Staging Genocide: Theatrical Remembering of the Romani Holocaust

This article explores performance-centred efforts to remedy the erasure of Romanies from public Holocaust narratives. ¹ During the Third Reich, Nazis targeted Romanies for genocide, a fact that has been largely downplayed and misconstrued by various European states and institutions. ² The lack of knowledge about Romani persecution during the Holocaust is often framed as the ‘forgotten’ or ‘unknown’ Holocaust, descriptors that inaccurately portray the suppression of history as a nameless and agent-less cultural phenomenon. In reality, this silencing has always had an agent, and it contributes to ongoing racism faced by Romanies across the world. In response, Romani artists have engaged in public-facing projects that criticize mainstream Holocaust historiographies and anti-Romani racism more broadly. This article examines two theatrical productions, one French and one Romanian, both of which engage in such work to develop anti-racist counter-narratives.

Siv B. Lie explores the French play Samudaripen (premiered in Strasbourg in 2010), which uses aesthetic strategies that emphasize themes of violence and rupture in order to evoke the brutality of Romani persecution under Nazi and Vichy regimes. French anti-Romani legislation from the early twentieth century enabled the smooth implementation of Romani internment camps, deportations to concentration camps, and further genocidal decrees under Nazi occupation and Vichy rule during the Second World War. By juxtaposing sound art, music, verbal narrative, dance, and visual imagery in provocative ways, Samudaripen challenges erasures perpetuated by French institutions. With its performative elisions between Romani experiences in internment camps in France and concentration camps abroad, the play connects both historically-specific and fictionalized instances of Romani trauma to broader patterns of anti-Romani persecution past and present.

Ioanida Costache analyses Kali Traš (‘Black Fear’), a Romanian-Romani language theatre piece that premiered in Bucharest in 2018. Kali Traš uses the medium of theatre to relay the story of the Romani deportations to camps in Romania in the region of Transnistria under the rule of Romanian fascist dictator Ion Antonescu. The play highlights the persecution Romani people faced in Romania both before and during the Second World War. Unlike Samudaripen, which incorporates survivor experiences from various groups, Kali Traš limits its scope to the Romanian-Romani experience of the deportations, drawing dramaturgically on source materials from Romanian-Romani survivors. Moreover, the aesthetic and cultural modes of expression featured in the production – both in terms of music and theatrical arts – are specific to Romanian Roma. Like Samurdipen, Kali Traš pushes back against the silencing of the Romani genocide by reinvigorating the counter-history of the Romani Holocaust through a theatrical production that is both informative and affectively compelling.

Each play under discussion proclaims Romani agency in commemorative contexts through various modes of representation. This article ultimately assesses the extent to which these works constitute valuable additions to Romani struggles for recognition and reparations.

Racial Violence, Past and Present, in Samudaripen

Samudaripen begins before the curtain rises. As audience members filter into the auditorium, they are greeted with an upbeat performance of jazz manouche, also known as Gypsy jazz, by three dapper-looking musicians. ³ The musicians are dressed and coiffed smartly, with lively expressions on their faces as they perform. Once they wrap up and disappear backstage, the stage lights go down. A 1940s newsreel glorifying French industry is projected for a couple of minutes and then appears to burn up on the reel. Suddenly, audience members are jolted into an altogether different scene: a Nazi concentration camp where Romanies (represented by hip hop dancers in prison stripes) are held. A few minutes into the show, the musicians reappear in the same uniforms as the dancers and remain an intermittent presence, perched above and to stage right of the play's central action.

As Mickael Stoll, the Manouche choreographer of Samudaripen and brother of the guitarists in the band, explained in an interview with Lie, the musicians’ initial appearance is meant to represent the Nazi practice of assembling prisoners to stage musical performances. ⁴ While at first, the innocuous opening concert appears external to the frame of the play, its inclusion as part of the play’s narrative becomes clearer when the musicians are revealed to be prisoners themselves. Samudaripen’s non-Romani artistic director and dramaturge, Yan Gilg, told Lie that this pre-show concert was also meant to index the present-day circumstances of Manouches, often adored for their music but targeted for racial discrimination:

People will say, ‘that’s great, that’s wonderful, I love jazz manouche, it’s amazing’. But they have no idea what [Manouches] live like in reality, what they return to afterward. And then, some person who adores jazz manouche, who prays in church, might vote for [the right-wing party] the Front National, ⁵ or maybe he’ll say, ‘they’re too much, they don’t respect the law, they are impossible to assimilate’. ⁶

Such dissonance is not only musical. Samudaripen weaves together jazz manouche with electronic music, unsettling sound effects, hip hop dance, slam poetry, jarring visual imagery, and other storytelling techniques into a purposefully incohesive narrative. As musicologist Maria Cizmic argues with regard to artistic representations of trauma, ‘fragmentation and repetition’ allow a work ‘to bear witness to the disruptive effects of trauma’. ⁷ Following Cizmic, this section explores how the multimodal poetics of Samudaripen underscore the necessarily fragmented nature of traumatic memory. The play's approach ultimately aims to foreground the continuity of anti-Romani racism in France between the Nazi era and the present day.

Although anti-Romani discrimination in France stretches back centuries, it was formalized in the early twentieth century through legislation that created a new category of citizens: nomades. This legislation targeted Romanies on the basis of their ostensibly innate deviancy, imputed criminal intentions to them, and imposed onerous regulations. ⁸ Nomades were required to carry identification booklets that detailed numerous physical attributes and to check in frequently with the police. Despite its obvious racial overtones, proponents of this policy claimed that it regulated the supposedly asocial behaviour of Romanies and was thus not race-based per se. ⁹ As Denis Peschanski explains, anti-nomade legislation laid the groundwork for the Vichy government to set increasingly repressive decrees, starting in 1940, that assumed Romanies posed a threat to the integrity of French society. ¹⁰ Unlike Romanies in many other Nazi-occupied territories, most French Romanies were not officially ordered to extermination camps, ¹¹ though several hundred were deported to Auschwitz. ¹² Some internment camps operated until 1946, well after the war ended, and Romanies were among the last populations to be freed. ¹³

Once liberated, many Romanies were forbidden from leaving the commune to which they had been assigned, or they discovered that their homes had been raided and all their possessions stolen. ¹⁴ They had to rebuild their lives from little or nothing. A large proportion became sedentary due to fears of arrest for travelling, lack of resources to continue their prior mobility, and/or hopes of finding new opportunities for education and work. ¹⁵ Some took up residence in rudimentary shacks on urban peripheries or parked their caravans more or less permanently. ¹⁶ Manouche internment survivor Raymond Gurême writes of his family's experience, ‘We never managed to get back on our feet, and this social degradation was only one of many traumas of the internment that scarred many generations’. ¹⁷

Indeed, the intergenerational effects of post-internment disenfranchisement, both social and material, are still present across many Romani communities throughout France. Among minoritized groups, Romanies are the ‘least tolerated’ in France and face barriers to political and economic inclusion. ¹⁸ To add insult to injury, the French state has made it nearly impossible for Romanies to apply for reparations that other categories of internees have received more readily. ¹⁹ Reforms to anti-nomade legislation between the 1960s and the 2010s provided incremental concessions to mobile French Romanies, yet the legislation remains repressive. ²⁰ Despite the painstaking scholarly work that has been undertaken on French Romani internment and deportation over the past several decades, French institutions continue to ignore or downplay this history. Only in 2016 did a French president officially acknowledge and apologize for the treatment of Romanies under the Vichy government. ²¹ The trauma of the Nazi era is still a sensitive topic for many French Romanies who endured it, as well as for their family members, and a sense of ambivalence about how to properly acknowledge and seek amends for Romani suffering remains potent within their communities.

The creators of Samudaripen were well aware of these injustices when they began work on the play, though their initial inspiration lay elsewhere. Stoll met Gilg in the early 1990s when Gilg, then an employee at a cultural centre in Strasbourg, encouraged him to pursue dance as a career. Stoll then went on to form his own dance company and tour internationally. In 2006, he joined Mémoires Vives and proposed a show that would bring together jazz manouche and hip hop dance. Gilg was intrigued, but he told Stoll that in line with Mémoires Vives’ artistic mission, the show needed to be historically-grounded and oriented towards social justice for minoritized groups. As Gilg told Lie, ‘We looked at the Jewish and Israelite community, and we saw how they had done this memorialization work with the Holocaust. … This work on persecution and genocide allowed it to become an established, respected community. And we asked ourselves, why isn’t it the same for Romanies?’ Stoll said that, with this vision in mind, he thought that ‘it was the moment to speak out about [the war], seeing as how all the [Manouche] elders had mostly passed away, so they couldn’t speak about it. [Samudaripen] is in honour of them, to sort of reconstruct all that they endured’. ²²

The play’s creators thus sought to depict what happened in internment and extermination camps, both in order to educate audiences and to pay respect to victims and survivors. Gilg took some creative liberties in constructing the play's narrative, drawing on a variety of literary sources and combining the experiences of Romanies in French internment camps with those in camps abroad. Many of the spoken portions, recited by Gilg and representing the viewpoints of anonymous Romanies, were based on unpublished survivor testimonies collected by French Romani performer Zsa Zsa Brinzwiska. ²³ Gilg based his own understanding of life in the camps largely on two works, L’espèce humaine by Robert Antelme and L’univers concentrationnaire by David Rousset. ²⁴ Although these works do not address the experiences of Romanies specifically in the camps, Gilg said that the experiences among inmates of various backgrounds must have been quite similar:

I decided that there wasn’t much of a difference between life for a deported Jew, or for a deported homosexual, or for a deported Communist. They were all untermenschen, and when you dehumanize [a person], you make an animal out of a human being. So they were all hungry, they were all scared, it was the same. … We compared what was said [during that period] about Gypsies, and what was said about Jews, and it’s the same phrases. ‘Parasites’, ‘vermin’. ²⁵

Stoll and Gilg attributed this capacious narrative approach to the fact that there were far fewer testimonies from Romani survivors available to them than from other survivors, and an especially small amount from Manouche survivors – a lack they said was due in part to certain Manouche customs that constrain open discussion about past traumas and the deceased. Considering these circumstances, Stoll in particular wanted to inspire young Manouches to learn about their own history. He told Lie that today's Manouche youth ‘don’t know their culture. They think that it's all about jazz, or something else’, adding that an initiative like Samudaripen was necessary ‘to give them the knowledge of where they came from, their identity’. ²⁶ In other words, he suggested that Manouches cannot understand their own ‘identity’ – which, he implied, they otherwise conceive of primarily in terms of musical entertainment – without coming to grips with the trauma their forbears endured. He thought that by representing this trauma explicitly, Samudaripen could catalyse an interest among these youth in learning more about the Nazi era and their families’ implication in this history.

Noting that he was disappointed in the widespread political apathy he observed among Manouche youth, Stoll further hoped that Samudaripen would inspire them to become politically active on behalf of their communities. While Stoll aimed primarily to address Manouches who might otherwise be hesitant to speak out, Gilg's focus was more on critiquing the French state and its role in sustaining racial prejudice. As he told Lie, Mémoires Vives ‘is a company that works to deconstruct myths, because France constructed a national myth that allowed the Republic to unify all the populations living on its soil. The problem is that this myth excluded singularities, it excluded [entire] populations’. ²⁷ This exclusion has had devastating consequences for France's non-white populations, including Romanies, who are targets of ‘color-blind racism’ for their ostensible resistance to assimilation into the French nation. ²⁸ Drawing parallels between anti-Romani racism and Islamophobia in France, Gilg said that he sought to underscore the hypocrisy of this ‘national myth’ of universal citizenship and the racism that permeates French society. He expressed frustration not only towards the state, but also towards ‘researchers and historians who refuse to recognize the term “genocide”’ with respect to Romanies during the Second World War, arguing that such recognition (broadly speaking) would mark a step towards meaningful inclusion for one of France's numerous minoritized populations. ²⁹

Samudaripen aims to challenge both the silence of the state and the reticence of some Manouches through its fragmented storyline and aesthetics. The play unfolds as a series of episodes depicting violence against Romanies in Nazi and Vichy camps. The stage is most often very dark, with spotlights highlighting where action occurs, and sparse: wooden structures evoke the architecture of a camp, including a barbed wire fence across the front of the stage. The three musicians from the show's opening remain on a platform to stage right throughout the play, while four dancers use the entirety of the main stage floor. Gilg performs the role of narrator, speaking from different locations onstage. Performers wear striped prison uniforms that include the brown triangle badge Nazis used to designate a Romani inmate, as well as each prisoner's number stitched just below the badge.

Segments involving dance and ‘slam-rap’, a French version of slam poetry, are set to live and/or pre-recorded music as well as other sound effects. No scene lasts more than a few minutes before it is interrupted by the blast of a siren and the sounds of whistles, guards shouting, dogs barking, and general commotion, sounds to which the audience might become inured as they are repeated throughout the performance. As these sounds erupt, a spotlight beams on the dancers and they line up shoulder to shoulder, facing the audience, at attention. After a few seconds, the transition into the next scene begins. Audience members might then see dancers chased by police and thrown onto trains, reminiscences of life before the war, recitations of anti-Romani propaganda, a dream sequence of liberation, or other instances of senseless camp brutality. Each scene differs in its composition and emphasis of elements so that spoken word, dance, music, and/or other sonic effects may be foregrounded at any given time.

Such violent transitions between scenes are one way in which Samudaripen enacts its fragmented motif. Gilg told Lie that:

there is no story, because in a concentration camp, I don’t think you can construct a story. … [The text is] rupture all the time. You want to have a story of friendship, and it's cut off by the call, by blows, by violence. A love story, it's cut off. A meal, it's broken, it's cut off. All is constantly in rupture.

The spoken text is thus episodic, impressionistic, and not united by a strongly identifiable narrative thread, with the highly punctuated prosody of slam poetry emphasizing this sense of rupture. Gilg described the effect he strove for as being ‘eaten’ at every scene. ³⁰

Rupture operates within scenes, as well. Whereas some of the choreography is fluid and ballet-like, Stoll said that ‘there are some effects of contraction and pulsation … so that we could express [a sense of] unease’. ³¹ The incorporation of popping, and to some extent locking, dance moves help to evoke a sense of disjointedness. ³² The mechanical qualities of these movements suggest that the prisoners are deprived of their humanity, while at some points, the dancers tremble as if to confirm that there remains some life within their hollow bodies. Gilg says that this choreography conveys ‘how the bodies break themselves, how they are shattered, the violence of the body pinned to the ground’.

One scene that incorporates these choreographic strategies with other expressions of rupture depicts mealtime in a camp. On a chair in the centre of the stage sits the camp's cook, played by Gilg. Multiple sounds filter in one after another: the flutter of a film reel turning, a recorded piano repeating a quick and jaunty descending line, and two of the musicians onstage playing a sustained chord at a lively tempo. One guitarist performs a virtuosic yet easy-going improvisation over this chord. As these sounds cue in, the cook mechanically bangs together two empty soup cups on the downbeats, wobbling his head and shoulders erratically and swaying his body stiffly. The incongruence between the irregularity of his bodily movements and the consistency of his cup-clapping make for a dissonant focal point, while to stage left, the four dancers perform a dynamic and desperate mealtime routine. The dancers attempt to line up, glancing eagerly ahead of each other, throwing each other out of line, pushing, pulling and reaching, all towards a cook who continues clapping indifferently.

After about two minutes of this, a person offstage whistles, signalling the musicians to stop and the sound recording to cut out. The dancers halt in line, and the live musicians pick up again with a gentle shuffle, one guitarist improvising deftly over the steady and understated accompaniment. One by one, as the prisoners approach the cook to receive their rations, he snarls at each of them. Upon receipt, each prisoner steals away to his own part of the stage and drinks his soup covetously. The dancers scramble around the stage, each one leaping, twirling, and pausing in efforts to prevent the others from stealing his soup. Meanwhile, the cook begins his ‘slam’, describing myths about Romanies during Biblical times:

The legend I prefer, it’s the one that says that during the crucifixion, a Gypsy is supposed to have stolen the fourth nail —

Once more, a dancer falls, everything halts, and the cook puts the second cup on his right shoulder. The ensemble resumes again, this time with the dancers appearing to listen fleetingly to the cook’s words instead of focusing entirely on defending the rations that remain.

Here, the cook stands up and takes another prisoner’s cup, placing it against his heart.

The cook turns around and exits to the rear of the stage. The dancers continue to fumble around for a few seconds in pursuit of the last cup when all of a sudden comes the shriek of whistles, dogs, and human shouts, and the scene is over.

Stoll said that this scene was inspired by a story he and Gilg had read in which some bread was thrown into the hallway of a camp, causing the inmates to fight over it. Stoll recounted, ‘We transcribed it our way, and at the end we say, ‘why are we fighting?’ [To show] to what point a person can go when he’s deprived of something, when he's made to need something’. ³³ The prisoners’ nearly animalistic conduct is a foil to the musicians’ tranquil accompaniment and the cook's contemplative soliloquy. The narration of myths within this one scene also contrasts with the play's overall lack of narrative, but even here, the cook's speech is repeatedly interrupted by the prisoners’ famished frenzy.

This scene’s spoken references to ‘Gadjé’ (a term primarily used by Romanies to refer to non-Romanies, though it may be used by non-Romanies as well) in general and the stories they tell about Romanies underscore the banal essentialization and the blatant dehumanization Romanies endure, both within the scene and beyond it. The cook refers not to one particularly bigoted group of Gadjé, but to Gadjé broadly speaking, perhaps as a way of pointing to those who may not engage directly in such discriminatory actions but whose inaction and tacit acceptance of hateful myths enables anti-Romani prejudice to persist.

Towards the very end of the play, the dancers shift abruptly to a jubilant dance while the live musicians accompany them with an upbeat jazz manouche tune. The dancers strike a pose together in which one appears to be caught mid-leap, chest up and arms outstretched, supported by the other dancers. As they freeze, the music cuts out and a canned voice announces joyfully that the war is over and democracy has prevailed. The dancers slowly lower themselves as the lights go down and a series of archival clips, likely dating from the 1970s through at least the 1990s, are projected in quick succession. Several clips show white Alsatians repeating racist tropes about Manouches and threatening violence against them. One extended clip draws from a television report about a Manouche settlement in a small Alsatian village which some of the village's inhabitants, including its mayor, have set on fire. ³⁴ Another clip shows Dominique Leclerc, a French senator, speaking on the floor of the senate in 2002 during a debate about a law concerning the country's interior security. Leclerc says adamantly that Romanies ‘are the plague of tomorrow, because these are people who, tomorrow, will pose an enormous problem to us. These are people who are asocial, primitive’. ³⁵ Yet another clip shows a man saying, ‘We find ourselves with people who kill, who steal, with an extraordinary aggressiveness, who subject their own children to the threat that they have no choice but to prostitute themselves or to steal. The whole family admits it! The whole Romani community is like that!’ After these clips, the stage lights slowly come back up as Gilg begins a soliloquy addressed directly to Gadjé: ‘But we [Romanies] have always been free. And each time that we are no longer free, it's never of our own will. It's always the fault of you, you Gadjé’.

This closing scene presents an obvious contrast between the jubilant announcement of Allied victory over fascism and the racism Romanies have continued to endure in the following decades. It manifests the critique of French republicanism that Gilg has called a ‘national myth’, one that proclaims equality among citizens but excludes minoritized populations by design. The video clips, whether decades-old or more recent, resonate closely with the contemporary anti-Romani prejudice that some in the audience would likely recognize. Romani audience members are interpellated as ‘the plague of tomorrow’ – they are part of the future generations to which the politician's tirade refers – and not the full French citizens that republicanism has, in theory, promised they would be. By this point in the play, it is clear that its primary addressees are Gadjé who remain complicit in the continued oppression of France's Romani populations, but this interpellation of Romani spectators also enacts Stoll's goal to inspire young Manouches to become politically involved. While much of the play foregrounds the necessarily fragmented nature of traumatic memory through its jarring aesthetics and relatively incongruous storyline, it drives home the continuity of anti-Romani racism in the present, calling on its audience to recognize both the historical precedents for such violence and the need to take action.

Representing the Genocide of Romanian Roma in Kali Traš

As in France, Romanian institutions overwhelmingly neglect the Romani Holocaust experience in public discourses, Holocaust historiography, and various forums for commemoration. ³⁶ Roma lack access to the channels and resources through which historical narratives are normally shaped, an epistemic inequality that has to do in part with the privileging of written sources over oral ones. Moreover, Roma have been systematically excluded from institutional participation, so the collective memory of the Romani Holocaust has been virtually non-existent in the public sphere.

It is in this social and political landscape that Kali Traš comes to life, making a significant and deeply necessary intervention. Kali Traš premiered on 8 June 2018 as the first theatrical production developed in Romania about the Romani Holocaust. ³⁷ The theatre company Giuvlipen, Romania's first and only Romani feminist theatre company, partnered with the Jewish State Theatre to produce the play. ³⁸ The pathbreaking company's broad-ranging repertoire tackles both contemporary and historical subjects, centring themes of intersectionality, systemic racism, gender politics, women's rights, Eurocentrism and Roma Futurism. ³⁹ Giuvlipen aligns itself with political theatre and maintains a contemporary and experimental aesthetic in its work.

Kali Traš (lit. ‘Black Fear’) is a Romani-language term that some Romani people have given to the genocide of Roma during the Second World War. Between 1942 and 1944, 25,000 Roma were deported to Transnistria, representing approximately 12 per cent of the Romanian Romani population at the time. ⁴⁰ Transnistria, a region between the Dniester and Bug rivers, was one of the largest sites of Romani genocide during the Second World War and is colloquially referred to as the ‘Romanian Auschwitz’. ⁴¹ Roma were often lied to upon deportation and told that they would be given homes in Transnistria with fertile land to cultivate. Instead, after a perilous journey by train and on foot, prisoners were housed in dilapidated collective farms (kolkhozes) in rudimentary shacks (bordei), vacant barracks, stables, or seized Ukrainian cottages. ⁴² Living conditions were miserable: prisoners who worked as forced labour were only given small rations of food, and hunger and disease claimed the lives of many. Those who attempted to flee were beaten or even shot. Thus the Transnistrian camps, which were administered by the Romanian government, were in fact sites of genocide. ⁴³ Antonescu, an ally and sympathizer of Nazi Germany, explained that in ordering the deportations, he sought to enact ‘the policy of purification of the Romanian race’, insisting that he ‘[would] not give way before any obstacle in achieving this historical goal of our nation’. ⁴⁴ By the end of the war, only 11,000 Roma had survived the deportations. ⁴⁵

Kali Traš depicts the specific experience of Romani internment in Transnistria. In this section, Costache shows that the play connects anti-Romani racism across historical periods. The play's creators aim to trace a through line between past historical persecution and contemporary discrimination against Roma, but unlike Samudaripen, the play itself does not weave recent examples of racism into the narrative of the play. Rather, it relies on the audience to make those connections. Above all, Kali Traš aims to sensitize audience members to the intersectional forms of persecution that Roma have long faced while providing a model for the transformation of public memory.

As Mihaela Drăgan, one of the founding members of Giuvlipen, explained to Costache, Kali Traš is a ‘ground-breaking project for the Roma minority’, as it is the first time Roma ‘speak in a theatre piece about the Roma Holocaust in Romania’. It was important for Drăgan and the rest of Giuvlipen that Romani epistemologies – meaning Romani perspectives and ways of knowing – feature prominently in the source materials used for research and dramaturgy. The script, written by Drăgan and Mihai Lukács in consultation with Romani scholar Adrian Nicu Furtună, is a free adaptation of Romani author Valerica Stănescu's novel With Death in My Eyes (Cu moartea’n ochi). ⁴⁶ It also incorporates individual Romani survivor testimonies and work by famed Romani poet Bronislawa Wajs (better known as Papusza), as well as texts by journalist Alexandru Sahia and writer Zaharia Stancu.

The creative use of these source materials helps to reconstruct a largely unrecognized narrative. In Romania, the Romani Holocaust – and Romani history more broadly – have been systematically suppressed, excluded, and marginalized to such an extent that many Roma themselves are disconnected from their own history. Drăgan, like Costache and many other Romanian Roma, had been previously unaware until adulthood that Roma were targets of genocide during the Second World War. As with Manouches in France, Romanian Romani families after the war tended not to pass on this history to younger generations. This reticence was due in part to fear of repeated persecution as well as policies of forced assimilation that sought to suppress Romani identity and history. For example, Soviet-era policies of ‘Romanianization’ discouraged Roma from speaking Romani. The censorship of public memory about the Holocaust was further buttressed by the omission of this history in school curricula and persisted in the post-Socialist context. ⁴⁷ It was not until 2004 that the Romanian government officially recognized the Romani genocide. ⁴⁸ By this point, the exclusion of Romani memory from public narratives and educational materials had become so normalized that Roma continued to shy away from speaking about their experience for fear of being reprimanded.

The widespread lack of historical awareness regarding the Roma and their persecution has resulted in an ignorance that feeds present-day anti-Romani bigotry and discrimination. As Drăgan explained in an interview, in making Kali Traš she sought not only to remedy this lack in Romanian collective understanding, but also to help audiences view contemporary treatment of Roma through a historically informed lens:

In Kali Traš we used all our artistic resources, passion, but also anger, and pain, to portray such a dark history … We wanted more than a simple presentation of the past. We wanted a show that stays in people's minds and souls for a long time to come. Although painful, we call on memory to respond to contemporary situations in the light of past experiences. We are replacing emotionally comfortable amnesia with complex answers from our recent history. ⁴⁹

Kali Traš follows a șatră, or travelling troupe of Romani theatre artists: Diloda, an actor; Șopârla, a puppeteer; Leanca, a fortune teller; and Franț, a musician, from the period before their deportation to their liberation at the end of the war. While the troupe members are played by Romani actors, the cast also includes a non-Romani actor who embodies the roles of mayor, gendarme, major and colonel. The events unfold more or less chronologically, starting in the pre-deportation period of the 1920s, though still in a fragmentary way. Each scene of the play constitutes a vignette that explicates a singular moment in the life of a particular troupe member. Such scenes introduce the audience to the everyday lives of these central characters while also depicting instances of racist mistreatment they endure prior to deportation.

At the start of the play, the audience is dropped in medias res into a scene in which the șatră is performing puppetry, music, and magic for townspeople in a village in southern Romania. We find the actors in the middle of a puppet show featuring an enslaved Romani character named Vasilake Țiganul (Vasilake the ‘Gypsy’), a popular stock character in early Romanian theatre. ⁵⁰ They perform a short scene about how the wife of Vasilake's master engages him in sexual relations, forcing him to run away or risk being castrated or killed by his master. This scene-within-a-scene sheds light on the real sexual exploitation (which more often involved Romani women) during the period of Romani enslavement in Romania until the mid-nineteenth century. After this brief performance, members of the șatră hear the hooting of an owl. They consider the birdcall a bad omen and a sign that their ambulatory theatre has been cursed and decide to burn down their caravan. As they set fire to their theatre, Leanca makes a second reference to Romani enslavement: ‘We escaped the evil boyars [wealthy slave-owners] and we’ll overcome this, too!’

These two allusions to the enslavement of Roma – Vasilake and the boyars – emplace these characters in a long history of Romani persecution stretching back centuries. Roma were enslaved in the Romanian principalities for 500 years. Following Romani liberation in 1856, the assimilation of Roma was at the forefront of Romania's modernizing project. Yet, between their emancipation and the onset of the Second World War, no policies actually facilitated Romani social or economic mobility. ⁵¹ Kali Traš's references to slavery gesture towards the recovery of this aspect of Romanian history that, like the Romani Holocaust, is widely unknown both in Romania and on an international scale. They compel the audience to understand these four characters not just as victims of genocide, but also as descendants of another form of ethno racial persecution. As such, Kali Traš critiques how a lack of historical knowledge feeds bigotry towards Roma, both historically and in more recent European conceptions about them.

The stage setting of Kali Traš, as in Samurdipen, is sparse. Instead of using the iconic imagery of barracks and barbed wire that one often finds in representations of Nazi-era concentration camps, the scenographer, Iulia Toma, chose a different visual language to represent the space of the camp. Vibrant fabrics dress an otherwise vacant stage, whose barrenness captures the infertile land to which the Romani deportees were taken. Large cloth banners that read ‘Bug’ and ‘Niester’ (the rivers that enclose the geographic region of Transnistria), as well as ‘On the Road’ and ‘In the Camp’, signal for the audience where the șatră is located geographically throughout the story. The sparse scenery works to centre the bodies of the actors on stage, focusing the audience's attention on atrocities endured by the Roma in the camps at Transnistria: dispossession, hunger, disease, starvation, and death.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

Kali Traš, Romani deportees arriving in Transnistria,

Kali Traš pulls no punches – it is shocking in its realistic portrayal of the events of the deportations and of the most violent experiences of Roma in Transnistria. It unapologetically depicts the horrors of starvation, disease, and death. In a heart-wrenching monologue, a pregnant Șopârla describes the death of her unborn child:

[The doctor] pulled the baby out of me. He took everything out of me [points to her stomach] so I won’t have any more children. The children's house that a woman has, the doctor removes it so we won’t have more children. I told the doctor: ‘Take everything out of me, because we are here to die’.

Kali Traš includes a number of songs sung by the members of the travelling troupe that, although not actually written by Romani survivors, mirror the themes, imagery, and expressivity of Romani-Romanian Holocaust survivor songs. One song performed by Franț, the musician, weaves together experiences of deportation into a powerful musical testimony that integrates the otherwise unspeakable facets of their experience of deportation, namely the reference to cannibalism in the final line:

Though Costache has encountered a few Romanian-Romani Holocaust songs, at the time of Kali Traš's production, these songs were unavailable to the creators of the play. In their absence, Giuvilipen wrote or adapted extant Holocaust songs for inclusion. One song, sung after the șatră escapes the camp, is an adaptation of a Czech Romani song ‘Aušvicate hi kher baro’, which is perhaps the most well known Romani Holocaust song. Despite the fact that Romanian-Romani Holocaust songs are not widely disseminated, the decision to incorporate music diegetically within the narrative structure of the play pays homage to the central role of music and orality in Romani culture.

Franț sings the aforementioned song ‘Bugule’ immediately following Kali Traš's most affectively dense moment, which comes about halfway through the play. The members of the șatră are starving in Transnistria, where only those who work in the fields receive a small portion of food. Hunger is a recurrent theme in Kali Traš – the characters often complain of starvation or dream of food they would like to eat. The desperation reaches its apex when the four characters turn towards the audience and beg for food.

Until this point in the play, the characters have only transgressed the invisible line between the artistry of the stage and the reality of the audience a handful of times. Here, however, the discomfort is profound as the șatră implores the audience to intervene, feed them, and relieve them of their suffering. In this scene of desperation, the characters do not just momentarily break the fourth wall; they tear it down completely, addressing the audience directly for a sustained period of time. In line with Brecht's theorization of this technique, the scene is meant to generate profound discomfort in the audience. ⁵³ Moreover, the scene forces the audience to evaluate what it means to be complicit in racial persecution. The final line Șopârla delivers –‘How much longer can I live with this death in my eyes?’ – captures the state of utter abjection, or what Agamben calls bare-life, that Romani people experienced in the camps. ⁵⁴ At the end of the scene, Șopârla dies.

This shocking moment of alienation and discomfort is foreshadowed earlier in Kali Traš, when gendarmes come to deport the șatră. During an altercation with the authorities, Franț quickly turns to the audience and says: ‘They will kill us, man! You’re just going to let them?’ Moments before Franț attempts to appeal to the audience's good will, the mayor, during the same altercation, also breaks the fourth wall and addresses the audience, imploring them to ‘Shoot at them, what are you waiting for?!’ These fleeting instances of interpellation instigate a tug-of-war over the audience's allegiance. The audience is brought into the moral dilemma of the scene and forced to consider whether they would obey the command of their superior and shoot or respond to Frant's desperate plea to save his and his family's lives. Put simply, the audience must question society's complicity in these atrocities, and, by extension, their own complicity in present-day manifestations of anti-Romani racism. It is important to note that in this scene and throughout Kali Traš, the Romani characters exhibit a resilience that challenges the idea that the Roma were passive victims. Here, Leanca interjects a powerful message of resistance to the erasure of the impending genocide: ‘Don’t worry, if we die, others of ours will be born. Our nation will not perish’.

Diloda, Șopârla, Leanca, and Franț escape Transnistria after a gendarme of Romani origin tips them off that liberation is on the horizon as ‘the Germans have lost the war’. The road back to Romania from Transnistria is tumultuous for newly liberated deportees and Diloda dies. In the final scene of the play a colonel stands centre stage, played by the same actor who has performed all the non-Romani roles in Kali Traš. He recites a speech summarizing the deportations of Roma:

Nomadic and semi-nomadic Gypsies were interned in forced labour camps. Their clothes had to be changed there; [they were] shaved, given haircuts and sterilized. In order to cover the expenses of their maintenance, they had to be put to forced labour. With the first generation we could have gotten rid of them’.

Kali Traš combats a lack of contemporary collective consciousness about the Romani Holocaust not only by creating a cultural product that tells a counter-history, but also by appealing to institutional and governmental support for the piece. Despite being an independent theatre company, Giuvlipen considers support from the Romanian government as an important reparatory measure for the Romani community, who, as Mihai Lukács has shown, laid the groundwork for modern Romanian theatre. ⁵⁷ Thus, for years Giuvlipen has been campaigning for a Roma State Theater. Kali Traš was funded in part through a governmental grant by the Administration of the National Cultural Fund, Administraţia Fondului Cultural Naţional (AFCN) through a project called ‘Roma theater is not nomadic: Memory of Transnistria’. With this funding, Giuvlipen was able to take Kali Traš on tour, performing in rural Romani communities. This facilitated a reconnection between Roma and their ethnic history, reigniting collective memory in the wake of its loss in the Romani community, while also furthering the broader educational agenda of the company.

In generating a counter-history of Romani persecution, Kali Traš stands in for the lack of historical education and collective memory of Romani persecution during the Holocaust, but it also serves as a performative and ambulatory monument for the memorialization of the deportations. Romanian Roma are not included in official ceremonies and are treated as secondary victims in many monument inscriptions, including the Holocaust Memorial in Bucharest. Furthermore, the plaque at Transnistria has not served as a true site of remembrance for the Romanian-Romani community. Kali Traš operates as a metaphorical ‘site’ of memory and mourning where Roma have the opportunity to reclaim past trauma and historicize it. ⁵⁸ As Oren Baruch Stier explains, ‘Holocaust memory matters because it is made to matter by and through cultural forms and institutions that mediate the Holocaust in the present day’. ⁵⁹ Romani Holocaust memory in Romania has ceased to ‘matter’ precisely because of the lack of frameworks – institutional, commemorative, educational, or historiographic – that would allow Romani memory to become collective memory.

Bridging Experiences of Romani Genocide

We close this article by offering some general assessments of each of these plays, separately and in comparison with each other, within broader contexts of Holocaust commemoration practices. Samudaripen represents one effort to remedy the erasure of Romani trauma in French public space. By brutally depicting the violence Romanies endured during the Second World War, the play's creators sought to raise awareness about experiences that are typically omitted from popular historical narratives and to inspire its Romani audiences to take more active roles in the shaping of these narratives. Similarly, Kali Traš also offers a counter-narrative, with the intention of shaping both public history and Romani self-knowledge about the deportations of Roma in Romania.

Similarities in the artistic approaches between Samudaripen and Kali Traš are also apparent. Both plays embody themes of fragmentation and discontinuity as affective strategies. They seek to make audiences uncomfortable through their unsettling aesthetics and their refusal to develop cohesive storylines. The creators of both plays also take liberties in representing facts about Romanies during the Second World War. Samudaripen draws liberally on Romani and non-Romani survivor testimonies and makes few clear distinctions between experiences of domestic internment and deportation, while Kali Traš centres on Romanian-Romani perspectives and borrows visual and aural imagery from other regional instances of Romani persecution. The plays thus represent works of historical fiction that elide differences between Romani experiences in specific times and locations. These reconstructive approaches are, we argue, part of strategies to make claims on different levels of European political space. The creators of these plays universalize Romani experiences of the Holocaust in order to help Romanies attain status within broader Holocaust narratives and institutions of public memory. They aim to transform ideas about Romanies as marginal to European space, as passive victims, or as uncritical and apathetic. Instead of condoning these assumptions, the plays foreground the embeddedness of Romanies within European society and their agency in constructing their own relational histories.

Some differences between each play's objectives should also be noted. Through its opening scene of contemporary jazz manouche performance, as well as the screening of post-war documentary video clips and its direct, present-tense address to the audience towards the end of the play, Samudaripen highlights the continuity of anti-Romani racism through the twenty-first century. Kali Traš, however, remains more firmly grounded in the representation of Nazi-era trauma while more subtly nodding to contemporary racism. Additionally, while Samudaripen centres on the French state and French society as primary targets of its critique, Kali Traš focuses first and foremost on reclaiming Romani history, with a less overt critique of the exclusionary biases of Romanian institutions and society. Both, nonetheless, compel their audiences to confront the histories and legacies of Nazi-era persecution.

Recent reclamations of history and of voices that have heretofore been silenced also function as proclamations of the rights of Romanies to assert their presence in society. Bringing the past into the present through commemorative artistic productions can help not only to heal past wounds, but also to empower marginalized communities to forge a more just and inclusive society for themselves. Kali Traš and Samudaripen enact radical recoveries of silenced histories by valorizing orality and performance, both traditionally Romani forms of intergenerational memory transmission. Thus, these plays assert the medium of performance as a legitimate form of recording and transmitting history.

Finally, we would like to emphasize that, with regard to public-oriented commemorations about populations against whom past atrocities continue to have real social, political, and economic effects, it is imperative to prioritize strategies for meaningful, effective change. This means going beyond just raising awareness about these under-recognized experiences of trauma. It requires taking stock of the current situations that marginalized populations are in and charting actionable ways forward. To bring about such changes demands an interrogation of the structural forces that give rise to and reproduce inequalities and hierarchies of power. In the French case, the confluence of universalist republican values and ever-more stratifying economic processes, both officially endorsed by the state, work together to perpetuate and justify the oppression of non-white peoples. In Romania, rampant anti-Romani racism, hate speech, the recent ascent of a far-right party, and the longstanding neoliberal criminalization of poverty maintain Romani abjection. Obstacles to the recognition and remediation of Romani dispossession are ever-present in these countries and elsewhere. ⁶⁰ While theatrical productions are certainly not equipped to effect such necessary changes on their own, they help catalyse the discussions that might lead to them. We remain critical of, yet hopeful for, the transformative potential of artistic productions in struggles for racial justice.