'Not being others' and 'Forgetting the Auschwitz Trauma' as two chosen strategies in the postwar history of a Czech-Moravian Roma family
Abstrakt
The paper presented a way of reconstructing one family story - family, which was from the reason of their origin from Czech and Moravian Roma tragically affected by the Holocaust. The main conclusion was, that in this family, after the war the most of the war events were for the new (post-war) generation hidden.
The first informant was from the third-generation survivors, after interviewing her several members of the family from the second-generation survivors were asked to say, what happened to their relatives during the war. From their answers we can understand, that the names of family's members killed in Auschwitz, as well as the Roma identity and also Romani language were not passed to the children born after the war.
The researcher described how she was (by occasion) informed about the history of family and how difficult it was to reconstruct the real story about the end of former well integrated Romani family who had lived in a small village about 30 km from Brno before the war. The methods used for this research were oral-history, interviews, seeking in archives and analyzing the memory-telling of relatives, who survived the Roma genocide (two memoirs from wider family were published 30 years ago).
This case study is an example of the effort of adult survivors to protect their children after the second-world war through- not informing about killed family members and hiding their ethnic origin, and also an example of researcher's role in reconstructing the history.