International Commemoration…
and those by the late Gabrielle Tyrnauer for USHMM, Fortunoff and Concordia University. The ones that I am familiar with are simply the tips of the iceberg, and I would love to have a way of putting multiple sources of testimony and multiple interviews in conversation with one another – to be able to create a repository of Romani testimonies that could be accessed by Romani people from all over the world. These are our archives, our histories – and our legacy that to which we have access. If archives are repositories of public memory, we still have not mined our own archives, our own repositories. This conference, with its focus on intergenerational conversations, has become a site of living repositories and archives passed down through the generations – oral, embodied, relational. We can read them intimately, as stories of everyday life under genocide. We need to listen to these testimonies, oral histories and narratives, because they do tell our history. In all our diversity, one thing that Roma and Sinti share across generations, across geographies, is a narrative tradition, a transmission of history across generations and not just a respect for our elders, but a living, intimate connection with between young and old, between and among families. This is how we should think about the wealth of testimonies and oral histories that we have, that we collect and that have been recorded. How do we make them accessible? One way is to connect the history of the Romani Genocide with today’s climate of Antigypsyism. I worked on a project, “Giving Memory a Future” (http://www. romsintimemory.it/http://www.romsintimemory.it/), coordinated by the USC Shoah Foundation and The University of the Sacred Heart in Milan, that makes connections between the Nazi-period archives, testimonies by Romani survivors and testimonies, stories and documents of the violence, discrimination and racism suffered by Roma in Italy and across Europe in the current period, including the mass fingerprinting of Roma in Italy and the serial murders of Roma in Hungary in 2009. We need to make such connections, to draw on archives, to bring to light even more repositories. Need to share our resourc-
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