For the Living and the Dead. Traces of the Holocaust

In this episode, podcast host Lovro Kralj talks with Hungarian researcher László Csősz about a memorial headstone dedicated to Roma victims of wartime violence in the village of Doboz, which is in Southern Hungary. This small white headstone with inscriptions is special as it is one of the earliest known efforts in Central Europe to commemorate the genocide on Roma.

László Csősz has recently led a project titled “Mapping the Genocide of the Roma in Hungary” about the history and memory of various places of life, execution sites and deportations of Roma across Hungary, during which he came across the fate of the Roma in the Doboz cemetery.

At the end of September 1944, the Soviet and Romanian armies invaded the then territory of Hungary in the area of Nagyszalonta (Salonta, Romania today). The Hungarian army, with German support, temporarily repulsed the attackers, then a week later abandoned the area again. In the days between the two changes of power, dozens of civilians, who were allegedly   "in contact" with the occupying Romanian troops, were arrested, among them Roma families.

On the afternoon of 5 October, as Red Army troops were again approaching, the prisoners were marched on foot to the village of Doboz. Here, the field gendarmes separated the Roma from the other prisoners and took them to the local cemetery.

Shortly before midnight, the gendarmes forced the Roma to lay on the ground in the cemetery and told them that they would spend the night there. The cemetery guard was warned by the gendarmes that "new weapons were going to be tested", so no resident  should come out of their houses. After the cold-blooded preparation, they fired volleys at the unsuspecting people and then threw hand grenades at them. The bodies, which were torn to pieces, were buried by Roma forcibly taken from a nearby settlement.

In 1946, a non-Roma local resident, night watchman Lajos Tobai, erected a memorial headstone over the mass grave for unknown reasons. His efforts are remarkable though: it was probably one of the first attempts to safeguard a lieux de memoire (places of memory) of the Roma genocide in Central Europe. Today, a different   headstone and a carved burial column are erected, by the local Roma minority, to commemorate the victims in Doboz. 

Featured guests:

László Csősz is a historian and archivist who is affiliated with the Hungarian Jewish Museum and Archives in Budapest. He has recently led the project “Mapping the Genocide of the Roma in Hungary”. Podcast host is Lovro Kralj.

László will tell the story of the Roma people who were killed in the cemetery of Doboz.

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• Andy Clark, Podcastmaker, Studio Lijn 14 

In this podcast episode, we learn about the life, art and writings of Roma Holocaust-survivor Ceija Stojka, one of the first Roma survivors to publicly bear witness to the genocide of her people. Deported as a child, Stojka survived three concentration camps: Auschwitz, Ravensbrück and Bergen-Belsen. Like many other Roma victims, she carried her memories in silence. That is, until she reached her fifties and began pouring her trauma into paintings and poems. Stojka died in Vienna in 2013 at the age of 79, but her groundbreaking work lives on to inspire, inform and commemorate a history that the world has long refused to see. 

Anna Mirga-Kruszelnicka, Director of ERIAC (the European Roma Institute for Arts and Culture in Berlin), talks us through Stojka’s life, work and influence on Roma Holocaust remembrance by means of one of Stojka’s most striking paintings: 'Persecutions in the Forest of Auschwitz' (1994). The painting is an emotionally charged depiction of Roma during the war, and speaks to something particular about the Roma genocide. Unlike the mass murder carried out inside the camps, much of the killing of Roma took place in forests, fields and on the outskirts of towns. Leaving unmarked graves, few records and therefore little trace in public memory is part of why the number of Roma victims remains so difficult to establish, and moreover why the genocide stayed invisible for so long.

Together with Anna Mirga-Kruszelnicka, podcast host Lovro Kralj traces Stojka’s life, art, and the long struggle for Roma Holocaust recognition that continues against the backdrop of enduring antigypsyism. After the war, Roma were denied acknowledgement as victims and were often blamed for their own persecution, leaving little space for them to speak. Stojka was among those who broke that silence, and her first-hand, first-person testimony helped bring the Roma genocide into public view, encouraging many others to speak out as well. This episode also reflects on the many forms Roma resistance took during the war: from the uprising in Auschwitz family camp to quieter acts of rescue and care as well as the power of art and culture to carry memory where archives and records fall silent.

Featured guest:
Anna Mirga-Kruszelnicka is the Director of ERIAC – the European Roma Institute for Arts and Culture, based in Berlin. She is a Polish-Roma anthropologist who has spent her career at the intersection of academic research and Roma civil society. Podcast host is Lovro Kralj.

Anna Mirga-Kruszelnicka will tell the story of Ceija Stojka and the plight for Roma Holocaust recognition.

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• Andy Clark, Podcastmaker, Studio Lijn 14 

In this episode, we look at a photograph taken in 1980 on the grounds of the former Dachau concentration camp. It shows survivors during the hunger strike that became a turning point for the German Sinti and Roma civil rights movement. At the center of the photograph is Hans Braun, a German Sinto who survived Auschwitz-Birkenau and Flossenbürg concentration camps. His story offers a powerful and deeply personal insight into the persecution of Sinti and Roma under National Socialism as well as the subsequent, decades-long, struggle for recognition of the status of the Roma victims of Nazi genocide.

In this episode we are joined by Karola Fings, historian at the Research Centre on Antigypsyism at Heidelberg University. She researches the Nazi persecution of Sinti and Roma and was the initiator and head of the project “Encyclopaedia of the Nazi Genocide of the Sinti and Roma in Europe.” She is also a member of the German delegation to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA).

 Featured guest: 

Karola Fings (Research Centre on Antigypsyism, Heidelberg University). Podcast host: Lovro Kralj. 

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• Andy Clark, Podcastmaker, Studio Lijn 14 

In this episode, podcast host Lovro Kralj talks with Théophile Leroy about an object gone missing; a beautiful pair of earrings. This piece of jewellery can be seen on photographs of a Sinti woman called Pauline Eckstein, wearing them in her ears. During her wartime plight, the earrings went missing, lost or stolen.

Pauline Steinberger was born on 13 October 1886 in Seebronn, Germany, to parents who were of Sinti background. Her father was an itinerant musician. When she was 21, she was married to Christian Eckstein and had her first child. Together with Christian she would have seven children, most of whom were adults when the war started. Christian died in 1938.

Pauline was evacuated, with some of her children, in 1939 during the demarcation of the western border, but in the spring of 1940, she returned to Karlsruhe.

There, she and five of her children were taken by police forces in May 1940 to the Hohenasperg fortress. After some time, they were deported by train along with other Roma and Sinti to occupied Poland, where they were interned in various camps and performed forced labor.

Three of Pauline’s daughters died in the camps, she herself survived the Sinti and Roma genocide and returned, with her son, to Karlsruhe. During the process of applying for reparations claim (Wiedergutmachung), she died in 1949.

Featured guest:

Théophile Leroy is an historian who recently defended his doctoral dissertation on the persecution of Sinti in the Rhineland area during the Second World War. He is currently a lecturer at the Strasbourg University, and he has also worked as a researcher collecting oral and written testimonies in France. Podcast host is Lovro Kralj.

Théophile tells the story of Pauline Eckstein and the lost earrings. 

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• Andy Clark, Podcastmaker, Studio Lijn 14 

In this episode, we focus on the photograph of a wedding which, at first glance, captures a moment of joy. However, behind it lies a far more complex and painful story. Through this photograph, taken in the Romanian town of Pitești in 1941, we uncover the story of a Roma family whose lives were shattered during the Second World War. The family was torn apart by war and deportations to Transnistria, the territory between the Dniester and the Bug where tens of thousands of Roma were sent to die.

We are joined by Petre Matei, a researcher at the Elie Wiesel National Institute for the Study of the Holocaust in Romania. In his research, he has conducted numerous oral history interviews with Roma and Jewish survivors and published widely on the Roma genocide, including as coordinator of a project documenting the testimony of Roma survivors of the deportations to Transnistria.

Featured guest:

Petre Matei (Elie Wiesel National Institute for the Study of the Holocaust in Romania). Podcast host: Lovro Kralj.

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• Andy Clark, Podcastmaker, Studio Lijn 14 

In this episode, we look at a memorial erected in 1977 at the local graveyard near Hrastina in northern Croatia.  The memorial is dedicated to a group of Roma and Sinti victims who were killed by the local Croatian fascists, Ustašas, on the night of 24-25 April 1945. This is among the last mass killings of Roma and Sinti in Europe during the Second World War, as the massacre took place only days before the end of the war. However, for decades, the events in Hrastina, as well as the monument itself, were a subject of misremembrance since the identities of both the victims as well as the perpetrators was obfuscated. The monument was dedicated to those who were “racially and politically” persecuted without stating that they were Roma and Sinti, and the crime was attributed to the SS rather than the Ustašas. This episode unpacks the massacre in Hrastina and how the subsequent misremembrance of its victims and perpetrators evolved.

We are joined by Danijel Vojak, a historian and Scientific adviser specializing in the history of the Roma in Croatia and Southeast Europe. Based at the Institute of Social Sciences Ivo Pilar in Zagreb, his research focuses on the genocide of Roma in the Independent State of Croatia. Over the course of his career, he has published extensively on the persecution of Roma and helped open new avenues of research into this often-overlooked history. 

Featured guest:

Danijel Vojak (Institute for Social Sciences Ivo Pilar, Zagreb). Podcast host: Lovro Kralj.

Daniel will talk about the memorial and the misremembrance surrounding it.

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• Andy Clark, Podcastmaker, Studio Lijn 14 

Podcast host Lovro Kralj talks to Milovan Pisarri, who discovered the small document that is the centre piece of this episode. Milovan is a researcher at the Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory in Belgrade, Serbia.

This paper slip contains a declaration, in Serbian, that a woman called Milica Glišić was removed from the “Gypsy list.” 

On the reverse of the slip, a four-word sentence in German accompanied by a date reads: “Aus dem Lager 12.II.1942 entlasse” (“Released from the camp on 12 February 1942”). It is signed by the camp commandant Andorfer, SS Untersturmführer.

Milica Glišić was a 25-year-old Romani woman with an eight-year-old son. Together with approximately 600 other Romani women and children, she had been interned in the Judenlager Sajmište in Belgrade in mid-December 1941. 

The small note saved Milica’s life.

The document is preserved in the Yugoslav archives alongside other similar records that enabled numerous Romani women and children to be released from the camp and to return to their homes, places that were looted and empty. The men had been killed a few months earlier by the Wehrmacht in mass executions.

Featured guests:

Milovan Pisarri is a researcher at the Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory in Belgrade, Serbia. Podcast host is Lovro Kralj.

Milovan will tell the story of Milica Glišić and the piece of paper that saved her life. 

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• Andy Clark, Podcastmaker, Studio Lijn 14 

The final episode of the third series of the EHRI podcast takes a step back to look at micro-archives in a more general sense. In keeping with our theme, however, we also focus on an object that teaches us more about the Holocaust. An object that represents both the richness of sources that can be found in micro-archives and the challenges that those working with them face. 

Our object of focus is a black and white photograph, depicting a group of prisoners dressed in the distinctive striped uniforms of Nazi concentration camps and walking along a corridor of barbed wire fencing. In the photograph, there is a woman in the fourth row from the front, circled in yellow. The woman’s name is Suzana Schossberger (Šosberger), and the photograph was taken by a Soviet military officer when Auschwitz was liberated in January 1945. Her son Mirko Stefanović remembers that his mother kept the photograph on a bookshelf in the living room, unframed and turned around. Mirko recalls how he never spoke to his mother about her imprisonment in Auschwitz even though she never tried to hide her experience and wore her tattooed prisoner number visibly. 

The photograph came to the attention of Dr. Dora Komnenović, our guest for this episode, following a call launched by the Jewish Community of Novi Sad in preparation for the workshop "Archival Basics: A Hands-On Workshop for Micro-Archives”. This workshop was one of the several EHRI workshops for micro-archives organized by the German Federal Archives and other EHRI partners.  Mirko answered the call almost immediately to contribute his mother’s remarkable photograph. He did this, as he explains in the testimony we hear in the episode, because of the responsibility he feels as part of the generation of survivors’ children to help preserve the memory of the Holocaust for the future. The photograph is important not only because of its subject matter, but because it represents the challenging first step towards building relationships with non-traditional archives. In the further exchanges Dora had with Mirko, she also found out about an oral testimony that Mirko's mother gave to Yad Vashem in the 1990s. Mirko explained that he only listened to his mother’s testimony after her death and that he was not comfortable sharing it. This highlights the complex and emotionally charged nature of collecting such archival material from individuals and the relatives of survivors. 

Suzana Schossberger was born and lived in Novi Sad, Serbia. She was the co-owner of a knitwear factory when, in April 1944, she was deported to Auschwitz along with her infant son, Andrija Schossberger and her father, Mirko Erdeš. Andrija and Mirko were sent directly to the gas chambers upon arrival and were murdered. Her husband, Tibor Schossberger, died of typhus as a prisoner of war.

Suzanna was selected by Mengele as a subject for experimentation. She was kept for some months in the hospital and subjected to unimaginable horrors before she could escape to the wider barracks where she managed to remain until the camp was liberated by Soviet soldiers in January 1945. 

Dr. Dora Komnenovic is a research associate at the Leibniz Centre for Contemporary History in Potsdam and an employee of the Federal Archives/Stasi Records Archive in Berlin. Podcast host is Katharina Freise.

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• Andy Clark, Podcastmaker, Studio Lijn 14 

In this podcast episode, we learn about a remarkable manuscript that survived the Holocaust and was later discovered to be the work of one of the most interesting modern creators of Hebrew literature in the 20th century: David Vogel. The manuscript is made up of pages upon pages of miniscule, uniform handwriting and was hidden by Vogel in the back garden of the boarding house in Hauteville, France where he was staying before his arrest by the Gestapo in 1944. Vogel was murdered in Auschwitz concentration camp at the age of 52, but his writings and the story of his life live on to inspire, inform and commemorate the turbulent 1930s in Europe.  

 Vogel was born in Staniv in the Podolia region in 1891, then in the Russian empire and today in Ukraine. He moved to Vilnius, where he attended yeshiva, and then in 1912 to Vienna - the center of literature and culture during the Fin de siècle. At the beginning of the First World War Vogel was imprisoned in Vienna – and not for the last time in his short life - as he was considered a subject of an enemy country; Russia. He met and married Ada Nadler, with whom he had one daughter, Tamara. In 1925 they moved to Paris, the city of lights that beckoned him and the literary and artistic people of its time.  

We are joined in this episode by Amir Ben-Amram, archivist at The Gnazim Institute of the Hebrew Writers Association, the largest Hebrew literature archive in the world, who will talk us through the fascinating journey behind this discovery. From the manuscript's burial in Hauteville, France, we follow its voyage across Europe and the sea to America, passing through the hands of Vogel's close friend, and painter, Avraham Goldberg, to Shimon Halkin, writer and poet and finally to Asher Barash, chairman of the Hebrew Writers' Association and founder of the Gnazim Archive, where it found its final resting place. The manuscript is now part of the collection of The Gnazim Institute of the Hebrew Writers Association.

Featured guests: 

Amir Ben-Amram is an archivist at the Gnazim Institute of the Hebrew Writers Association. Podcast host is Katharina Freise. 

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• Andy Clark, Podcastmaker, Studio Lijn 14 

In this episode, a lost letter tells the extraordinary story of Tommy Benford Junior, a baby boy born in Paris in 1939 and saved by the incredible bravery of a Dutch woman called Truus Wijsmuller.  To look at, the letter is simple, and formally written, but it contains a father's desperate plea to save his son.   

Tommy Benford Junior was born in Paris in 1939. His father was an accomplished American jazz drummer, and his mother, Sophia Mezzaro, was a dancer, singer and pianist from Vienna. Sophia died giving birth to their son in 1939, and Thomas Benford Senior was left unable to care for him and work to provide a living for them both. Poor economic conditions after the outbreak of war and the threat of fascism spreading across Europe meant that Tommy's father needed to return with his band to the US and couldn't take his son with him. Unwilling to leave Europe without knowing that his son was in safe hands, Tommy Benford Senior wrote to the American Consulate in Paris, which led to Tommy Junior being collected by Truus, who agreed to take 14-month year old Tommy Junior from Paris to Amsterdam, where she personally cared for him for 9 weeks.   

 Joining us to tell this story are Jessica van Tijn and Pamela Sturhoofd, directors of the documentary Truus’ Children, and founders of the Truus Wijsmuller Archives. Their documentary not only brings to light the incredible bravery of Truus Wijsmuller, who was leading the efforts of the "Kindertransport" that saved the  lives of more than 10,000 children during the Second World War, but also captures the moment that Tommy Benford Junior read the letter from his father to Mrs Wijsmuller, and learnt the truth about the efforts that went into saving his life.  In addition to speaking to Tommy Benford Junior, Sturhoofd and van Tijn were able to speak to 23 people who were saved as children by Truus Wijsmuller in the process of making their documentary. Since it’s completion, they’ve met a further 3.  

Featured guests: 

Jessica van Tijn and Pamela Sturhoofd, are directors of the documentary Truus’ Children, and founders of the Truus Wijsmuller Archives. Podcast host is Katharina Freise. 

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• Andy Clark, Podcastmaker, Studio Lijn 14