Publication |
2022
Abstract
This chapter argues that although the culture of commemoration in the contemporary Czech Republic changed significantly in 1990s, the Roma and Sinti Genocide remains starkly disconnected from local community-oriented practices of commemoration of the Second World War. In order to understand these processes, it offers a microhistorical case study.
Detailed analysis of the struggle of the extended Růžička (Roma) family to obtain social status of "decent citizens" within the small rural Czech community in Čížová (South Bohemia) between 1929 and 1947 outline the ways how the presence of Roma and Sinti were erased and silenced in the local collective memory in the aftermath of the Second World War.