Music and the Romani Holocaust

Author: FORSHV member Weeun Wang 

As part of my studies in ethnomusicology, I developed a research project aimed at promoting remembrance of Romani Holocaust victimhood through music. One of the results of that project is a website titled Music and the Romani Holocaust.

The website begins with a basic question – why is it imperative to remember Romani Holocaust victimhood? Unlike the extensively and internationally documented and commemorated Jewish genocide, there is little public awareness of the atrocities against Romani peoples. Rather, the murder of hundreds of thousands of innocent Roma and Sinti lives has been neglected, obscured, and marginalized. Little in the way of institutional effort or resources has been invested in Romani Holocaust research or commemoration. Romani survivors, their numbers dwindling, are often reticent to tell their stories for many reasons, including fear of furthering social stigmatization. The means of uncovering and documenting the full history of the Romani Holocaust is fading away over time.

A second question is then addressed – how does music contribute to remembrance? Music is a powerful vehicle for encoding, preserving, and retrieving memory. It can be greatly expressive and used to enhance, accentuate, and shape remembrances; it can stir emotions, elicit empathy, promote healing, and arouse action. The website provides insight into this power of music by featuring some tragically beautiful selections of Romani Holocaust music, including:

Aušvicate hi kher baro, possibly the most well-known song about the Romani Holocaust is based on a traditional Roma folk tune and adapted to painful and haunting lyrics about the miseries of the Auschwitz death camp.

Requiem for Auschwitz is a large scale orchestral and choral work composed by Sinto musician-composer Roger Moreno Rathgeb; it is a beautiful example of the classical requiem form, and is shown in the website as performed by the Roma und Sinti Philharmoniker Orchestra, with Chorus, conducted by Romani maestro Riccardo Sahiti.

Chajori romani is a folk standard of Roma Czech and Slovak origin sung by Romani concentration camp residents to dark “alternative” lyrics that lament the horrors and inhuman conditions forced upon them.

In outlining continuing research objectives, the website highlights a number of lesser known songs about the Holocaust attributed to Romani concentration camps, for which lyrics and English translations are presently unavailable. In the research project, these and other musics of and about the Romani Holocaust need to be systematically investigated, documented, and preserved for posterity. By helping to make Romani Holocaust music more accessible, the project seeks to make a significant contribution to memorializing such a grievously momentous part of Romani history.

Click here to view the website