2016. Gordon, Mordechai. Education in a Cultural War Era. Thinking Philosophically about the Practice of Cancelling. London: Routledge, 2022. Gryglewski, Elke. Anerkennung und Erinnerung: Zugänge arabisch-palästinensischer und türkischer Berliner J gendlicher zum Holocaust. Berlin: Metropol, 2013. Haessler, Walter. Enfants de la Grand-Route (Hilfswerk für die Kinder der Landstrasse). Neuchâtel: Delachaux et Niestlé, 1955. Halbwachs, Maurice. Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire. Paris: Alcan,1925. Hancock, Ian. The pariah Syndrome. An account of gypsy slavery and persecution, Ann Arbor: Karoma publisher, 1987. Harari, Yuval Noah. Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. New York: Vintage, 2015. Kenrick, Donald and Grattan Puxon. The destiny of Europe’s Gypsies. London: Chatto Heinemann for Sussex University, 1972. Mehr, Mariella. Daskind. Zürich: Limmat, 2017. Mehr, Mariella. Ognuno incatenato alla sua ora. Torino: Einaudi, 2014. Owens, Ernst. The case of cancel culture. London: Macmillan, 2023. Patrizi, Patrizia. La giustizia riparativa. Roma: Carocci, 2009. Rizzacasa d’Orsogna, Costanza. Scorrettissimi. La cancel culture nella cultura americana. Torino: Einaudi, 2023 Van Ness, Daniel W., Karen Heetderks Strong, Jonathan Derby and Lynette Parker. Restoring justice. London: Routledge, 2022. Zagrebelski, Gustavo and Carlo Maria Martini. La domanda di giustizia. Torino: Einaudi, 2003. Copyright © 2024 by FrancoAngeli s.r.l., Milano, Italy. ISBN 9788835168393 38 3. Breaking the prejudice through places of Memory by Silvia Bencini* and Luca Bravi* 1. History walks in the places of the past and present1 The places are an element from which to start a historical reconstruction of the public policies of Remembrance and the Auschwitz State Museum is one of the sites that was first intended for this objective (at least in the immediate intentions of the survivors), which later became an international symbol, to the point of iconically implying the entire path of persecution and extermination implemented by Nazism and European fascism. Auschwitz, which has become a world symbol, has undergone a crystallization: known on a public level for its past (the events between 1940 and 1945), it sees its post-war period and its present constantly put in the background; it seems to exist only for the historical time of Nazism. A fundamental phase of the TRACER project was the visit to the Auschwitz State Museum as an element of connection between past and present, as a tool for reflection in relation to the discriminatory categories of the past which are still used at a social level in the preservation of stereotypes: the category “gypsies” is one of those that has been most preserved over time, carrying stereotypes about Roma almost unchanged into the present. The proposed contribution aims to reflect on the need to build a passage between the past and the present that is linked to the activation of training and educational processes. But just visiting the Museum is not enough to produce this process; after the visit of the Museum which * Department of Education, Languages, Interculture, Literatures and Psychology (FORLILPSI), University of Florence. 1 Luca Bravi is author of paragraphs 1; Silvia Bencini is author of paragraphs 2 and 4; Luca Bravi and Silvia Bencini are both authors of paragraph 3. Copyright © 2024 by FrancoAngeli s.r.l., Milano, Italy. ISBN 9788835168393 39 represents the story of Nazi persecution and extermination, it is necessary to find channels of relationship with people living in the present. The attempt to escape from this crystallization of Auschwitz also means describing the variation of meanings that have been linked to this same place. It is a geographical area that speaks of the past of death and destruction, in such an all-encompassing way that it influences the vision one has of the town of Oświęcim (Auschwitz, in the historical Nazi translation)2, even today. Over time, the international public narrative of death has focused on this town, so much so that any sign of life expressed in the present risks appearing out of place and being described as an offense to the memory of those who suffered the fate of death in the lager between 1940 and 1945. Yet the activities to build contexts of peace and the fight against racism are active right in the town of Oświęcim, but paradoxically not perceived by those who are visiting the Auschwitz Museum, who leave the city immediately after the visit and return to the main nearby Polish metropolises before going home. The burning current debate can be summarized in these terms: does Oświęcim remain a place of death, or can it be a symbol of the strength of Memory, from a proactive perspective of the present? And if the invitation of Memory policies is always to translate awareness of the past into present commitment, how to manage the return to life? Is it ethical that life continues to flow around the fence of the Auschwitz camp, or should we leave the entire place, including the town, as a memorial to those fallen under the hand of the Nazi death machine? The debate is decidedly intricate and presents an innumerable series of problematic issues, but the reflection around these questions is essential precisely when one intends to give full meaning to processes of participation and deconstruction of stereotypes: if the Auschwitz Museum is not made to dialogue with the present, any visit risks 2 Under the Nazi occupation, the town of Oświęcim was renamed Auschwitz (name taken from the Habsburg translation). The Polish name of the city will be reported here, whenever the analysis focuses on contexts outside the concentration camp, while "Auschwitz" will be used only when referring to the historical time and the events of the concentration and extermination camp. This distinction is also necessary because the citizens who live in Oświęcim today perceive the full weight of the stigma of history in the German translation. This approach will naturally also open the reflection to the subsequent theme of the removal and/or construction of Memory. Copyright © 2024 by FrancoAngeli s.r.l., Milano, Italy. ISBN 9788835168393 40 exhausting itself in a sort of excavation into past events which end up being perceived as distant from the current context: the evil of the past in opposition to the present considered immune from similar drifts. Reflecting on the relationship between Auschwitz (symbol of the past and a warning for the democracies of the future) and Oświęcim (the city of the present that works on the fight against racism and xenophobia) is essential when approaching these places and these stories, people belonging to young generations in training who are part of a minority that is still affected by racism throughout Europe. The young Roma and Sinti who come to Oświęcim to learn about the phase of Auschwitz which directly affected them through extermination policies must be able to relate historical notions with the perception of themselves and with a European narrative which continues to perceive them as “different” in the social context. To build a process that is not ethnicizing and that does not risk proposing historicization paths segmented into a single minority, it is useful to first consider the place of Oświęcim (the present) in its entirety and complexity, in order to perceive how the practices of deconstruction of stereotypes through history do not only concern the specific theme of a minority, but also the global approach to history that finds a form of formative expression in the multicultural present. Here we will attempt to describe Oświęcim proactive face of the present, with its dense network of people and associations who inhabit and experience the town and who connect the commitment to active citizenship with constant reference to the history preserved and narrated by the Museum. Carrying out this revolution means being aware that Memory is made (and not just studied) and that this path can only be accomplished where life exists. Life alongside death, without one prevailing over the other: from death to life, in a reciprocal movement that leads to the preservation of Memory as a training tool in which Roma and Sinti participate together with all the other people who make up the humanity. It is an effort that will also allow us to reflect on the methods of access to certain places, on the role of “memory tourism”, on what is right or wrong to do and on how each of the reflections takes on a different depth when observed as a citizen and not as an impromptu passer-by in these places who then quickly returns to his home. Copyright © 2024 by FrancoAngeli s.r.l., Milano, Italy. ISBN 9788835168393 47 racism and anti-Semitism. Also, particularly relevant on a communicative and educational level are the “Talking heads”, murals that depict well-known and important people alongside one of their famous quotes. Thus, walking through Oświęcim, it is possible to come across the words of the physicist, chemist and mathematician Maria SkłodowskaCurie (a figure valued precisely in the context of the European Union), who reminds us that «in life there is nothing to fear, only to understand». Understanding the lesson that comes from the history of a place like the town of Oświęcim and remembering it in everyday life; process which brings to mind the Stumbling Stones, Stolpersteine in German, an initiative spread internationally by the artist Gunter Demnig as a reaction to every form of denialism and oblivion, in order to remember all the victims of National-Socialism who for whatever reason were persecuted: religion, race, political ideas, sexual orientation. And again, walking through Oświęcim, the visitor comes across Martin Luther King's message, «In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends». Likewise, the reproduced figure of Mahatma Gandhi seems to appeal to passers-by with his famous exhortation «Be the change you want to see in the world» and the politician Vaclav Havel who states: «Decent people cannot stand by and watch». These images aim to promote, especially among younger generations, values such as tolerance, human rights, peace, democracy and civil society. In the “City of Peace” two parallel realities coexist, which have been carrying out for a long time the fight against prejudices and mechanisms of hatred, activating educational processes: Cafe Bergson and the Roma Association in Poland. 3.1 Cafe Bergson, walking between yesterday and today Cafe Bergson is today one of the main centers committed to the guarantee of every minority civil rights. It was born in 2014 thanks to Copyright © 2024 by FrancoAngeli s.r.l., Milano, Italy. ISBN 9788835168393 48 the American Auschwitz Jewish Center Foundation (AJCF)6 in the building where the last Jewish citizen of Oświęcim Shimson Kleuger lived, and right next to the only synagogue survived the Second World War. The position is not accidental, Cafe Bergson is in fact engaged in education on the Shoah, in a continuous project of memory preservation through educational activities involving various age groups. To understand the importance of this commitment, it is necessary to explain the social context that pushed the Foundation to create this cultural, educational and recreational center in Oświęcim. Before the Second World War, the Jewish community was very large and diverse in Oświęcim: about 58% of the inhabitants were Jewish, more than twenty synagogues stood in Oświęcim and there was peaceful coexistence between the Jewish and Christian communities. Even today it is possible to appreciate how close the Great Synagogue7 of Oświęcim, destroyed by the Nazis on the night of November 29, 1939, and the Church of Saint Mary Help of Christians, still functioning as a place of worship, were. After the war, 186 Jews returned to Oświęcim (there were approximately more than 7.000 before the extermination). The majority were killed in their own town, inside the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp, after having been transported to the ghettos of other cities. Upon the survivors’ return, the only synagogue not completely demolished was restored and remained in use during the 1940s and 1950s. In the 1960s, due to growing anti-Semitic policies, the Jewish community decided to emigrate from Poland; the synagogue was closed and used by the city in a secular manner (for a period it even housed a carpet shop). Only in the 1990s, with the birth of the Auschwitz Jewish Center Foundation, was the synagogue renovated again and made available 6 The Auschwitz Jewish Center Foundation (AJCF) is a non-governmental organization founded in 1995 by Fred Schwartz with the aim of building a cultural, spiritual and educational center for the Jewish community. To date, the foundation takes care of the maintenance of the Oshpitzin Jewish Museum, the Synagogue, the Jewish cemetery, and the memorial that stands on the ruins of the Great Synagogue which was destroyed during the Nazi occupation. Furthermore, it financed the reconstruction of the building in which Cafe Bergson is located. 7 The demolition was completed in the summer of 1941, when a detachment composed mainly of Polish Auschwitz prisoners was sent to clear the ruins of the Great Synagogue. This historic site where a special memorial stands today is managed by the Auschwitz Jewish Center Foundation and the artefacts found in the 2004 excavations are part of the collection present at the Jewish Museum in Oświęcim. Copyright © 2024 by FrancoAngeli s.r.l., Milano, Italy. ISBN 9788835168393 49 for a small group of Jews who remained in the town. It currently plays a dual role: it hosts the Jewish Museum, which deals with the preservation of the memory of the Shoah through the collection of photos, objects and artefacts connected to history, and it is occasionally used as a place of worship. Since there is no longer a Jewish community in the city of Oświęcim, the synagogue is open to groups of visitors from the Jewish Museum and the Auschwitz State Museum. In the year 2000, the building next to the synagogue was acquired by the Foundation, because the owner died. The structural conditions were precarious, so the foundation organized a fundraising campaign to renovate the premises and give birth, in 2014, to a new place that could host not only visitors or groups of tourists, but also and above all the local community. Cafe Bergson marked a real turning point for attendance at the Jewish Museum. Before its opening, the population of Oświęcim had not shown great interest in the themes covered by the museum: a story, that of the Shoah, now distant in time and which no longer represented the citizens from a religious point of view. After its opening, citizens began to frequent the Cafe and its surroundings, including the restored synagogue, despite some initial reticence. There were those who did not understand whether or not it was a place reserved only for Jews or for groups visiting the museum, but over time the Cafe has gained a rather large number of regular visitors and is currently one of the most popular places in the town of Oświęcim, thanks to a philosophy of great openness on the social issues of the present. Cafe Bergson is a significant example of proactive commitment for the present, because it is not limited only to the creation of training processes aimed at knowledge and preservation of the memory of the Nazi extermination, but it updates the mechanisms of hatred and discrimination that led to the reality of places like Auschwitz: it effectively implements a process of historicization, of knowledge that dialogues through places, between past and present. The Cafe organizes workshops calibrated to the age of the participants: the “Elder Brothers in Faith” project, an artistic workshop in which children learn the basic terms of the Jewish religion and the synagogue, through the use of games and colours; the “Auschwitz Jewish Center Fellows” program, for university students involved in historical studies on the Shoah or similar topics. An advanced study trip lasting Copyright © 2024 by FrancoAngeli s.r.l., Milano, Italy. ISBN 9788835168393 50 three and a half weeks to the most important cities in Poland related to the study program (Krakow, Warsaw, Łódź, Treblinka and Oświęcim). In Oświęcim, fellows participate in an intensive program at the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, where they visit the camps, study the history of inmates, and take part in workshops with staff from the Museum’s collections and education departments. Teachers are a particularly important category for the centre. The “Anti-discrimination Education Academy” is a long-term program on which the foundation focuses most, and it is aimed at teachers of Polish or other humanities subjects in primary and secondary schools in the Polish regions of Małopolska and Górny Śląsk. The program provides specific training against stereotypes and prejudices, and uses the so-called VICE model (Visibility, Inclusion, Collaboration, Empowerment), which encourages the construction and maintenance of safe communities, because they are free from discrimination and violence. The effectiveness of certain educational processes in deconstructing stereotypes rooted in the present is based on the ability to consider the history of all the victims of the Nazi genocide. In fact, Cafe Bergson is not limited to ethical declarations but is built and proposed as a “neutral environment”: it is frequented by anyone, even by people not really interested in history who, by participating in the various public events, have the opportunity to read something about it even just in the posters that crowd the walls of the building. The Cafe itself is an indirect educational tool, as it is a place of informal training. Lively, effective and accurate communication intrigues the online community but also passers-by. It is in fact very easy to notice the building, thanks to its colored ribbons: a rainbow of colors, a banner, symbolizing that, at Cafe Bergson, everyone is welcomed with open arms, regardless of origin, gender, sexuality, physical and neurological condition, age: “Here you can be whoever you want, you can come and feel comfortable and safe”8. The commitment continued in relation to the nearby war context in Ukraine with the #bergson4ukraine project, activated immediately after the outbreak of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict. Thanks to 8 The motto “Here you can be whoever you want, you can come and feel comfortable and safe” was pronounced by Karolina Turza, manager and educator of Cafe Bergson, during an interview conducted in Oświęcim on 17th August 2023. Copyright © 2024 by FrancoAngeli s.r.l., Milano, Italy. ISBN 9788835168393 51 cooperation with the “European Solidarity Corpse” project, every year the Foundation hosts young volunteers from various countries (in particular now Ukraine), who have the opportunity to participate in the various activities offered: leading groups in the museum, working in the Cafe, taking care of the Jewish cemetery and the Memorial. The Cafe has become a place of welcome and redemption for Ukrainian refugees where, in addition to accommodation and employment, activities such as Polish lessons for foreigners, workshops and trips are offered. Finally, Cafe Bergson has been committed to the fight against discrimination towards the LGBTQAI+ community for six years now. This can be appreciated from the rainbow flags at its entrance, but also from having chosen to spread the slogan “Nikt nie jest nielegalny” (“No one is illegal”) through its business. This motto is inspired by the recent denial of civil rights in some regions of Poland towards members of the LGBTQIA+ community. In fact, there are (even if today only symbolically) LGBT-free zones, i.e. areas of Poland declared “free from homosexuals”. Oświęcim is not one of them, but the Cafe has nevertheless decided to act as a megaphone for any action against hatred and discrimination. 3.2. The Roma. From Oświęcim to the European gaze on the present Along the same road that leads to Cafe Bergson, the same road that reaches, on the opposite side, the Catholic church and passes next to the monument that recalls the ancient Great Synagogue which was destroyed by the Nazis, you will find the headquarters of the Association Stowarzyszenie Romów w Polsce (“Roma in Poland”), a key partner of the TRACER project, which works against anti-gypsyism at local, national and international levels. The Association was founded at the beginning of 1992, with the main objective of creating the conditions for the full participation of Roma in the life of the country. The reflection on places in relation to the construction of awareness of the history of the Roma and Sinti as a central element of European history finds in this context a natural constructive relationship between past and present. One of the main purposes of the Association is to remember and commemorate the Nazi persecution and extermination of Roma and Copyright © 2024 by FrancoAngeli s.r.l., Milano, Italy. ISBN 9788835168393 52 Sinti and its location in the city of the Auschwitz State Museum makes the concrete meaning of this objective immediate with respect to the past; in this case, the reflection on the present adds elements that make a concrete example of the possibility of managing educational actions, through a constant reminder that finds its fulcrum in historicization, but to make it the basis of appropriate and solid current training. The permanent exhibition entitled «Romowie Historia Kultura» («Roma History and Culture»), which can be visited at the Association’s headquarters, is constructed as a narrative of the Roma history, starting from the movements of this community around the world (in Europe in particular), and makes immediately visible the stereotypes more rooted in the collective thought regarding this population, the same ones that formed the basis for the Nazi extermination and which remain in the present. There are paintings of women presented through the art produced by the majority culture in which “gypsies” become attractive, bewitching subjects, with mystical seductive powers and accused of being enchantresses and deceivers; the images of the men oscillate between the vision of extreme freedom (which however also constructs the figure of the “rootless and non-citizen gypsy”), up to that of the carefree musician, circus artist and therefore “obviously” nomadic and contextually described as a thief. The European imagination has always been fascinated by the exoticism of these people, but at the same time annoyed by their presence which has been depicted as a cumbersome and dangerous diversity. The exhibition retraces the steps which, from this imaginary, led to the Nazi persecution, deportation and extermination of around 500,000 Roma and Sinti, of which around 23,000 in the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration and extermination camp. From eugenic tests, to forced sterilizations, to the extermination in the Zigeunerlager of Birkenau (camp of the Birkenau gypsy families, officially indicated as the BIIE sector of the lager), which took place on 2nd August 1944, we are faced with a page of history that has almost never been told in schoolbooks. From the imagery of the negative narrative of the Roma in the majority culture, the historical phase of Auschwitz is addressed in the exhibition, through archival documentation, in order to historicize an event of the past which has long been denied in its character of extermination for racial reasons (the commitment of Professor Ian Copyright © 2024 by FrancoAngeli s.r.l., Milano, Italy. ISBN 9788835168393 53 Hancock9, a Roma researcher at the University of Austin in Texas, was necessary to achieve adequate knowledge of the persecution process implemented by the Nazis against Sinti and Roma and to achieve recognition of their extermination , which occurred as a final act linked to the definition of racial inferiority applied to the category “gypsies”). The exhibition of the Polish association is a narrative journey that does not finish with the end of Auschwitz but continues with a story that once again becomes the story of Oświęcim, but above all the description of the relationship between the cultural majority and Roma minority in the post-war period. The events of the Roma thus leave the direct reference to Auschwitz and the passage to the personal and family history of Roman Kwiatkowski allow us to concretely consider the effects of a denied memory, as was that of the Roma at least until the 1980s. The Kwiatkowskis are a family of Roma who, as happened with the entire group of Polish Roma, arrived in Poland at least as early as the 16th century, due to pogroms against the “gypsies” carried out in Russian territories. Each family suffered Nazi persecution which resulted in the extermination and death of members of the community. The generations following that of the direct witnesses of the persecution returned to live on Polish territory alongside the majority community. In the 1980s, during the changes that led to the end of the Cold War, the Polish economic situation had worsened considerably and the need to identify those responsible for the general malaise caused new pogroms against the Roma who were used as scapegoats. In 1981, conflicts specifically targeted against the Roma population occurred. The first of these events took place on 9th and 10th September 1981 in Konin, where 70 Roma lived, while the second took place on 21st and 22nd October of the same year in Oświęcim, where 137 Roma were registered, including Roman Kwiatkowski with his family. A futile argument between a Roma and a non-Roma over a place in a queue sparked the conflict. Speculation about the financial situation of the Roma and the cultural resort to theft began to be widespread again. It was also said that Roma from nearby towns - Kęty, Chrzanów and Andrychów - would be resettled in Auschwitz blocks to keep them under control. Local committees were formed to expel the “gypsies” from the cities and actual agreements were stipulated with the 9 Hancock, The pariah syndrome. Copyright © 2024 by FrancoAngeli s.r.l., Milano, Italy. ISBN 9788835168393 54 authorities of the Bielsko voivodeship (region) to remove them. Meanwhile, the demonstrators destroyed the property of the Oświęcim Roma and set fire to their cars and threw them into the Soła river. Roman Kwiatkowski’s family, together with the other Roma in the Polish town, was forced to leave and move away from the city where they had always lived, to move abroad. The return occurred only two years later and on that occasion it was Roman Kwiatkowski himself who perceived the urgency and need to work on a cultural level for the participation of Roma in the social context at a local, national and international level: the idea of give life to the association Stowarzyszenie Romów w Polsce in that context and from 1992 significantly established its official headquarters in Oświęcim, where the Roma, including the Kwiatkowski family, returned to live. In 2023, the association achieved government-level recognition; Therefore, it is recognized and supported as the official representative of Roma in Poland. It was during the period of building the association’s activity that Roman Kwiatkowski established relationships with Romani Rose, one of the most well-known German Sinti activists and director of the Central Council of German Sinti and Roma (born 1982). The Rose family was hit hard by the Nazi extermination: 13 of Romani Rose's relatives were murdered in the concentration camps, including his grandfather Anton who died in Auschwitz and his grandmother Lisetta who died during transport to Ravensbrück. The sons Oskar (who had managed to escape deportation right from the start) and Vinzenz (who survived Auschwitz) were saved; the two brothers continued to fight for the affirmation of the civil rights of Sinti and Roma in the post-World War II period in Germany. At an international level they worked assiduously for the recognition of the extermination of the Roma and Sinti as an element linked to racial persecution, and at a national level (until the 1980s the deportation and persecution of men, women and children which took place under the label “Gypsies” had been declassified as a social control action by the Third Reich, denying the specificity of persecution for reasons of race). Oskar Rose died in 1968, after the birth of his son Romani. Vinzenz Rose, who remained alive until 1996, wanted to build the first monument dedicated to the memory of Sinti and Roma within the section of Birkenau reserved for “gypsy” prisoners. He managed to follow up this project in 1974, paying with his own money for the construction of the monument which Copyright © 2024 by FrancoAngeli s.r.l., Milano, Italy. ISBN 9788835168393 55 still stands in the BIIe sector of Birkenau and which reproduces the wall of one of the barracks in which Sinti and Roma lived, imprisoned between 1943 and 1944 Auschwitz II. Romani, son of Oskar and nephew of Vinzenz, organized and took part in the public demonstrations that were carried out by the German Sinti for the institutional recognition of their own extermination, in order to be able to officially declare, starting from 1980, that it had been a policy of racial persecution: among the best-known demonstrations, the one that took place on Good Friday 1980, when twelve Sinti began a hunger strike at the memorial site of the former Dachau concentration camp (the Dachau concentration camp, the first to be built in 1933 in Nazi Germany, it was immediately a place of imprisonment of the German Sinti - the Sinti immediately lost the German citizenship with the promulgation of the Nuremberg laws), as they were considered dangerous asocials to be kept under control (the specific theories of racial inferiority on the category “gypsies” were developed in 1936). The strike turned into a key event for the Sinti and Roma civil rights movement in Germany. The public protest action received particular weight thanks to the participation of concentration camp survivors Jakob Bamberger, Hans Braun and Franz Wirbel. Romani Rose intervened with a speech projected onto the present, recalling the past of death in the very place where the Memorial reconstructed by Vinzenz inside Birkenau is located. It is in memory of that speech held in 1980 that on Good Friday of each year, in a place that was the site of extermination, what the Sinti and Roma call a “hymn to life and peace in the present” is celebrated. Please note that the “Landfahrerordnung”10 (Nomads Ordinance) remained valid in Bavaria until 1970; this had limited the fundamental rights of Sinti and Roma for decades in terms of housing policies, education and participation in public life. The Bavarian criminal police had continued to record the names, fingerprints and personal data of Roma and Sinti from all over Germany during the post-war period. This information was in some cases added to files already created during the Nazi period on each Sinti or Roma individual present in the area and the information contained therein was often used to deny compensation to Sinti and Roma survivors of the 10 https://www.ifz-muenchen.de/heftarchiv/1997_4_3_margalis.pdf (Last access: August, 2024) Copyright © 2024 by FrancoAngeli s.r.l., Milano, Italy. ISBN 9788835168393 56 concentration camps who officially requested it. The strikers also tried to find out where these files were located. Their protest triggered a widespread wave of public solidarity and marked a turning point in the public perception of the minority. About one hundred domestic and foreign media reported the events in Dachau. Eventually, the regional government publicly admitted that it was facing discrimination against Sinti and Roma. Furthermore, the Ministry of the Interior stated that the individual files of the Bavarian criminal police had been destroyed at the very beginning of the 1970s. It is on the basis of the results progressively obtained from this process of building rights and participation underway in the thirty years following the end of the Second World War in Germany, that the subsequent international relationships were born between Roman Kwiatkowski and Romani Rose who found themselves in collaborate in the annual celebrations in memory of the extermination of Sinti and Roma, but which have had the ability to project a concrete commitment to the construction and defense of civil rights in the present. It is through these reference figures present within the Roma communities and who belong to the generation of the children of the deportees, that the need to link the past of Auschwitz to the present of Oświęcim is clearly expressed, as well as the history of persecution that characterized Dachau, with the most recent events that made it a place for claiming rights in the present. Through places and their complete historicization (between present and past) the valorization of the historical narrative can also be resumed through the narrative links between different generations: in the case of Sinti and Roma, this process has stopped, because (we will see it in some passages of this book) there are Sinti and Roma communities in Europe who, placed in conditions of extreme denial of rights and marginalization, have not been able to perceive themselves as a fundamental mechanism of community memory: some young people who took part in the TRACER project did not know anything about Auschwitz in relation to its own people nor the subsequent struggles for recognition that characterized the Roma of Europe. It is naturally not a personal responsibility of the younger generations, but the effect of the marginalization and centuries-old keeping at a distance that these people have suffered. In the meantime, the majority culture has not perceived the history of Sinti and Roma as an element of a common Copyright © 2024 by FrancoAngeli s.r.l., Milano, Italy. ISBN 9788835168393 63 Babbit’s paintings are the only tangible evidence (besides the documentation that sees them registered as Zigeuner – “gypsies”) of the presence of this population in the camp. Having a typical Sinti scarf, a colorful Roma skirt, would probably have meant talking about the Roma and Sinti genocide long before the 1980s. And this silence has consequences in today’s society, in which knowledge about the persecution and extermination of this population still struggles to reach the majority of people and, consequently, the processes of hatred towards them are slow to be deconstructed. A “silence imposed”32 by the “condition of failure to de-fascistize” post-war Italy, but also by a certain absence of practical references, such as objects, which were able to give voice to the memory of a forgotten people, who instead was the protagonist of important forms of resistance, both partisan and internal to the concentration and extermination camps33. The history of places becomes a useful training tool for direct participation in multicultural contexts. Bibliography Bauman, Zygmunt. Modernity and the Holocaust. Oxford: John Wiley and Sons, 1991. Bravi, Luca. Preface. In Nencioni, Chiara. A forza di essere vento. La persecuzione di rom e sinti nell’Italia fascista, Pisa: ETS, 2024. Cajzer, Elżbieta. Museum Collections. In Państwowe Muzeum Auschwitz-Birkenau (Ed.). Zachować autentyzm (To preserve authenticity). The Conservation of Museum Collections and Archival Materials, Auschwitz-Birkenau, Oświęcim: Auschwitz Birkenau State Museum, 2021. Cywiński, Piotr M. A. “introduction by the director of the Auschwitz Birkenau Museum”. In Państwowe Muzeum Auschwitz-Birkenau (Ed.). Zachować autentyzm (To preserve authenticity). The Conservation of Museum Collections and Archival Materials, Auschwitz-Birkenau, Oświęcim: Auschwitz Birkenau State Museum, 2021. D. Czech, Auschwitz Chronicle, 1939-1945, Holt, New York, 1990. 32 Bravi, Preface. 33 On 16 May 1944, the Sinti and Roma of the Zigeunerlager of Birkenau organized a real revolt against the guards, responsible for liquidating that specific sector of the camp. See the description of the events of May 16, 1944 in D. Czech, Auschwitz Chronicle, 1939-1945. Copyright © 2024 by FrancoAngeli s.r.l., Milano, Italy. ISBN 9788835168393 64 Feingold, Henry L. How Unique is the Holocaust?. In Grobman, Alex and Landes David. Genocide: Critical Issues of the Holocaust. Los Angeles: Simon Wiesenthal Centre, 1983, 399-400. Gozzini, Giovanni. La strada per Auschwitz. Documenti e interpretazioni sullo sterminio nazista. Milano: Bruno Mondadori, 2004. Hancock, Ian. The pariah Syndrome. An account of gypsy slavery and persecution. Ann Arbor: Karoma publisher, 1987. Kapralski, Sławomir, Maria Martyniak and Joanna Talewicz-Kwiatkowska. Voices of Memory. Roma in Auschwitz, Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum. Oświęcim: Auschwitz Birkenau State Museum, 2011. Lachendro, Jacek. Auschwitz after the liberation. Oświęcim: Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, 2018. Lennon, John J. and Malcolm Foley. Dark tourism. The attraction of death and disasters. New York: Continuum, 2000. Rubenstein, Richard L. The Cunning of History. New York: Harper, 1978. Satta, G. Patrimonio Culturale. Bologna: il Mulino, 2013. Stone, Philip R. “A Dark Tourism Spectrum: Towards a typology of death and macabre related tourist sites, attractions and exhibitions”. In Tourism: An Interdisciplinary International Journal 54 (2006), n. 2: 145-160. Wieviorka, Annette. L'Ère du témoin. Paris: Plon, 1998. Copyright © 2024 by FrancoAngeli s.r.l., Milano, Italy. ISBN 9788835168393 65 4. Representation of Roma persecution in school curriculum development in Europe by Ivana Bolognesi*, Maria Alfredo Moreira** and Luca Bravi*** 1. Representing Roma genocide in Europe1 In July 2020, the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe produced a Recommendation which asked all member states of UE to include the history of Roma in school curricula and teaching materials (DC 099/2020)2. In previous years, the European Union has proposed specific digital dissemination tools, including factsheets that tell the story of the persecution of Roma in different countries during Nazism3. The role of the European institutions has been fundamental in promoting remembrance in the Union through numerous recommendations that have been circulated since the 2000s. For a long time, several programmes, funded by the European Commission, have indicated the history of Roma and Sinti people as a central theme to develop training and educational actions. Awareness of Roma history is different for each country; for example in Italy, the history of the fascist concentration camps reserved for “gypsies” between 1940 and * Department of Education “Giovanna Maria Bertin”, University of Bologna. ** CIEd, Institute of Education, University of Minho. *** Department of Education, Languages, Interculture, Literatures and Psychology (FORLILPSI), University of Florence. 1 Luca Bravi is author of the first section of the article (paragraph 1); Ivana Bolognesi is author of section 2 (paragraphs 2 - 2.1; 2.2); Maria Alfredo Moreira is author of Section 3 (paragraph 3 - 3.1; 3.2). 2https://search.coe.int/directorate_of_communications#{%22CoEIdentifier%22:[%2209000016809ee553%22],%22sort%22:[%22CoEValidationDate%20Descending%22]} (Last access: August, 2024). 3 https://www.coe.int/en/web/roma-and-travellers/roma-history-factsheets; https://www.coe.int/en/web/roma-genocide (Last access: August 2024). Copyright © 2024 by FrancoAngeli s.r.l., Milano, Italy. ISBN 9788835168393 66 1943 and the subsequent deportation until 1945 are often unknown4. In the Czech Republic, the memorial commemorating the victims of the Lety ù Pisku5 concentration camp (reserved for the persecution of Roma people who were deported and exterminated in Auschwitz) was inaugurated on May 12, 2024. However, for decades, in the same area where the lager stood, the presence of a large pig farm was permitted and only the commitment of survivors, scholars and intellectuals allowed the memorial to be built in Bohemia. The “National Inclusion Strategies for Roma and Sinti”6 elaborated by each European State often recognize the importance of remembering the persecution of Roma for building active citizenship and the “Europe Strategic Action Plan for Roma and Traveller Inclusion (2020-2025)” has focused on the role of the knowledge of history as an element for deconstructing stereotypes7. A significant part of the materials on Roma history has also been produced by the main Sinti and Roma associations present in Europe who are promoting both the knowledge in their own community and its diffusion as public memory policies8. From the point of view of school curricula, it’s useful to consider the investigation on some specific European countries9: Italy, Poland and Portugal (chosen because they are the countries of the partners of TRACER - they had different involvement in the Second World War and they are different regarding the presence and condition of inclusion of Roma and Sinti on their territory nowadays); Germany (it can provide an interesting comparison in relation to the memory policies that it has built since the post war period10) and France (it represents 4 https://www.porrajmos.it/it/story/04-la-persecuzione-in-italia-1922-1943/ (Last access: August 2024). 5 Polanski, Black silence. 6 https://democracyinstitute.ceu.edu/projects/roma-civil-monitor-2021-2025 (Last access: August 2024). 7 https://edoc.coe.int/en/roma-and-travellers/8508-council-of-europe-strategic-actionplan-for-roma-and-traveller-inclusion-2020-2025.html (Last access: August 2024). 8 https://dokuzentrum.sintiundroma.de/publikationen/; http://www.stowarzyszenie.romowie.net/Swiadectwa-190.html; https://www.porrajmos.it/it (Last access: August 2024). 9 The data are those catalogued by the European Commission in the virtual library https://www.coe.int/en/web/roma-genocide/virtual-library (Last access: August 2024). 10 Wüstenberg, Civil Society and Memory in Postwar Germany. Copyright © 2024 by FrancoAngeli s.r.l., Milano, Italy. ISBN 9788835168393 67 one Western European nation that was occupied and controlled by Nazism). In the list below, for each country it is indicated: - whether the Roma genocide has been officially recognized; - whether the extermination of Roma is a specific part of the national school curriculum; - whether there are ordinary training processes on the extermination of Roma. Italy - There is no official acknowledgment of the Roma Genocide in Italy. The “Law 20 July 2000, no. 211, that institutes the Day of Remembrance” for those who have been deported in the concentration camps during the Second World War, doesn’t specifically mention the Roma. - In every school level curriculum, the Holocaust and the Genocide of the Jews is included, but not specifically the Roma Genocide. School textbooks often do not mention the Roma genocide or include it in a generic way in the events of the Second World War. - State institutions, research centers, foundations, non-governmental associations offer training seminars on the Roma genocide, but this action is not yet precisely defined in the training curricula. The National Strategy of Roma and Sinti is a fundamental reference to promote activities in this cultural context. Poland - In 2011, the Parliament of Poland declared 2nd August as the official Roma and Sinti Genocide Remembrance Day. - Activities to learn about the Roma genocide are generally part of Holocaust studies and are not generally included in school textbooks but in scientific books edited by foundations, associations and research centers; - Some important training activities about the Roma genocide are planned by the Association «Romów w Polsce» (officially recognized since 2023 as a representative of the Roma community in Poland) in collaboration with Centre for Educational Development, the Jewish Historical Institute, the Institute of National Remembrance, universities, and the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum. Copyright © 2024 by FrancoAngeli s.r.l., Milano, Italy. ISBN 9788835168393 68 Portugal - Portugal has not officially recognised the Roma Genocide through law. - The study of the Holocaust is compulsory in schools and it is part of the National History curriculum. It is taught at the third level of elementary education and in secondary school. All Portuguese students in the ninth grade (ages 13 to 14) study the Holocaust, but there is no specific indication on the study of the Roma genocide, except for the reference to a book on Roma in the Holocaust, as an example of bibliography that can be used in secondary education. - State institutions, research centers, foundations, non-governmental associations offer training seminars on the Roma genocide, but this action is not yet precisely defined in the training curricula. Germany - The racial extermination of the Roma and Sinti was officially recognized in 1980. - The teaching of the Holocaust includes remembrance of all the victims of the National Socialists’ regime. Special reference is made to persecution and Roma Genocide in the curricula of the Länder of Baden-Württemberg (secondary school: “Gymnasium”), Hamburg (secondary school: “Gymnasium”, “Hauptschule” and “Realschule”), Hessen, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern (lower secondary school and “Gymnasium”, “Hauptschule” and “Realschule”) and Rheinland-Pfalz (lower and upper secondary school: “Gymnasium”, “Hauptschule”, “Realschule”). Since the curricula of the Länder are implemented, the description of the Roma Genocide can be found in the textbooks within the topic of Holocaust. - The Education Department of the “Dokumentationsund Kulturzentrum Sinti und Roma”, which was established in January 2001, focuses on gathering information on public and private education services, designing seminars for teachers and preparing teaching materials dealing with the history of the persecution of the Roma and Sinti minority during the National Socialist era and with civil rights activities in the Federal Republic of Germany. The department also analyses standard schoolbooks and makes recommendations. For each country, it is indicated whether the extermination of the Roma has been officially recognised, whether specific Copyright © 2024 by FrancoAngeli s.r.l., Milano, Italy. ISBN 9788835168393 69 policies exist in school curricula and whether ordinary training experiences exist: France - Roma genocide is not officially recognized. In October 2010, a law proposal, (Proposition de loi n°273), was presented to the National Assembly stating the official recognition of the Roma Genocide and setting the official commemoration of this genocide on the 5th April. In 2013, French President François Hollande acknowledged the State responsibility in the internment of Roma from 1940 to 1946 during a tribute ceremony in Montreuil-Bellay, one of the 31 camps managed by the Vichy regime. - The Holocaust studies are a general part of the French school curriculum. In 2008, the Ministry of Education issued an official bulletin directed at all educational authorities and enforcing the teaching of the Shoah and Roma victims of the Genocide. Yet, in the history teaching syllabi, Roma are referred to as “Tziganes” (“Gypsies”) and not “Roma”. The study of the extermination / Genocide of the Roma (and the Jews) is included in study of the Second World War. It is carried out at three levels of schooling: Primary “extension course”- “extermination of the Jews and Roma: a crime against Humanity”; lower secondary, third class: “Theme 3: Second World War, a war of annihilation (…) This is the context in which the Genocide of Jews and Roma was perpetrated in Europe.”; upper secondary, first class: Second World War, Genocide of the Jews and Roma – common strand of European history and memory. - The question of the Roma Genocide is only sketchily addressed in teachers’ basic training. According to the volume The Representation of Roma in European Curricula and Textbooks11, which carried out an analysis of references to Roma and Sinti in textbooks in twenty different countries, some elements can be highlighted on history textbooks for secondary schools: in countries where the official recognition of the genocide of Roma and Sinti has taken place (Germany in particular), attention to the dissemination of history and the deconstruction of stereotypes is more 11 Spielhaus, The Representation of Roma in European Curricula and Textbooks. Copyright © 2024 by FrancoAngeli s.r.l., Milano, Italy. ISBN 9788835168393 70 widespread and generalized. In Germany, the Central Council of German Sinti and Roma12 was founded in February 1982 and its role was important for advocacy actions and for the recognition of Roma and Sinti as a national minority. In countries where there has not been specific recognition, activism is less widespread, and the knowledge of their genocide is less known. In Italy and France, books that generically name Sinti and Roma among the victims in the extermination camps always indicate them as “gypsies”, without reflecting on the word “gypsies” as a stereotype. The same volume analyses textbooks of other school subjects and in the same countries, even when dealing with books on civic education or geography, the most used term by authors remains “gypsies”. In Poland, Roma activism is growing thanks to their association recognized by public institutions; Roma genocide is officially recognized. The derogatory use of the word “gypsies” is present in 2 out of 15 books analyzed by the European study. Deconstructing stereotypes is not just about using the right words (in 1981, in the town of Oświęcim - next to the Auschwitz State Museum - a pogrom took place against Roma families who were made scapegoats for the Polish economic crisis of that period), but a language that eliminates “wrong” words demonstrates a process of reflection on prejudice. In both Germany and Poland, the direct civic engagement of Sinti and Roma in the deconstruction of stereotypes is essential. The word “Zigeuner” (Gypsy) is totally absent in German history textbooks for the secondary school, or it is used specifically to indicate the category that the Nazis used in the concentration camps. Germany is also the country with the lowest percentage of hatred towards Roma and Sinti (37%); in France, it is 44%, in Italy 83%, in Poland 55%13, there is no data for Portugal; in the Pew Research study, the Iberian Peninsula is represented by Spain, which reports a percentage of 40%. Antigypsyism in Portugal is discussed in a recent article by sociologist Olga Magano and Tânia D’Oliveira14 (about Roma in Portugal see the volume Roma 12 https://zentralrat.sintiundroma.de/en/central-council/who-we-are/ (Last access: August 2024). 13 Minority groups in Europe, Pew Research Center 2019: https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2019/10/14/minority-groups/ (Last access: August 2024). 14 Magano, D’Oliveira, Antigypsyism in Portugal. Copyright © 2024 by FrancoAngeli s.r.l., Milano, Italy. ISBN 9788835168393 71 in ten European countries15, published by FRA – European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights). The following analyses by Ivana Bolognesi (Italy) and Maria Alfredo Moreira (Portugal) on textbooks allow us to verify the data proposed by the European volume. They demonstrate how textbooks can risk transmitting fake information: processes of miscommunication can reinforce prejudices in public opinion, especially when the transmission of incorrect knowledge occurs in educational contexts such as school. 2. Italy: the representation of the extermination of the Roma communities in history textbooks for upper secondary school What is the representation of the Roma communities in textbooks for upper secondary school? Starting from this question, a preliminary investigation was carried out on a small number of history texts for this school level with the main aim of understanding whether and how these communities are remembered on the theme of the Second World War, a central theme of the TRACER project. The texts considered were eleven, all of them history texts for the third grade of secondary school, published in the time period 2009 - 202316. The historical period considered goes from the beginning of the twentieth century to the contemporary age: therefore, they describe the 15 European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights (Ed.), Roma in ten European countries. 16 The texts consulted are as follows: Calvani, Finestre sulla storia dell’età della globalizzazione; De Vecchi and Giovannetti, Storia in corso. Civiltà, tecniche, industria; Variuos authors (not specified) Capire la storia. Il Novecento e la globalizzaizone; Borgognonea and Carpanetto, L’idea della storia. Il Novecento e il Duemila; Cioffi and Amerini, Storia. Imparo con metodo. Il Novecento e il mondo attuale; Paolucci, Signorini and Marisaldi, Di tempo in tempo. L’età contemporanea; Necci, Jacomuzzi and Montanaro, Nel grande gioco. Storie idee persone; Ardone and Pianura, Voci della storia. Il Novecento e il mondo attuale; Biggio, La Storia a colori. Dal Novecento ai giorni nostri; Greppi and Persico, La storia è presente. Dal Novecento a oggi. Copyright © 2024 by FrancoAngeli s.r.l., Milano, Italy. ISBN 9788835168393 72 causes that led to the First and Second World Wars and the social, economic and political consequences that ensued. The Roma people appear in connection with anti-Semitism and racial discrimination, particularly when minorities deported to concentration camps in Germany are listed. The criteria identified for the analysis of the texts were the following: terms used to define the Roma people; description and insights into the Porrajmos. 2.1 Terms: Roma, Sinti, Gypsies and Nomads As already pointed out, all the texts considered include references to the extermination of this people, even if they are defined using different terms. Some texts, five in total, use words such as Roma and Sinti: definitions considered appropriate by the communities themselves because they respect their own linguistic and cultural roots. However, they also continue to use the term gypsies as synonyms. The other six texts use the definitions nomads and/or gypsies. We know that these two terms carry with them political choices (nomads) and historical aspects (gypsies) often derived from various forms of discrimination. These are terms that have been abandoned over time because they are characterised by semantic ambiguity: zingari has always been used in a derogatory sense, used by the native populations to negatively connote these groups; while nomads refers to a condition of wandering and vagabondage that, if it has characterised the lifestyle of these groups, today no longer distinguishes the majority of these communities present in Italian and partly European territory. Even today people prefer to use the term nomad rather than gypsy, which is considered more derogatory, but both are neither correct, nor are they in line with the historical-cultural identity of these communities. Copyright © 2024 by FrancoAngeli s.r.l., Milano, Italy. ISBN 9788835168393 79 gypsies." (p. 104); "During the Holocaust, other ethnic groups, like the gypsy, were also victims of the Nazi hatred." (p. 136, bold by the authors) Textbook 2: "«Holocaust» or «Shoah» have been the most common expressions to name the systematic extermination of the jews, firstly, but also of communists, homosexuals, gypsies, physically and mentally disabled, psychiatric patients, Soviet war prisioners, Polish and Russian political activists, Jeovah witnesses, some catholic and protestant clergyman, and common criminals. They were all executed in the extermination camps, like Auschwitz-Birkenau, Belzec, Treblinka, Sobibor, Majdanek and Chelmno, purposefully builts for this dark purpose." (p. 140) Textbook 3: "Nazism presented itself as racist and antissemitic. The regime implemented a policy of mass extermination of their political opponents, Jews and minorities (like gypsies, homosexuals, physical and mentally disabled)" (p. 87, bold by the authors) Textbook 4: "The Germans would have the right to dominate the «sub-human» and protect themselves against those they perceived as able to «contaminate» the German purity, like Jews and gypsies, but also people with mental illnesses or even political opponents, like the communists." (p. 81) Textbook 5: "Beyond Jews, all those who opposed the regime or regarded as inferior, as disabled people, gypsies, homosexuals, were taken to Nazi concentration or to extermination camps." (p. 91); "The nazis created more than six dozens of concentration and extermination camps, to where they sent all those who were regarded as a menace to the purity of the Aryan race: Slavic people, gypsies, homosexuals, disabled people and, specifically, jews." (p. 117) The descriptions of the Roma genocide go from ‘merely’ being the subject of racism and persecution (Textbook 4), to being the object of systematic extermination, like other minorities (in the remaining textbooks). The importance of this genocide is undermined by the use of brackets (Textbooks 1 and 3), that shows how their fate was a by-product of minor importance when compared to the Shoah. There are no testimonials or historical documents specifically on the Roma (or on any other minority, beyond the Jewish people). Only one of the Copyright © 2024 by FrancoAngeli s.r.l., Milano, Italy. ISBN 9788835168393 80 textbooks explicitly represents the Roma, by including a photograph of a Roma woman being questioned by Nazi inspectors (Textbook 3). Regarding the methodological approach, in line with the national curriculum guidelines (see Table 1), students are required to analyse historical documents, posters, and photos, researching events (like the Crystal Nacht) and life histories (of Jewish people), reflecting on antiracist practices, writing texts on living in those times (including in Auschwitz), on the discrimination of minorities in present times (Rohingya, Uigures, LGBTI+), or on producing news articles, posters and even a mural. There are also suggestions on watching films on the Holocaust, reading books (most mentioned is the Diary of Anne Frank), and visiting museums in Portugal (like the Holocaust Museum in Oporto) or online Holocaust museums. Besides raising an awareness of the historical events connected to the Holocaust, seeking to advance explanations and interpretations on how and why they were promoted by the Nazi Regime, 3 textbooks explicitly connect past events with present situations, proposing activities that engage students in critical reflection and some form of activism, seeking to prevent a repetition of this dark time. Conclusion The presence of stereotypes towards Roma causes a devaluation of the memory of their genocide: in the past, at least until the 1980s, the non-recognition of the persecution of Roma as racial extermination (similar to the Shoah) was often justified by declaring that the “gypsies” had been deported because “they represent a group of asocial people”. The stereotype still active in the present was connected to the racist concepts of the past and described the extermination of the Roma as an acceptable practice for public safety. This type of approach downgrades the importance of history and interprets the events of the past by preserving stereotypes in the present. For the TRACER project, it is paramount to develop a correct knowledge of the history of minorities as a necessary tool for building democracy and full citizenship. To that end, an analysis of the most important regulatory pedagogical tools, as textbooks are, is a key task to develop training and educational actions more adjusted to the several contexts in which they Copyright © 2024 by FrancoAngeli s.r.l., Milano, Italy. ISBN 9788835168393 81 take place. To conclude, we might add that every minority involved in these tragic events demands due recognition, and that this recognition arises from the awareness of each individual, from the formation of their own thought made up of knowledge and reflection, which can become a barrier to the propaganda of totalitarian regimes, or of the unbridled consumerism to which we are all subjected to today. Bibliography Ardone, Viola and Giuliana Pianura. Voci della storia. Il Novecento e il mondo attuale. Messina-Firenze: G. D’Anna, 2023. Biggio, Barbara. La Storia a colori. Dal Novecento ai giorni nostri. Trento: Erickson -Fabbri, 2023. Borgognone, Giovanni and Dino Carpanetto. L’idea della storia. Il Novecento e il Duemila. Milano-Torino: Pearson, 2017. Calvani, Vittoria. Finestre sulla storia dell’età della globalizzazione. Milano: Mondadori, 2009. Cazzaniga, Andrea. La Storia che si vede. Il Novecento e il mondo di oggi. Trento: Erickson – Fabbri Editori, 2022. Cioffi, Fabio and Franco Amerini. Storia. Imparo con metodo. Il Novecento e il mondo attuale. Trento: Erickson – Rizzoli, 2020. De Vecchi, Giorgio and Giorgio Giovannetti. Storia in corso. Civiltà, tecniche, industria. Milano-Torino: Pearson, 2012. European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights - FRA (ed.). Roma in ten European countries. Roma Servey 2021, Luxembourg: Publications Office of the European Union, 2022. Fings, Karola, Sinti e Rom. Storia di una minoranza. Bologna: il Mulino, 2018. Greppi, Carlo and Roberto Persico. La storia è presente. Dal Novecento a oggi. Milano: Garzanti Scuola, 2023. Magano, Olga and Tânia D’Oliveira, “Antigypsyism in Portugal: Expressions of Hate and Racism in Social Networks”. In Social Science 12 (September 2023), n. 511: 2-13. https://doi.org/10.3390/socsci12090511. Necci, Alessandra, Ulisse Jacomuzzi and Giorgio Montanaro. Nel grande gioco. Storie idee persone. Torino: SEI, 2023 Paolucci, Silvio, Giuseppina Signorini and Luciano Marisaldi. Di tempo in tempo. L’età contemporanea. Bologna: Zanichelli, 2022. Polanski, Paul. Black silence. The Lety survivors speak. Prague-New York: 1998. European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights (ed.). Roma in ten European countries. European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights, 2023. Spielhaus, Riem, Simona Szakács-Behling, Aurora Ailincai, Victoria Hopson and Marko Pecak. The Representation of Roma in European Curricula and Copyright © 2024 by FrancoAngeli s.r.l., Milano, Italy. ISBN 9788835168393 82 Textbooks, Strasbourg: Leibniz Institute for Educational Media and Georg-Eckert-Institute and Council of Europe, 2020. Various authors (not specified). Capire la storia. Il Novecento e la globalizzazione. Milano-Torino: Pearson, 2012. Wüstenberg, Jenny. Civil Society and Memory in Postwar Germany. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Copyright © 2024 by FrancoAngeli s.r.l., Milano, Italy. ISBN 9788835168393 Second Part Transforming the present through history and memory Copyright © 2024 by FrancoAngeli s.r.l., Milano, Italy. ISBN 9788835168393 Copyright © 2024 by FrancoAngeli s.r.l., Milano, Italy. ISBN 9788835168393 85 5. Transforming and training through actionresearch on the history of Sinti and Roma by Maria José Casa-Nova* and Daniela Silva* Introduction We begin this chapter with some of the questions that Jack Whitehead posed in the introduction to his book "Living Theory research as a way of life": «As you have worked on developing practice or knowledge as a contribution to a field or enterprise, have you ever thought ‘What’s the point’? For fame or fortune? Or, given that you fulfill your contractual obligations (…), is there something in addition that is needed to understand why, what and how you do what you do and hold yourself to account to? A something that enables you to believe your life and work are not only satisfying and productive, but also worthwhile?»1. When we read it, we couldn't help but think of one of us (Maria José Casa-Nova) many years ago, when we began our research path precisely in a participatory action research project, within a team of mostly senior researchers working together with teachers from lower secondary schools in Portugal. During this 4-year project, we gradually gained awareness that this type of research, involving the participation of practitioners in a relationship that was intended to be equal, was one of the forms of research with which we most identified and that would come to be, alongside Ethnography, the way of carrying out research throughout a 28-year university career. And this * CIEd, Institute of Education, University of Minho. 1 Whitehead, Living theory research as a way of life, 1. Copyright © 2024 by FrancoAngeli s.r.l., Milano, Italy. ISBN 9788835168393 86 identification, shared by the other author of this chapter (Daniela Silva), is closely linked to the answer to the question that Jack Whitehead asked (“What’s the point”?): trying to make research worthwhile for its contribution to the transformation of personal and social life. Ours and that of other people with whom we carry out (we do together) participatory action research. It was also the same principle that was at the genesis of the TRACER project and espoused by the international team that constitutes it. This chapter briefly reflects on the participatory action research that transformed this project into reality, articulating with some of its practices and results. 1. Why participatory action research? So, “why participatory action research in the TRACER project?” Because it is a research method that seeks to uncover unfair and oppressive realities, working with people who are socially deprived of the different types of power that confer social prestige (namely economic power, cultural power, institutional and symbolic power) and that are negatively perceived by global society and which, consciously or unconsciously, places these people on the periphery, as is the case with most Roma people. Because it is a method «with effective participation of the population in the process of research and knowledge production, fundamentally conceived as a process of collective education»2. Because as Kemmis, McTaggart and Nixon so well mentioned, People involved in critical action research aim to change their world collectively, by thinking about it differently, acting differently, and relating to one another differently – by constructing other practice architectures to enable and constrain their practice in ways that are more rational (in the sense of reasonable), more productive, and more just and inclusive3. And because the aim of the project was to unveil the unknown (Roma Holocaust/Samudaripen) through research (bibliographic, 2 Haguette, Metodologias Qualitativas Na Sociologia, 109. 3 Kemmis, McTaggart and Nixon, The Action Research Planner. Doing Critical Participatory Action Reseach,17. Copyright © 2024 by FrancoAngeli s.r.l., Milano, Italy. ISBN 9788835168393 87 graphic, literary), by young Roma and non-Roma, transforming this acquired knowledge into their own training and into the training of other young Roma and non-Roma in the schools and organizations taught by the young people who were part of the project. But also using the arts (painting, graffiti, cinema, theater) as a form of expression and transformation. This is what the TRACER project sought to build over its two and a half years. Therefore, being involved in a participatory action research process as in the TRACER project included commitment (to the project and all the participants), collaboration (among team members), respect (for people, context and history), construction of transformation (one's own and that of others), where this type of research proves to be the most appropriate in “culturally complex societies”4 such as the ones we live in. But an important dimension for reflection and already discussed by other authors (namely Brown5), is related to the degree of participation of all stakeholders in all phases of the process: does more or less participation in decision-making processes, more or less participation in some project activities than others, more or less participation in data analysis make the participatory action research method “less” participatory action research? Participatory action research of an emancipatory nature is an extremely valuable method at the service of exercising democratic citizenship (awareness, dialogicity and participation). However, in all its dimensions (or in its “pure” theoretical conception – action research in its “strong version”, as Esteves said6), it is difficult to implement as it implies constant commitment and responsible practices, power sharing and decision-making on equal terms in all phases of the project, on a regularity that the personal life of each participant, their experiences, life history, perceptions and understanding of different social phenomena do not allow. In this sense, we agree with Brown7 when she points out that «depending on the design participatory research needs to be seen as a 4 Balakrishnan and Claiborne, Participatory action research in culturally complex societies. 5 Brown, Scope and continuum of participatory research. 6 Esteves, A Investigação-Acção. 7 Brown, Scope and continuum of participatory research, 2. Copyright © 2024 by FrancoAngeli s.r.l., Milano, Italy. ISBN 9788835168393 88 continuum from being minimally participatory to being fully egalitarian, whereby realistically most participatory research designs are situated somewhere in between the two». This is what happened during the development of this project, with young Roma and non-Roma becoming research beginners, giving “wings” to creativity and imagination, in a project that intended to be transformative based on the arts, with differentiated participation in the different phases of the project. 2. Unveiling the unknown: knowledge, participation and empowerment If this project intended to work on the memory and historical awareness of the Holocaust/Samaduripen Roma with a view to knowledge and dissemination, aiming at the transformation of mentalities and practices, the involvement and participation of young Roma and nonRoma in the different phases of the project was fundamental, although with different degrees of participation. In this second part of this chapter, we intend the unveiling of the unknown and to present a set of activities developed by the group of young leaders from the Portuguese team, within the scope of the TRACER project and where the action-research method took place. The action-research activities that we chose for this chapter are: a) research and bibliographical reading on the Roma Holocaust/Samudaripen, (knowledge of their own history) by young Roma and non-Roma and conducting interviews with Roma people with memories of armed conflicts or experience of racism and lower secondary school history teachers; b) the reflections made by the group of Portuguese young leaders who visited the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum, former German Nazi concentration and extermination camp in Poland; c) the training of young leaders on the Roma Holocaust/Samudaripen, who accompanied the entire development of the project and d) training of teenagers attending the 7th and 9th grade of schooling, carried out by young Roma and non-Roma who were part of the TRACER team. Copyright © 2024 by FrancoAngeli s.r.l., Milano, Italy. ISBN 9788835168393 95 Pic. 2 - Picture drawn by students about the suffering in the Holocaust The students highlighted their horror at what happened and said they would act daily to prevent events like this. At the end of the training, the students had the opportunity to express what they felt and what they learned during the training. From what they wrote and said, what became most evident was the respect for human beings, for each other’s culture and for Human Rights: «Many people were tortured, mistreated and greatly despised just because they were of different origins, ethnicities and religions than Hitler» (testimony of one of the students); «We learned how much everyone who participated in the Holocaust suffered, that Roma are not what they say» (testimony of one of the students); «Respect people regardless of their culture or community» (testimony of one of the students), «I learned that the Roma community was very misunderstood» (testimony of one of the students); «I learned that we should value other cultures more and always understand our history» (testimony of one of the students). They also highlighted the value of collaboration and acceptance of difference, as they write: «It portrays something very sad that should be talked about in all schools and make sure that this never happens again» (testimony of one of the students); «I learned to be grateful for today being able to express myself without being judged» (testimony of one of the students); «Many people were mistreated […] when what they wanted was peace, freedom and equality» (testimony of one of the students); «We learned how cruel they were out of pure prejudice» (testimony of one of the students); «I learned to distinguish right from wrong» (testimony of one of the students), «I learned not to support the Holocaust»; «Not to accept the Holocaust» (testimony of one of the students). The use of the verb “to learn” associated with the distinction between good and evil and awareness of human rights is recurrent in the reflections. Copyright © 2024 by FrancoAngeli s.r.l., Milano, Italy. ISBN 9788835168393 96 The use of art was essential for participants to express their feelings about the Holocaust, because «Through their powers for expression, evocation and illumination11 the arts lend themselves towards exploring experiences and expressing feelings and emotions or other concepts that would be otherwise difficult to verbalize»12. The experience and participation of young leaders throughout the project in activities to raise awareness of the historical Roma Holocaust/Samudaripen led to a committed process of changing the historical consciousness of the young participants, and this research project strengthened this dialectic of research – reflection – action not only among the young leaders but also among the students in the training. This dialectic was expressed in the form of art, through drawings, paintings and sculptures by the students, resulting in a process of denouncing a society that disrespects Human Rights by giving visibility to the historical memory of the Roma Holocaust/Samudaripen. 2.3.3 Technical artistic workshop for a mural painting To finalize the research/training project - action in schools, the Portuguese team decided to paint a mural on the wall of a lower secondary school in Braga because we consider that a school is the best place to learn about Human Rights, as is the case with the Holocaust. It took place after 12 hours of training in a classroom with three 7th year classes and involving students from the same classes. A plastic artist13, known in the city of Braga for having carried out several artistic interventions in the city, was invited to provide this training that gave rise to the mural (Pictures 3 and 4). Continuing the work that the groups had carried out in the classroom, young people's awareness was at its highest, as well as their motivation. During the training, students expressed their thoughts and feelings about human rights violations and the importance of preventing these violations through their daily actions, having learned to express themselves through the arts and becoming aware of their transformative power. 11 Barone and Eisner, Arts based research. 12 Brown, Scope and continuum of participatory research. 13 Painter Alexandre Pinheiro, artistic name: Bekam. Copyright © 2024 by FrancoAngeli s.r.l., Milano, Italy. ISBN 9788835168393 97 Pic. 3 and 4 - Young people painted the mural and the exhibition in Braga The group included twenty young people (11 girls and 9 boys) from 9 countries (Portugal, Brazil, Angola, Iraq, Morocco, Syria, Andorra, Canada, and Luxembourg). This activity took place in May 2024. At the beginning of June, an exhibition of the work done by the participants was inaugurated at the school, with their families and other members of the community being invited. In Portugal, at a middle school in Figueira da Foz, a mural was also painted to raise awareness of the Roma Holocaust/Samudaripen in the community (Pictures 5 and 6). Pic. 5 and 6 - The mural in Figueira da Foz Copyright © 2024 by FrancoAngeli s.r.l., Milano, Italy. ISBN 9788835168393 98 Final considerations History is better understood with images and documents that make visible the people who are part of this History. Who produced it. History is learned and apprehended actively by reading, writing and telling others. The TRACER project sought to do this. Knowledge and awareness of the Roma Holocaust/Samudaripen; awareness of the importance of all human beings being treated equally and humanely; the awareness that all human beings are worth the same and that everyone has the capacity and possibility to build their future, continuing to fulfill their dreams, are results that are part of TRACER's “portfolio”: more empowered young Roma, aware of their rights and capabilities, societies more informed about the Holocaust/Samudaripen and Roma culture, as well as their belonging to European culture are some results of the project. Of the project results, which will never truly be known in all its dimensions because individual and collective transformation processes take place in the medium and long term, those that were possible to observe and hear in the present and which this book seeks to highlight, showed that the project was worth it. And one of the tangible results of the training with young Roma in one of the lower secondary schools was the continuity of the school path of six of the young people who decided to go to the 10th grade before the project they had decided to leave school at the end of the 9th grade. This “conscientization” about the role of education in the society, in which we work with these students, is a remarkable and unforgettable result of the project. We remember Paulo Freire’s words: «Education doesn’t transform the world. Education change people. People transform the world»14 and it is transformative projects as TRACER that help to build a more democratic and humane society. 14 Freire, Educação e mudança. Copyright © 2024 by FrancoAngeli s.r.l., Milano, Italy. ISBN 9788835168393 99 Bibliography Balakrishnan, Vishalache and Lise Claiborne. Participatory action research in culturally complex societies: opportunities and challenges, Educational Action Research, 25:2, 185-202,2017 DOI: 10.1080/09650792.2016.1206480. Bourdieu, Pierre and Jean Claud Passeron. A Reprodução. Elementos para uma teoria do sistema de ensino. s/d: Editora Vega. Barone, Tom and Elliot W. Eisner. Arts based research. New York: Sage, 2011. Brown, Nicole. “Scope and continuum of participatory research”. In International Journal of Research & Method in Education 2021, DOI: 10.1080/1743727X.2021.1902980. Casa-Nova, Maria José, Maria Alfredo Moreira, M. A., Silva, D. V., Rodrigues, J., & Ribeiro, L. RISE – Roma Inclusive School Experience. A experiência portuguesa/ The portuguese experience. Lisboa: Alto Comissariado para as Migrações-OBCig, 2020a: https://hdl.handle.net/1822/85365. Casa-Nova, Maria José, Maria Alfredo Moreira and Maria Teresa Tagliaventi (eds.). School education, minorities and life opportunities: Roma inclusive school experiences. V. N. Famalicao Húmus, 2020b: https://hdl.handle.net/1822/85373 Casa-Nova, Maria José. Minorias e escolaridade. In Casa-Nova Maria José and Paula Palmeira (Coord.). Minorias. Ministério do Trabalho e da Solidariedade Social, 2008. Casa-Nova, Maria José. Etnicidade, género e escolaridade. Lisboa: IIE, 2002. Esteves, António Joaquim. A Investigação-Acção. In Augusto Santo Silva and José. Madureira Pinto (Orgs.). Metodologia das Ciências Sociais. Porto: Afrontamento 1986: 251-278. Freire, Paulo. Conscientização: teoria e prática da libertação: uma introdução ao pensamento de Paulo Freire. São Paulo: Cortez & Moraes, 1979a. Freire, Paulo. Educação e mudança. Rio de Janeiro: Paz e Terra, 1979b. Haguette, Teresa Maria Frota. Metodologias Qualitativas Na Sociologia. Petrópolis: Editora Vozes, 2010. Kemmis, Stephen; Robin McTaggart and Rhonda Nixon. The Action Research Planner. Doing Critical Participatory Action Reseach. New York: Springer, 2014. Whitehead, Jack. Living theory research as a way of life. Brown Dog Books, 2018. Copyright © 2024 by FrancoAngeli s.r.l., Milano, Italy. ISBN 9788835168393 100 6. Knowing the history in the educational context by Luca Bravi* 1. The role of history in educational processes The traces that the young participants in the TRACER project left inside the Auschwitz State Museum, visited in May 2023, ideally mark the path for a reflection on the relationship between knowledge of history and the methodological-formative aspect, to build memory processes. What purpose can history serve, especially when dealing with the recovery of the events of a minority such as the Roma and Sinti? Among the tools used to tell the story, the TRACER project has assigned a fundamental role to the visit to Auschwitz, where even Roma and Sinti, under the label of "gypsies", were physically eliminated, because they were considered inferior by race. In this contribution, the analysis will focus on the role of places of memory in knowing history, in particular Auschwitz, to reflect on the theoretical and methodological level implemented by the European project. The mediation of places of memory in educational processes is generally considered useful, but according to which theoretical references? Short-term and long-term objectives are fundamental aspects to consider in the construction of an educational process and it is probably at this level that the most frequent misunderstandings occur. The short-term objective of an educational process that starts from the events of Auschwitz can never be the generic construction of memory, but always historicization, that means knowledge of the specific history of the initial, intermediate and final process that Auschwitz represented. Knowing history corresponds to historicizing events. Historicizing Auschwitz means expanding as much as possible historical Copyright © 2024 by FrancoAngeli s.r.l., Milano, Italy. ISBN 9788835168393 101 knowledge about events happened in that area from 1940, when Auschwitz I was opened as a base camp, until 27 January 1945, when the camp was liberated by the Red Army, after it had expanded to Auschwitz-Birkenau, Auschwitz-Monowitz and its many subcamps1. From this point of view, the history of Roma and Sinti must connect to the history of other categories that were deported to the extermination camp. This approach opens a range of innumerable knowledge that the trainer must consider about the time available, the experiences that he wants to connect to it, the age of the people he is addressing, the specificity of the history of the different categories of deportees who were imprisoned in Auschwitz, the personal stories of the participants in the training. Historical knowledge always needs a specifically structured path to be learned and tools that are suitable for generating interest. Historicization of this educational process is the short-term objective, but the long-term objective can be identified in the construction of an “active memory”2, understood as the ability to transform the activity of approaching history into daily actions turned to peace, democracy and equal relationship between communities and individuals. It doesn’t correspond to a series of generic and theoretical intentions: historicization of Auschwitz have to be used as a specific pedagogical tool: the theorization of ethical concepts represents a phase that always follows the historicization of past events, because historical knowledges constitute the necessary basis for producing theoretical reflections. 2. Crossing Auschwitz In the TRACER project, Auschwitz represented a “milestone”, but it is necessary to avoid its crystallization. The history of Auschwitz can represent an element of activation for an educational process, in consideration of its symbolic impact on a global level: nowadays, * Department of Education, Languages, Interculture, Literatures and Psychology (FORLILPSI), University of Florence. 1 State Museum of Auschwitz-Birkenau, Auschwitz studies. 2 Bravi, Percorsi storico-educativi della memoria europea. Copyright © 2024 by FrancoAngeli s.r.l., Milano, Italy. ISBN 9788835168393 102 naming Auschwitz in a public communication refers immediately to the entire story of persecution, deportation and extermination, but from a historical point of view, it is important to be aware that Auschwitz is the final phase of a process that produced the extermination and elimination of lives reduced to "pieces" to be eliminated; Auschwitz does not even represent the end of deportations, because its liberation on 27 January 1945, anticipated by almost four months the last liberation of Mauthausen concentration camp (5 May 1945) and its satellite camps, in the days immediately following. Auschwitz can be placed at the centre of an educational process that has active memory as its long-term objective, but it provided that Auschwitz isn’t a dogmatic symbol of evil. In Modernity and the Holocaust3, Zygmunt Bauman defines it as a concrete representation of the “great factory of death” that was activated with the aim of eliminating the lives defined as inferior: some of specific Auschwitz elements have continued to characterise post-Auschwitz modernity: - technology, which has permitted innovation: it was the ability to build large gas chambers and an industrial system for the disposal of bodies); - bureaucracy (the capillary division of tasks: it was the possibility of removing direct responsibility for the deaths in the gas chambers from each of the subjects involved; - «culture of the gardener», that Bauman defines the action of someone who eliminates the plants declared to be weeds from a garden (in defense of the beauty of the garden): this kind of action is considered as a generative action and not as a destructive one; «gardener's culture» is comparable to the social organization that considered the project of a racially pure “new man” as the better point of arrival. From this point of view the extermination become an action to improve society and not as a mass murder; this message also characterized education and training in the regime's schools. Not crystallizing Auschwitz and its history means being able to link similar reflections to the achievement of full knowledge of the past. The process of historical knowledge described can be activated either through a chronological approach that leads from the beginning of the 3 Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust. Copyright © 2024 by FrancoAngeli s.r.l., Milano, Italy. ISBN 9788835168393 103 dictatorships to Auschwitz, or as a path backwards that moves from Auschwitz towards the clarification of the previous phases; in both cases, the fundamental aspect is to identify historicization as the basic tool for didactic and formative work. It is a methodology that can be summarized in the ability to “cross Auschwitz” rather than “visit Auschwitz”: it means the possibility of traveling through historical time to gain awareness and historical knowledge. From this point of view, the focus of pedagogical reflection must be directed at the methodologies and tools that can be used to make this knowledge interesting and activatable in educational contexts. One of the most frequent formative errors about memory of the twentieth century is the tendency to put ethical reflections as first objective of a training process: we talk about education for peace and connect it to the generic reflection about extermination that took place in the concentration camps, without considering the problem of clarifying the entire proceeding that made humanity capable of extermination: we often use historical facts considering them as symbolic images disconnected from their stories. “Crossing Auschwitz” faces the need to structure a narrative historical continuum to identify specific focuses of historical studies which are the basis for arriving at the ethical considerations. in this context the historical and pedagogical school subjects collaborate each other. The analysis of the links between past and present is now more urgent: 15 years ago, the Italian historian David Bidussa wrote: Once the testimonial voices of an event disappear, what will we have in our hands? How will we process that void? And at the same time, how will we reflect? The question concerns the capacity of those voices to speak and raise questions; not just to reproduce themselves. In that empty terrain, the dimension of post-memory will arise, of a reflection that will live structurally on the capacity to process documents. There, the problem of the relationship between testimony and history will arise. When the eyewitnesses have disappeared, when those voices no longer have a voice, we will find ourselves with a defined archive of stories, which will tell scenarios and situations. It will be a question of making those stories narrated as "documents" work. At that moment, the irreversible passage between the twentieth century and “current events” will take place4. 4 Bidussa, Dopo l’ultimo testimone. Copyright © 2024 by FrancoAngeli s.r.l., Milano, Italy. ISBN 9788835168393 104 “Crossing Auschwitz”5 means attempting a path that can never be limited to replacing the role and presence of the witness with the reproposal of a recorded interview. How to start again? From the relationship with the places where the historical events took place. It allows to resume the narration of the story in connection with multiple elements: the past, the present (in which the place continues to live), but also the people who have passed through those places. Reflecting on the specific place of Auschwitz (as proposed in TRACER) means being able to consider all places as a useful training tool to be included in the narrative continuum of a project. This is not a totally new path if we consider that the first valorization of the places started with the deportees who survived the concentration camps. The first journeys immediately organized after the war (to return to the places of their personal suffering) were made in a situation of lack of collective interest. Today we are in a different phase and the collective and public relationship with these areas has changed and it poses critical issues that must be addressed. There has been a progressively more widespread rooting of the so-called “Memory trips” between the 1990s and the 2000s. At the same time, the journeys proposed by many tourist operators to the concentration camps (in particular to Auschwitz) have increased, giving rise to a “mass tourism” that often risks turning into “horror tourism”. In 2019, there were more than 2 million visitors to the Auschwitz State Museum, in 2023, after a sharp drop due to the closure for Covid, they returned to exceed one million presences and the figure of one million has been constantly reached by the museum for at least a decade. If we were to consider the quantitative data, we should imagine having a part of the population with a fair amount of knowledge about Auschwitz history, but it does not correspond to the reality; so it is possible to identify the difference between “visiting” and “crossing Auschwitz”: visiting corresponds to placing oneself in front of a monument of extermination that "must be seen" at least once in a lifetime, but we need to transform Auschwitz from a monument to a tool for training and historicization, if we want to build a process of knowledge. Some direct witnesses, including Liliana Segre (Italian Holocaust survivor and Senator for Life of the Italian Republic since January 5 Rizzin (ed.), Attraversare Auschwitz. Copyright © 2024 by FrancoAngeli s.r.l., Milano, Italy. ISBN 9788835168393 111 7. Visiting history. “Crossing” the camp of Auschwitz by Silvia Bencini* Moon, take all your light, come here with your shine and charm. Stay here forever with your beauty, with your grace. […] Come here, Moon, stay here, I will show you the tomb of my people. Illuminate it with your one ray. You see, I look at you from my barred hell. I find myself in the heart of hell, in which my people are dying1. The concept of visiting places of Remembrance was born in the immediate post-war period, mainly in the form of pilgrimage, at a time when society deliberately distanced itself from the events of the Second World War. The creation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum was strongly requested by a small number of former prisoners of the camp, who wanted to transform the lager into a site of Remembrance in which to commemorate the victims and tell the stories of those who did not survive, of the “untestifiable”, as Giorgio Agamben defines the Muselmann: The witness usually testifies for truth and justice and from these his words draw consistency and fullness. But here the testimony is essentially valid for what is missing in it; contains, at its center, something untestifiable, which deposes the authority of the survivors. The “true” witnesses, the “full witnesses” are those who did not testify nor could they have done so. They are those who “have hit rock bottom”, the Muslims, the submerged. The survivors, as pseudo-witnesses, speak in their stead, by proxy: they testify to a missing testimony. […] The “untestifiable” has a name. He is called, in the jargon of the camp, der Muselmann, the Muslim”2. * Department of Education, Languages, Interculture, Literatures and Psychology (FORLILPSI), University of Florence. 1 Gradowski, I am in the heart of hell. Manuscripts of a Sonderkommando prisoner found in Auschwitz. 2 Agamben, Quel che resta di Auschwitz. Copyright © 2024 by FrancoAngeli s.r.l., Milano, Italy. ISBN 9788835168393 112 Already in 1945 it was possible to visit the site of Auschwitz. However, the visit was limited to organized groups or took place on the occasion of certain ceremonies. Only after the beginning of the construction work on the various exhibitions, the Museum started to come to life and work regularly. In 1946, 100,000 visitors and pilgrims visited the place (many people, especially relatives of the victims, considered the visit as a pilgrimage). The following year there were 170,000 people. It was possible to make both individual and group visits. In both cases, the visitor had to be accompanied by a custodian or another member of the Museum’s nascent staff, who acted as a guide. Entry required the purchase of a ticket, and the income was used for organizational work. Before the official opening of the Museum, the guides showed the main entrance to the Auschwitz I camp with the writing “Arbeit macht frei”, the Block number 11 and the “Wall of Death” in the courtyard, the Crematorium I, the interiors of the brick and wooden barracks, the ruins of the crematoria and gas chambers of Birkenau. The inauguration of the Museum took place on June 14th, 1947, in the presence of tens of thousands of people, mostly former prisoners, their relatives and delegations from many Polish and Jewish communities and political organizations. Only on July 2nd, 1947, the «Sejm» (Polish Parliament) approved the law establishing the Museum. The legislation stated that «the area of the former Nazi concentration and extermination camp Auschwitz, together with all buildings and equipment located there, must be preserved forever as a monument to the martyrdom of the Polish and other peoples. […] The Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum has the task of collecting and bringing together evidence and materials associated with Nazi crimes, making them accessible to the public and studying them in a scientific way». This atypical situation, in which the museum was opened before the approval of the legal act regulating its operation, arose from the desire to hold the opening ceremonies on 14th June, the seventh anniversary of the arrival at the camp of first transport of Polish political prisoners, while the first possible session of Parliament was scheduled for the beginning of July. Not wanting to postpone the opening, the authorities Copyright © 2024 by FrancoAngeli s.r.l., Milano, Italy. ISBN 9788835168393 113 decided that the Museum could start operating before the required legislation was approved. Today the meaning of visits to the Museum has retained its pilgrimage-visit profile only in relation to the celebrations of important anniversaries, such as the liberation of the camp on 27th January 1945 (a date institutionalized at an international level as “International Holocaust Remembrance Day”), or the liquidation of the Zigeunerlager (“gypsy camp”) on 2nd August 1944. Every year, on important dates like those just mentioned, institutions, volunteers and pilgrims from all over the world head towards the camp to commemorate the victims of Nazism3. But in general, the very high numbers of visits to the Museum (in 2023, there were 1,676,000 visitors) are mainly due to two diametrically opposed ways of access to the place which are nowadays far from the concept of pilgrimage: a superficial approach that takes shape under a profile of mass tourism (or “dark tourism”), which we talked about in the first part of this book, alongside a necessary and significant educational intent towards the history of the place. Visiting Auschwitz today means not only commemorating, but also entering the context of educational processes that start from the need to know the past of Nazi and fascist extermination, to understand and deconstruct the mechanisms of hatred of the present. Precisely with this training purpose, TRACER project identified the journey through the Auschwitz Memorial site as a fundamental stage for the education of young Roma, Sinti and non-Roma girls and boys about the history of the Nazi genocide and, in particular, that of the extermination of the Roma and Sinti people. Young people from three different countries (Italy, Poland and Portugal) started from very different levels of knowledge on this page of history: the group was made up of university students, part of the Roma and Sinti communities, who had a clear understanding of the history of their people; non-Roma students who equally knew it; Roma and Sinti youth who had never heard of it; and finally young Polish people who live in Oświęcim and have to interface with the place’s past on a daily basis. 3 Keen, Right to remember. Copyright © 2024 by FrancoAngeli s.r.l., Milano, Italy. ISBN 9788835168393 114 After a pre-departure historical training, the very heterogeneous group set off together towards the city of Oświęcim, with the aim of “crossing” the Auschwitz camp through a visit to the Museum. For some participants, the visit went beyond their own expectations: «Being at Auschwitz-Birkenau a place where millions of lives were meticulously, systematically, and inhumanely taken away is something very difficult and challenging to describe and put into words. Everything we had learned about the Holocaust is there for us to see and witness, yet its stark reality by far surpasses all previous expectations. The enormous scale of this horrific event is terrifyingly well represented by the size of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp. We were in shock as we tried to process how this scale translated into countless victims. It is impossible to truly comprehend those numbers. Throughout the camps, we were confronted with efforts to represent this monstrosity – piles and piles of belongings, hair, ashes, numbers – but the gigantic book listing the names of Holocaust victims by far surpassed all these representations. It revealed the painful truth behind the numbers we are used to read in books and documentaries – those numbers haves names. The thickness of the air inside the gas chamber in Auschwitz, its damp smell, and the markings on the walls left deep roots in our memories. It is difficult to imagine how this killing process was conceived. Putting ourselves in the victims’ shoes is an easy task, but simultaneously unbearable for an empathetic exercise. But trying to think like these killers seems impossibly absurd. Birkenau revealed how their only thought was on exterminating people, faster and more efficiently, ever seeking to optimize their macabre process. We learned how, at times, their need to kill quickly surpassed the capacity of their machinery. The memorial atop the ashes of a mass grave next to Crematorium IV – where the families of the ‘Gypsy Camp’ (‘Zigeunerlager’) were taken – stands as evidence of this fact. This mass grave resulted from “The Night of the Gypsies”, August 2nd, 1944, the night of the liquidation of the ‘Zigeunerlager’, when nearly three thousand people were killed, and the number of bodies exceeded the crematorium’s capacity. Replicas of children’s drawings from the barracks walls showed how creativity can emerge even in the darkest of places, while simultaneously capturing the grim omnipresence of lifeless bodies in their day-to-day lives». (From an exponent of the Portuguese group) Copyright © 2024 by FrancoAngeli s.r.l., Milano, Italy. ISBN 9788835168393 115 Sharing the visit to the camp allowed the young participants to elaborate together thoughts and reflections on the history of the place but also on its reality in the present: «A certain feeling of helplessness followed our footsteps during the visits, highlighting the voyeuristic nature of such a trip. Some of us discussed the absurdity and perversity of this kind of tourism, even as we acknowledged its importance as a life lesson and a shared unforgettable memory. The realization that our footsteps traced the paths of prisoners, solely for the purpose of gaining knowledge still lingers in our minds in a conflicting way. Our ability to walk back along a route that was designed as a one-way journey to the gas chambers feels both like a privilege and a strange relief. As we retraced our steps, we recognized a certain stoic need to make of use of that privilege to fight against and prevent humanity from ever repeating such atrocities». (From an exponent of the Portuguese group) Coming into contact with the history of the extermination of Roma and Sinti had a particular meaning for young Portuguese Roma: perfectly integrated into the social context in which they live, in peaceful coexistence with the non-Roma population, the Portuguese Roma declare that they have lost their attachment to the traditional references of their people, and even the use of the Romanes language (a language that unites all Roma and Sinti communities, although presenting differences depending on the country of origin). «Learning about the experiences of the families in the ‘Zigeunerlager’, and their treatment, was horrific. The accounts of the terrible experiments conducted by the physician Josef Mengele on Roma families, and the futile efforts of biomedical scientists searching for biological racial differentiators, were eye-opening. They clearly demonstrated what a late-stage racist ideology looks like, revealing that humans can, at times, descend to unimaginable depths of evil. A mixture of relief, pride, privilege, and sadness was felt during the commemoration of the 79th anniversary of the Roma’s heroic resistance on May 16, 1944, against the SS. Honouring and celebrating the memory of those who fought that day was an unforgettable experience. The shivering sound of the Hungarian cimbalom and the violins of the ceremonial band delicately painted the surrounding grey, ruinous landscape where millions perished. The speeches by Roma delegations from various countries, along with the Copyright © 2024 by FrancoAngeli s.r.l., Milano, Italy. ISBN 9788835168393 116 group photos taken with the Roma flag, reflected the significance of the date as a day of both mourning and resistance. The experience of feeling, touching, seeing, and even smelling those places was overwhelming – even its silence was deafening. Our minds are not wired to comprehend, process, and endure such immense pain. Some cried, others were left speechless, while others sought to distract themselves as much as they could. At times, an inopportune joke would spark laughter in a kind of desperate attempt at an emotional escape from the intolerable weight of those places. Those May days were filled with contrasting experiences. We not only bore witness to the aftermath of humanity’s most vicious and cruel ideas and beliefs but also engaged in important cultural exchanges between people from different nationalities and ethnicities. So, as we crossed through death-camps that materialize a worldview of deeply entrenched race-based intolerance and prejudice, we simultaneously built bridges across borders and cultures, enriching our individual and collective differences. Focusing on Roma people’s experience and history, our journey aimed to uncover these “invisible” stories and records. Our group of young leaders was composed of Roma and non-Roma youth. We were challenged to set aside boundaries we are often trained to see and act upon – boundaries based on race, ethnicity, age, gender, and nationality – and give way to communication. And communication was the cornerstone of this experience. We discussed the past, the present, and the future. We talked about the dangers of what we had learned and witnessed, exchanged worldviews and life experiences, shared local and national political knowledge, but, most importantly, we explored our similarities and differences as equals». (From an exponent of the Portuguese group) Dealing with a part of history reserved for their people and doing it together with different realities (Italian Roma and Sinti and Polish Roma), has stimulated processes of knowledge and construction not only of a collective memory, but also of a common European Roma identity. «Over the course of a week, we realized how much of our life experiences are similar, yet also very different. Our previous rigidly encoded boundaries began to blur as we talked, danced, and interacted with one another. Broad social and cultural categories of difference gave way to more specific, smaller, mundane categories, such as people who dance flamenco and those who don’t, people who like Polish food, cat lovers, people who mostly talk Copyright © 2024 by FrancoAngeli s.r.l., Milano, Italy. ISBN 9788835168393 117 about food or politics, non-English speakers, students, student-workers, and so on. But most interestingly, these smaller distinctions did not lead to segregation. We saw Roma and non-Roma youth discussing, learning, and sharing dance traditions, exchanging musical tastes, beliefs, and lifestyles. Some discovered new ways of being and feeling Roma, new boundaries and frameworks to guide their identities, and new histories on which to build solid foundations of identity. Initially, many questioned whether someone was Roma or non-Roma, often judging by physical appearance or the way they walked, talked or interacted. Interestingly, most of these assumptions were proven incorrect, further blurring the aforementioned boundaries. Many of us encountered Romani speakers for the first time. Curious eyes and ears gathered around them as they read Romani signs and plaques. Phrases, words, and accents were exchanged frequently. Enriching discussions emerged about the importance of Sinti and other Roma groups recognizing each other as Roma, challenging distinctions solely based on historical experience. The consensus on such a topic reflected how those days helped consolidate a common Roma identity among Roma youth. Even though broader Roma groups, such as the Portuguese Calon, may not have experienced the Samudaripen as the Sinti and Rom groups did, the prejudice, persecution, and genocide that it represents serves as a common memory and an historical milestone for Roma identity. Most dialogues took place during lunch or dinner, during breaks, or while on the road. It was highly motivating for us all to witness the achievements of the Roma associative movement, such as the creation of museological places like the one in Oświęcim, along with the Block 13 in Auschwitz. These places represent crucial reservoirs of Roma Holocaust memory, without which there would be almost no content related to those infamously invisible crimes. This served as an example for our national associations, showing what struggle and organization can achieve. As young leaders, we now have renewed references and examples to guide our paths». (From an exponent of the Portuguese group) One of the strong points of TRACER project was to unite together people who, before the trip, felt this part of history far from their reality and those who, instead, live it on a daily basis. The Polish Roma who live in Oświęcim have to experience the double face of this city every day, in its vital profile, but also in the death one related to the Auschwitz camp. The choice of many of them is to consciously recognize the history of this place of Memory, living it Copyright © 2024 by FrancoAngeli s.r.l., Milano, Italy. ISBN 9788835168393 118 with the utmost respect, but without considering its past as the only side of a peaceful and calm city. «Every time I cross the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp, it’s really hard for me. Now I can peacefully walk there, but eighty years ago it was the place of extermination of my community and in general of some many people… Normally when I approach the camp area in Brezinka with car or bike, I always mute the music or stop talking in sign of respect for all the victims». (Sabina from Oświęcim, Poland) And right next to those who experience Auschwitz every day, people who would never have thought of visiting it took part in the trip. «I never thought I could take a plane. For me and my family, flying has always been a taboo: beyond the sky we thought there was war. But we all decided to face our fears, to trust the project, such was our curiosity about what awaited us. When I arrived at the camp, I didn’t expect to find an endless expanse of green grass. It floored me. Auschwitz-Birkenau in spring is a beautiful place to see, surrounded by nature. I found it jarring with my thoughts: for me this was not a pleasure trip, but a massacre trip. So around me I didn’t see the beautiful vegetation that surrounded me, it’s as if I fully experienced what happened in that period. Even though I was a little prepared, because when I went to Fossoli I had thought about the same thing. Those places that we now perceive as empty are actually full of a tragic history that can be felt as you walk through them step by step». (Simonetta from Modena, Italy) Retracing the route in Auschwitz-Birkenau that took the prisoners from the transport wagons to the barracks or gas chambers, the participants had the opportunity to realize that those places which are now empty or semi-empty are full of the history of at least 1.3 millions of people deported to the Auschwitz camp. But the educational process underlying the visit to the camp makes no sense if it does not lead to a reflection on the empty places of the present. The emptiness of today’s Mediterranean Sea actually hides a theater full of too often forgotten massacres; the invisible geopolitical borders, ground of innocent deaths. TRACER approach to the visit to the Auschwitz camp, together with Michele Andreola (official guide-educator of the Museum), made Copyright © 2024 by FrancoAngeli s.r.l., Milano, Italy. ISBN 9788835168393 119 the place of Memory a tool to stimulate reflections on the present in the young participants, which make them protagonists of a community that wants to learn the lesson of the past of death in order to act in support of life, solidarity, democracy and the rights of every single human being. «Among the things that have most marked me in my training path aimed at understanding history, there are certainly the visits to the concentration and extermination camps. In May 2019, for the Memory trip, when I was just thirteen years old, I visited the Ebensee and Mauthausen camps and five years later, with the training trip of the TRACER project, I visited the Auschwitz camp. These experiences made me aware and also affected me emotionally because I was overwhelmed by a sense of emptiness at the thought of the atrocities suffered by millions of human beings who differed in no way from me, contrasted with an infinite sense of recognition and gratitude for having been born in the “right part” of the world in an apparently better time. I realize that History has not educated us sufficiently, because in too many places, not even that far from us, certain atrocities continue to be repeated and women, children and men, without any fault, continue to die. Therefore, I feel invested with a great responsibility: what kind of meaning would my knowledge and awareness have if they remained just confined to me? I feel the duty, through the means I have, to spread the stories, the tales that encouraged me to learn more, to as many people as possible, because if even just a little girl, as happened to me, becomes interested and then she spreads it in turn...from one it becomes many and what you know is no longer scary, but you can eat, drink and laugh together at the same table: for me it was like that». (Teresa from Tuscany, Italy) Bibliography Agamben, Giorgio. Quel che resta di Auschwitz. L’archivio e il testimone. Torino: Bollati Boringhieri, 1998. Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial Foundation (Ed.). Państwowe Muzeum, AuschwitzBirkenau w Oświęcimiu, Oświęcim: Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, Report 2023. Bravi, Luca. Percorsi storico-educativi della Memoria europea. La Shoah nella società italiana, Milano: FrancoAngeli, 2014. Copyright © 2024 by FrancoAngeli s.r.l., Milano, Italy. ISBN 9788835168393 120 European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights (Ed.). Roma in ten European countries. European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights, 2023. Keen, Ellie. Right to remember. A Handbook for Education with Young People on the Roma Genocide. Strasbourg: Council of Europe, 2014. Lennon, John J. and Malcolm Foley. Dark tourism. The attraction of death and disasters. New York: Continuum, 2000. Gradowski, Zalmen. From the Heart of Hell. Manuscripts of a Sonderkommando Prisoner, Found in Auschwitz. Oświęcim: Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, 2017. Stone, Philip R. “A Dark Tourism Spectrum: Towards a typology of death and macabre related tourist sites, attractions and exhibitions”. In Tourism: An Interdisciplinary International Journal 54 (2006), n. 2: 145-160. Rizzin, Eva (Ed.). Attraversare Auschwitz. Storie di rom e sinti: identità, memorie, antiziganismo. Roma: Gangemi, 2020. Copyright © 2024 by FrancoAngeli s.r.l., Milano, Italy. ISBN 9788835168393 127 of screwing and shutting off the water supply was in fact quite arduous, with a massive deployment of forces to carry out the orders of the North Naples Public Prosecutor's Office. But they tried hard, and in the end they succeeded. Securing, removing the electric cables - but the electricity has been gone for more than twenty days, they are running on generators - disconnecting the water because of the abusive connection. The ambiguity and violence of the institutions, in this dramatic story, has reached its most sophisticated point. On the one hand, the media tells a story of solidarity, consternation, and efficiency: extolling the plans that have been set in motion for schooling, even with an allocation of European funds; reaffirming the will to settle once and for all the four hundred and fifty people who have been living in total precariousness for too long; and yet stressing the need to restore order and security. On the other hand, in reality, institutions showed no mercy and a strong fist against a scenario that is clearly overflowing with illegality and attempts at survival. It is clear that the strategy is the one we have already seen in many other circumstances in the city of Naples - in the neighbourhoods of Gianturco, Scampia, Ponticelli, Barra: we are facing an induced eviction. If you do not decide to leave, we will take everything away from you, including water, even at the cost of bordering on unconstitutionality and casually ignoring world resolutions - the UN, in a resolution passed on 28 July 2010, declared access to drinking water and sanitation a human right. The culprits, once again, are the victims who pay twice, three times, four hundred times, and are the only ones who pay. The young people participating in TRACER cannot move from the camp because they use car batteries to charge their phones, otherwise they would be isolated and unreachable. They can't go out, they can't work, they can't participate in the pathways that could painstakingly lead to better and greater opportunities. But the question of rights, when it comes to the Roma, is easily dismissed. Proof of this is the fact that all the minors in Via Carrafiello have been refused access to schools in the area for years - here Article 34 of the Italian constitution has been fully violated: School is open to all. Lower education, imparted for at least eight years, is compulsory and free - until, after only the threat of intervention by the Juvenile Prosecutor's Office, one school popped up that, according to those who Copyright © 2024 by FrancoAngeli s.r.l., Milano, Italy. ISBN 9788835168393 128 have been involved in this battle for years, making it a life mission, was sent directly by providence. And one has to rely on providence once again to see as a miracle, on Monday 29, after five days without water either for drinking, cooking or washing, the arrival of a tanker truck with five thousand litres of drinking water - sent by the Migrantes Foundation of the Italian Episcopal Conference. Despite this inhuman situation, as the Roma children's school year had finally begun, in the middle of January, in the throes of enthusiasm they still managed to maintain attendance. And the participants of the TRACER leader group also found creative means to continue the workshops they were so passionate about and never missed. 4. Facing the history to talk of redemption 4.1 Trollmann and redemption On their return from Auschwitz, the group leaders shared with everyone else the story of a German Sinti boxer, Johann Wilhelm Trollmann, nicknamed Rukeli, which was the one that struck them deepest in their hearts and stomachs. Rukeli, which means tree in the Sinti language, so called because of his imposing stature and curly hair, and also known as Gipsy, a nickname that he had sewn onto his shorts, was a gypsy who became the national champion of the middleweight division, at a time in history when boxing was a sport that conferred a certain prestige on nations. With the rise and consolidation of Nazism, his persecution began, causing him to lose everything, from his title as champion, to his daughter and his right to procreation. He ended his life in 1944 at the age of 37 in a concentration camp. Challenged by a Nazi officer who had recognized the champion despite a life of hardship in the camp, he decided to accept the challenge and ‘decided to die a champion’. And so Rukeli becomes the symbol of all stories of oppression and redemption, which comes to life in the magic of a story inspired by reality, a tale in images and music that we have decided to dedicate to Michelle. Rukeli, Gipsy, puts on his gloves, forgets that he is reduced to skin and bones, starts his dance, punches and knocks out the Nazi officer, Copyright © 2024 by FrancoAngeli s.r.l., Milano, Italy. ISBN 9788835168393 129 and with him the entire apparatus of power. The next day, they take him out, but his story has become a symbol. We worked on the collective reading and rewriting of his past history of injustice, which intersected with all the injustice we have seen concentrated in the days in Giugliano since Michelle died. Every time we read and repeated in dozens and dozens of audio recordings the text of Trollmann's story, written in the first person as if Rukeli were each one of those boys, we were moved and inside us, in the shiny eyes of the boys and girls, that boxer who fights today and for eternity for justice and freedom, and not just for himself, stirred. The Day of Remembrance comes at a catastrophic time globally. With more than 10,000 children killed since the one hundred and ten days of war and bombing in the Gaza Strip, the celebrations are not only about the victims of the past but become cultural witnesses of what we wish would never happen again, and instead strikes us with extreme violence every day. With the young people of TRACER, both those in the leading group and the dozens of young people we met in the schools, we learnt and were able to observe that painstaking work is being done to recover hundreds of hitherto submerged and forgotten stories that tell us what happened. A history made up of 500,000 precious stories, such as the victims of segregation and Nazi horror, which we tried to understand in depth through art workshops, to see all the discrimination and inequality to which entire categories, including the Roma, are still subjected. We decided to disseminate to a wider audience the story of Rukeli, which we freely reinterpreted in this way. Here is a piece of it. Imagine it being read by a young man of about twenty, like the young champion Trollmann was before he ended up in a concentration camp. Copyright © 2024 by FrancoAngeli s.r.l., Milano, Italy. ISBN 9788835168393 130 Gypsy My name is Johann Wilhelm Trollmann. But those were the 1930s, the years of Nazi Germany, of the theories about the pure race pure race, the Aryan race, and all that rubbish there... So they started calling me Gypsy... The Gypsy! Inferior race, they said. But I knew how to put them right. At 15 I was already South German champion and ready to leave for the Amsterdam Olympics. Then, before departure, Zirzow, my manager, came looking for me: They won't let you leave. They say that a gypsy, a Sinti, cannot represent Germany. But you'll see: we'll make up for it, he said. And so we did. I didn't go. But then I stood up for myself. One by one the Aryans went down! Under the Gypsy's fists! Look at him, he seems to dance. People were saying. It's like hearing a gypsy fiddle when he punches After 14 victorious fights they proclaimed me champion of Germany. And then I cried: me, Rukeli, a Gypsy... I had punched Nazism! Copyright © 2024 by FrancoAngeli s.r.l., Milano, Italy. ISBN 9788835168393 131 9. Presenting the history. Building Memory through art by Inês Aydin* and Liliana Moreira* 1. TRACER and the memory´s mechanisms through filmed interviews 1.1 Epistemological advantages of filming interviews Understanding memory, based on video recording of interviews, but also the way in which the memory of a historical or biographical event is constructed in the present context, is one of the objectives of this article. The epistemological and methodological issue arose from the moment that the members of the TRACER project in Portugal collected narratives, with a camera, having to choose and also reject images in order to “order them chronologically” and “shows” the Memory through videographic means. Much of the work we find on Memory revolves around writing as the only legitimate way of returning the research and results that have been found. Some, the more “positivist”, denied the possibility of exploring fieldwork through images, recognizing only their illustrative capabilities. From this perspective, the arguments advanced are reduced, on the one hand, to the perception of the unlimited forms that the videographic process allows with regard to image manipulation, and on the other hand, to the perception of the limited forms that the film camera induces in its most basic operations (e.g. limitation in framing the image, need to use an instrument that obstructs direct contact between the interviewer and the interviewee, etc.). Copyright © 2024 by FrancoAngeli s.r.l., Milano, Italy. ISBN 9788835168393 132 At the same time, there are many other interested parties, from researchers to filmmakers, who have contributed and managed to impose the use of audiovisual in the work on the issue of Memory. For example in the field of social sciences, Marc Piault emphasizes that exploration through images not only contributes in a privileged way to putting certain objects of study into perspective, which other types of more classical methodologies could not achieve, but that their use can also unveil new objects and new fields of exploration2. Taking these premises into account, the interviews carried out within the scope of the TRACER project, and presented below in this section, assume that the use of video can be as legitimate a way as writing in the restitution of a work on Memory, without however compromising the seriousness of it. Furthermore, the use of filmed interviews in this proposal to explore the field of Memory in the context of Roma communities, proved to be essential as a starting point for a research that was intended to be creative, but above all heuristic, where we could develop an involving and dialectic between the communities, project members, Roma or non-Roma, the research object and finally the instrument used to collect and return the data. 2. Memory as a “social fact” If we consider that the discourse given about the past corresponds to our social framework of the present, the challenge that arises is to build the foundations of this analysis through understanding the relationship we have with the past, and not through the past as static time. We thus join the tradition of Maurice Halbwachs3 on two levels: first, Memory as a “social fact”; second, most of our memories emerge when others remind us. Analysing the discourse of an individual's relationship with the past is, above all, understanding how the experience of the past is told in the light of the experience of the present, that is, a reconstruction of the past according to the social frameworks of Memory. Having said * Agência para a Integração, Migrações e Asilo (AIMA), Portugal. 2 Piault, Anthropologie et Cinéma, 266. 3 Halbwachs, Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire; Halbwachs, La mémoire collective. Copyright © 2024 by FrancoAngeli s.r.l., Milano, Italy. ISBN 9788835168393 133 that, it is necessary to take into account that the interviewer, when asking questions to the interviewee, can sometimes break silences and create disorders in the discourse that is constantly being renegotiated. The reference to Halbwachs leads us to reflect on the Memory of a biographical or historical event, in the form of its rooting in physical spaces that were turned into mythical elements. If we take into account the narratives collected through video, we see the existence of collective representations. In addition to a common narrative model, which is sometimes quite localized in spatial and chronological terms, the analysis of the narratives also shows a memorial reconstruction that has as its backdrop the coherence of memories within the community. It is through Memory that communities can continue to reproduce themselves according to cohesion and social norms. 3. The role of the TRACER project in the construction of memory The use of audiovisual media is a preferred means of making the narrative collection process transparent. More than the written rendering, whose sometimes extremely formal format screens the impact of the research on the subject studied, the audiovisual rendering shows without ambiguity what is the role of the interviewer in the work of understanding the construction of the Memory. Furthermore, through images it is possible to show that the interviewer sometimes intervenes ultimately in the work of constituting the Memory that he is investigating, particularly in the final rendering. In other words, it is a question of showing that we can study Memory as a “thing” modelled by social “constraints” (in the Durkheimian theory), of showing how Memory is itself objectified, to the extent that it provides “stability” within groups to make it a basis for action in the present; and finally how the interviewer despite himself has a role in the reification of a memory. It is necessary, especially with regard to this last element, to be aware of this action of reification, which otherwise often goes unnoticed, only to be able to master it and handle it with great caution. In this sense, the filmed interviews carried out in this project also led us to the need to reflect on the relationship with the past, as a condition for creating a social bond and raising awareness against racism Copyright © 2024 by FrancoAngeli s.r.l., Milano, Italy. ISBN 9788835168393 134 and discrimination against Roma people, but also both as a form of reconstruction of the Memory of the Roma Holocaust and the Memory of the Roma people. In terms of this relationship to the past, these two kinds of memory turn out to be very socially intertwined, but we can distinguish the two. The first – memory of the Holocaust – appears as a story and can be anchored with greater or lesser intensity in the public space. This memory is an integral part of collective Memory. The second – memory of Roma people – is both represented and atomized in private spaces, to which we could define as individual memory. Collective memory will remain the backdrop to individual memory, to the extent that the latter, as a social fact, is always forged in relation to the former. Halbwachs4 captures the interrelation between the two memories: Nous dirions volontiers que chaque mémoire individuelle est un point de vue sur la mémoire collective, que ce point de vue change suivant la place que j’y occupe et que cette place elle-même change suivant les relations que j’entretiens avec d’autres milieux5. The author then goes further than just the link, because between the two memories there isn´t a pure interrelation, these changes depending on the position in the social spectrum and/or in the interaction with others. On the principle of studying social frameworks concerning the reconstruction of memory, it was important for us to understand the relationship to the past in the present of Roma people through images. In other words, it is about the creation of images about a past that is adjusted to the social frameworks of the present. To do this, images in the literal and figurative sense, even before being considered as research tools, were taken as research objects. In fact, the audiovisual documents produced and presented below can leave traces on the memory construction, either through social representations or with iconic representations. 4 Halbwachs, La mémoire collective. 5 Halbwachs, La mémoire collective, 94. Copyright © 2024 by FrancoAngeli s.r.l., Milano, Italy. ISBN 9788835168393 135 4. Presenting the history and constructing the memory through filmed interviews with Portuguese Roma As with the TRACER project it was intended to make the discovery of the past and the reconstruction of a community memory about the Holocaust and the Roma and Sinti genocide (Porrajmos), the Portuguese TRACER team set the goal of involve the Portuguese Roma communities in collecting narratives about this impressive historical happening through filmed interviews with older Portuguese Roma people. These filmed interviews are a contribution i) to improve information and knowledge on the past and on the present situation of Roma, ii) to raise younger generations' awareness of stereotypes, iii) to spread anti-discrimination messages for all and iv) to promote literacy on rights to protection against discrimination for Roma people, ensuring that no person is disadvantaged on the basis of racial or ethnic origin, place of origin, sex, gender identity, age, nationality, disability, education, economic situation and social condition, among others, considered in isolation or in combination (intersectional discrimination). In Portugal, some filmed interviews with Roma people were conducted by the national team (AIMA, I.P., University of Minho and Ribaltambição association) on the subject of the Holocaust and the importance of historical memory. Five Roma people living in various locations in Portugal, in the north, center and south, were invited to share their testimony about their memories, perceptions and experiences related to these issues and to the discrimination and racism suffered by Roma in Portuguese society6. Firstly, each partner of the Portuguese TRACER team tried to identify older Portuguese Roma people who could contribute with their direct or indirect testimony about the genocide suffered by Portuguese Roma during the Second World War and help build historical knowledge and awareness in this regard. The selection of interviewees took into account territorial representativeness and social heterogeneity. Secondly, during 2023, the filmed interviews were carried out faceto-face at locations proposed by the participants, using a script and 6 European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights (ed.), Roma in ten European countries. Copyright © 2024 by FrancoAngeli s.r.l., Milano, Italy. ISBN 9788835168393 136 recording the answers by members of the TRACER project team. It should be noted that the audiovisual recording was made mainly by amateurs. In third place, the five testimonies collected resulted in the production of four videos. Two of these videos have been edited and the remaining two correspond to the original recording. Thus, two videos concern the narrative of a person living in Porto (José Maria Fernandes)7, another video contains the interview with a person living in Figueira da Foz (Zara Oliveira)8 and the remaining video contains the testimony of three people living in Beja/Alentejo (Edite Maria, Acácio Fialho e Marcelina)9. Due to the country's historical and geographical reasons, such as the neutrality of Portugal in the Second World War, there are no evidences that the Portuguese Roma population was arrested and killed in the concentration camps. Therefore, the Portuguese TRACER team decided to try to construct a historical memory of armed conflicts experienced by the Portuguese Roma, referring to the social impacts of war. The emphasis has been placed on the Portuguese Colonial War, also known as the War of Liberation or War of Independence, which took place between 1961 and 1974 - a period of confrontation between the Portuguese Armed Forces and the forces organised by the liberation or independence movements formed in the provinces of the then Portuguese overseas territories, in particular Angola, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau and Mozambique. The revolution of 25 April 1974 overthrew the dictatorship that had dominated Portugal for more than four decades, opening up a wide range of possibilities as to the way forward. Additionally, we also try to focus on the experiences of discrimination lived and felt by Portuguese Roma in the past and in the present. Analysing the content of the narratives allows us to highlight various meaningful reflections, for example: 7 Filmed interview with José Maria Fernandes. Available at https://youtu.be/gyqcqR0Fuj4 (part 1, portuguese version) and https://youtu.be/qdAaoW470Pc (part 2, portuguese version) (Last access: August 2024). 8 Filmed interview with Zara Oliveira. Available at https://youtu.be/M1W2VlEhoiM (portuguese version) (Last access: August 2024). 9 Filmed interview with Edite Maria, Acácio Fialho and Marcelina. Available at https://youtu.be/avZu4e4h0jQ (portuguese version). (Last access: August 2024). Copyright © 2024 by FrancoAngeli s.r.l., Milano, Italy. ISBN 9788835168393 143 Pic. 9 - Sequence of video images (from left to right, top to bottom). PT: There were many Roma who fought in that war. Didn't your father ever talk about that war? Don't you know any stories about that war? AF: No. PT: So, what experiences can you say you've had in the past in relation to racism and discrimination? AF: We were here and the Guarda, even under water, in the rain, sent us away. We wouldn't sit still. Sometimes we'd shake the food pot on top of the wagon while it was raining water. It was raining water and we were fined. Marcelina (M): 58 years old. PT: Do you know any stories about the Colonial War? M: Not at all, miss. PT: Didn’t your mum and dad never talk about it? M: No. PT: So, tell me about your time as a nomad? M: My time as a nomad... I don't know anything. It was old. Copyright © 2024 by FrancoAngeli s.r.l., Milano, Italy. ISBN 9788835168393 144 PT: But what were the difficulties you were facing? M: We'd get here, the guards would come and send us away. They didn't want us and issued notices/fines. PT: What's more? In what other ways did you and your family suffer during that time? M: We were there under water, it was raining, the Guard was chasing us under water and we had to cover ourselves with a blanket, we were just selling all our lives. Now that we're here on this bit of land, we don't walk so much under the Guard. Bibliography Halbwachs, Maurice. Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire. Paris: Albin Michel, 1925 [1994]. Halbwachs, Maurice. La mémoire collective. Paris: Albin Michel, 1950 [1997]. Piault, Marc Henri. Anthropologie et Cinéma. Paris: Nathan, 1950 [1997]. European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights (Ed.). Roma in ten European countries. 2022. Available at https://fra.europa.eu/en/publication/2022/roma-surveyfindings (Last access: August 2024). Copyright © 2024 by FrancoAngeli s.r.l., Milano, Italy. ISBN 9788835168393 145 10. Leaving a trace in the present by Maria José Casa-Nova*, Maria Alfredo Moreira* and Maria Teresa Tagliaventi** 1. Introduction1 As we write this chapter, we keep reading everyday news on protests and, even riots, in several locations in Europe, fueled by far-right wing movements, targeted at immigrants and ethnic minorities. Antigypsyism is still rampant, as well as Roma widespread poverty and social exclusion. Even though anti-Semitism is on the rise again, the Shoah is no longer denied and there is an international consciousness on the importance of preserving the memory of the infamous events connected to the 2nd World War and to the Nazi regime. The same cannot be stated about the Roma and Sinti genocide, or Samudaripen, too often denied and/or explained on the basis that these people were criminals, so their persecution and fate were fully justified2. As Kapralski states, «The Roma memory of the genocide they experienced during World War II was not ‘made to matter’ and therefore remained limited to the individual remembrance or family memories, insulated and neither communicated to broader audiences, nor supported by cultural institutions and discourses»3. Roma and Sinti have historically «neither a public voice nor material or educational * CIEd, Institute of Education, University of Minho. ** Department of Education “Giovanna Maria Bertin”, University of Bologna. 1 Maria José Casa-Nova and Maria Alfredo Moreira are authors of paragraphs 1, 2 and 4; Maria Teresa Tagliaventi is author of paragraph 3. 2 IHRA (Ed.), Recomendações para o ensino e a aprendizagem sobre o holocausto. 3 Kapralski, “Between mneme and anamnesis”, 10. Copyright © 2024 by FrancoAngeli s.r.l., Milano, Italy. ISBN 9788835168393 146 resources to raise awareness about the Nazi genocide»4 and their “right to remember”, as Jews have had: «In the absence of European-wide networks, let alone the global diasporic structures and media available to Jewish victims, the persecution of the Roma could not easily be communicated or processed as a collective, Europe-wide experience either as it was going on or in its immediate aftermath»5. The right to remember and understand one’s own past and history is crucial to the “strengthening of Roma youth identity”, a “tool for fighting for human rights and against discrimination”6, “an aspect of learning about, through and for human rights”: Working on remembrance, however, is more than just history. As practised in human rights education and in education about the Holocaust, remembrance is more than just learning about the past: it is learning from the past so that it is not repeated. Furthermore, it is about restoring a sense of dignity and justice to the victims and to their families and communities7. History does not exist disconnected from time and place. For this very reason, its knowledge and apprehension cannot be disconnected from the time and space in which the phenomena that gave rise to it were produced. It's called historical contextualization. Knowledge of history is at the origin of the construction of historical memory. From this knowledge and this memory, a historical consciousness is built. A society that does not remember its history is like a person that does not remember the past. If we don't remember our past, we don't know who we are. We need history for the construction of identities, whether social or personal. But the importance that each one of us gives to historical facts varies according to each one's experiences; the knowledge we have, the sensibility we built. For this very reason, memory and historical consciousness are not the same in all of us. We apprehend History according to our experiences, according to who we are. We thus build a historical consciousness that gives us 4 Bartash and Neringa, “Introduction”, 2. 5 Rosenhaft, “East Prussian Sinti and/as German expellees”, 62. 6 Keen, Right to remember, 7. 7 Keen, Right to remember, 8. Copyright © 2024 by FrancoAngeli s.r.l., Milano, Italy. ISBN 9788835168393 147 tools for analyzing social reality; operative instruments to reflect and transform societies. When this occurs, it means that training has taken place. And it is this training that enables the construction of autonomy and a path to empowerment. Since Confucius, there has been theoretical reflection on the importance of historical empathy for the construction of better societies8. Historical empathy allows us to connect with people from the past and understand their suffering in events that negatively impacted humanity. 2. Building collective historical memory and consciousness in the present During the TRACER project, we saw, we heard, we read, we wrote, we spoke, we thought, we reflected. Individually and together, we built collective historical memory and consciousness. We became more human. More aware of the importance of the daily construction of Human Rights. And our role in this construction: “History is better understood with images and documents that make visible the people who are part of this history. Who produced it. History is learned and apprehended actively by reading, writing and telling others”9. This project was developed with that purpose: the construction of a historical memory and consciousness, through reading, writing, speaking and using artistic formats for the education of others that, in the process, would give room for our own transformation. As key messages of the TRACER for Roma and non-Roma participants10, we can highlight the following: 1. The Holocaust was something done to the Roma Researching about the Roma and Sinti genocide, having access to historical sources and testimonials, visiting the Auschwitz-Birkenau 8 Tan and La Londe. “Empathy as a virtue”. 9 Casa-Nova, Maria José and Daniela Silva. Transforming and training through actionresearch on the history of Sinti and Roma (chapter 5 of this book) 10 Keen, Right to remember, 70. Copyright © 2024 by FrancoAngeli s.r.l., Milano, Italy. ISBN 9788835168393 148 camps, reflecting individually and in group, among many other activities, helped participants realise that genocide is not something that you bring on yourself, a fate that is written and that you cannot escape from. Genocide is a crime against humanity and there is no crime perpetrated by a social group that can even justify it. 2. Roma participants should take pride in their identity Being in a group of Roma young people from three European countries that shared communalities, but also desires, expectations, and hopes, along with an awareness of a common history and culture, brought about a heightened sense of four different aspects of Roma identity11: cultural (substance), social (relation), historical (process), and individual (choice). Creating a common «memory of the genocide of Roma [may become] the ‘foundational trauma’ of their new identity»12, helping unite the Roma and Sinti communities into a common political project of recognition and acceptance. 3. Roma people can contribute to reshaping society Like any other social group, Roma and Sinti do not exist outside of history13. Their centuries’ old history in Europe speaks volume of their contribution to a common European space, but also of centuries’ old relentless persecution and discrimination. An increasing awareness of their history and culture, carried out by research on Roma genocide, along with teaching and disseminating the information acquired through diverse artistic formats, helps foster more activist stances on young Roma. TRACER’s focus on education for remembrance and for human rights will certainly give «young people an understanding of the terrible past events which continue to influence some people’s lives today; and partly about helping them to identify patterns in their own behaviour which recall some of the underlying reasons for the Genocide»14. 11 Kapralski, “Between mneme and anamnesis”. 12 Kapralski, “Between mneme and anamnesis”, 18. 13 Kapralski, “Between mneme and anamnesis”. 14 Keen, Right to remember, 91. Copyright © 2024 by FrancoAngeli s.r.l., Milano, Italy. ISBN 9788835168393 149 3. Traces between past and present TRACER was a challenge for several reasons: for the complexity of the project, for the methodological difficulty, for the little-known subject matter, for the direct involvement of young Roma and nonRoma and the communities they belong to, for being an international project and including very different realities, perspectives, visions. Like all projects, particularly those using participatory action-research, it was built up along the way, in the interactions between the leader groups, the partners, the target groups involved during the numerous actions. The strength of this project, and its originality, was having combined historical awareness and social change. The genocide of the Roma people was the collective element. Discovering, deepening, reasoning about the Porrajmos was a way to join young people from different countries and contexts around a common goal, that is not educational only. The project promoted active participation, empowerment, and the capacity for self-determination of the people involved as well. The project’s message, as adopted by its participants, is that present knowledge is contingent upon an understanding of the past. The two concepts are mutually reinforcing and interdependent, forming a dialectical relationship. Each individual’s life is situated within social contexts through which contact is made with the past. This past provides the context for personal, familiar and collective memories, and serves as the foundation for future (re)construction. In the event of certain components being missing, it is necessary to reconstruct them. The lack of knowledge regarding the genocide of the Roma people represents a significant gap in understanding that is fundamental and important for both the Roma and Sinti community and for non-Roma people. It was not easy to achieve the objectives of the project, which were certainly very ambitious. The actions were all carried out to the great satisfaction of the participants and the quality of the products was very good. But what was achieved went further than expected. The project brought about a change not only collectively but also individually in the participants involved, and not only in the young people who Copyright © 2024 by FrancoAngeli s.r.l., Milano, Italy. ISBN 9788835168393 150 followed the whole course, but also in the teachers and students who took part in the workshops. The fact that it was an international project enabled the young people involved to “discover” each other. The different ways in which Roma minority is recognised and protected in different countries has led to strong social inequalities and different demands for rights, which were also evident in the groups that participated in the project. Portugal’s inclusive policy, which also passes through incentives to attend the education system, up to the highest levels, has favoured the presence in the project of young Roma university students, with a completely different history from, for example, Italian Roma and Sinti youth. The young Roma from the Italian leader groups are mostly residents of Roma and Sinti camps, regular and irregular. The camps are already a tangible example of racial segregation and mark the symbolic border between Roma/Sinti and non-Roma. The policy of institutional segregation that has been in place in Italy for years has not encouraged integration and school attendance. The young leaders of the project are representatives of completely different life situations. Thus, young Portuguese university students in Poland found themselves confronted and working together with young people who had left school early without graduating and who are still fighting with their families and associations for the recognition of basic civil rights. The mutual discovery of belonging to a minority that lives in different contexts and realities fostered in all the participants of the leader groups an awareness of how discriminatory policies still affect everyday life, but not only. The confrontation opened up new horizons, on one hand by encouraging those with a lower educational profile to believe in the value of education, for example by returning to school, and on the other hand by promoting increased attention to social inequalities and their construction in history among young university students. Past events leave traces in the present: we find them in the places where the events occurred, but also in the mentality and feelings that people preserved and reproduced in the social policies promoted by institutions. The most visible traces of this project are the artistic events promoted by young leaders and adolescents (murals, short films, booklets, Copyright © 2024 by FrancoAngeli s.r.l., Milano, Italy. ISBN 9788835168393 151 plays) in which memories become part of a social narrative building bridges between past, present and future. 4. Conclusion Those more interested in the genocide itself, mostly historians, are focused predominantly on the past, studying the history of what did happen, and if they include the present into their field of interest, they treat it as a consequence of the past events. Those more interested in the present situation of Roma communities may include the past into their research by studying the memory of what happened and the present functions of this memory15. As Keen16 poignantly reminds us, «The period leading up to the Holocaust was a time, after all, when general public attitudes towards the Roma were not dissimilar to those we find today». History has a troublesome way of repeating itself. It is our hope that the TRACER project, along with many other social and educational initiatives, may stand in the way of keeping Roma and other genocides from repeating themselves. Bibliography Bartash, Volha and Neringa Latvytė. “Introduction: Memory and recognition of the Nazi genocide of the Roma in the Baltic context”. In Journal of Baltic Studies 54 (2023), n. 1: 1-6. https://doi.org/10.1080/01629778.2023.2162681. Casa-Nova, Maria José and Daniela Silva. Transforming and training through action-research on the history of Sinti and Roma. In this volume. International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) (Ed.). Recomendações para o ensino e a aprendizagem sobre o holocausto. IHRA: 2019: https://holocaustremembrance.com/resources/recomendacoes-para-o-ensino-e-a-aprendizagem-sobre-o-holocausto. Kapralski, Sławomir. “Between mneme and anamnesis: On the memory and forgetting of the Roma Holocaust”. In Journal of Baltic Studies 54 (2019), n. 1: 7-26. https://doi.org/10.1080/01629778.2023.2156565. Keen, Ellie. Right to remember. A Handbook for Education with Young People on the Roma Genocide. Strasbourg: Council of Europe, 2014. 15 Kapralski, “Between mneme and anamnesis”. 16 Keen, Right to remember. Copyright © 2024 by FrancoAngeli s.r.l., Milano, Italy. ISBN 9788835168393 152 Rosenhaft, Eve. “East Prussian Sinti and/as German expellees: Beyond mémoires croisées”. In Journal of Baltic Studies 54 (2023), n. 1: 47-66. https://doi.org/10.1080/01629778.2023.2143386. Tan, Charlene and Priya Goel La Londe. “Empathy as a virtue: A Confucian interpretation and a tool to address anti-Asian hate crime”. In Critical Studies in Education 65 (2023), n. 2: 162-180. https://doi.org/10.1080/17508487.2023.2249057. Copyright © 2024 by FrancoAngeli s.r.l., Milano, Italy. ISBN 9788835168393