It is well known that one of the ethnic groups that were subjected to extermination due to their national origin during World War II in many parts of Europe was the Roma (Gypsies). However, scientific interest in the fate of the Roma (Gypsies) during the Nazi rule arose quite late.
The first scientific work that drew the attention of war researchers to the problem of the Roma genocide was an article in 1951 by a Jewish Holocaust survivor, historian Philip Friedman, with the paradoxical title "The Nazi Extermination of the Roma - the Nazi Genocide of the "Aryan People".
The tragedy of the Roma gained public attention only in the mid-1960s thanks to the efforts of the famous "Nazi hunter" Simon Wiesenthal, who in 1965 collected and submitted documents about this to the Central Bureau for the Investigation of Nazi Crimes in Ludwigsburg. Despite the fact that hundreds of memoirs, articles and several monographs have already been published to date, the topic remains insufficiently researched. It is significant that there are disagreements even on the conceptual question of whether the extermination of the Roma was total, carried out on the basis of racist ideology and carried out everywhere in accordance with the existing intention and the plan drawn up later, using the technical resources mobilized for this and administrative links of different levels. to achieve one goal. A positive answer to this question is given by scholars Sybil Milton, Ian Hancock. At the opposite pole, we will find the opinion expressed in the works of historians Yehuda Bauer, Michael Zimmermann, and Gunther Levi: the anti-Gypsy policy of the Nazis did not have a clearly expressed racial and ideological basis, was not the implementation of a single plan adopted for all Roma, and did not bear the features of the universal extermination of Roma.
To give a comprehensive answer, it is necessary to present a general picture of events, at a minimum - to have knowledge about the number of deaths, about the policy of the central authorities of the Third Reich and local features in its implementation. However, the regional specifics of anti-Gypsy policy have been studied extremely insufficiently. The territory of Ukraine is almost not considered in the works of foreign historians; statistics are extremely fragmentary, significant complexes of archival sources have not yet been introduced into scientific circulation, the position of various branches of the occupation administration in Ukraine on the "Gypsy question", etc. has not been studied. The main thing is that the problem of the tragic fate of the Roma, its structural similarity and fundamental differences from the policy towards other categories of the population of Ukraine is still absent as an independent scientific and research problem in Ukrainian historiography; no practical actions are being taken in Ukraine in the field of teaching and perpetuating the special fate of the people: a long period of suppression of scientific interest in the fate of various ethnic groups during the war and the occupation policy towards them is evident, which is intensified in our days by the persistent spread of mono-ethnic history in the public consciousness - and this topic still remains a "terra incognita", not attracting due attention from historians of the Second World War, remaining on the outskirts of the historical memory of Ukrainian society, and thus encountering total indifference.
By the Resolution of the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine of October 8, 2004 In Ukraine, the Day of Remembrance of the Roma Holocaust (Gypsies) was established, which falls on August 2 (the action of the extermination of Roma prisoners of the Auschwitz camp in 1944). The state of Ukraine is taking the first steps towards joining the system of events called "Decade of Roma Integration in 2005–2015" (European Roma Decade), which are implemented by the Council of Europe. However, this year no state events were planned by this date. And here (unfortunately, as in many similar ones) it is indicative how, in conditions of ignoring their direct duties by state bodies, civil society takes the initiative.
Professor, Dr. Wolfgang Wippermann (Berlin), author of the book "Shoah and Poraymos in Comparison", described the main directions of German historiography and the problems that researchers in Germany have managed to solve in recent decades. He expressed solidarity with those scholars who consider the genocide of the Roma (Gypsies) to be total and planned, and place responsibility for the Nazi anti-Roma policy not on individual segments of the Nazi state, but on the entire German society, which, in their opinion, took an active part in the genocide. The conference was then structured around three consecutive sessions, each of which, according to the organizers, was designed to highlight some of the most important aspects of the history of the Roma genocide and related contemporary issues.
Nazi policy towards the Roma in the occupied USSR. The sources brought together the speeches of researchers, which contained an analysis of the principles of occupation measures in various regions of the Soviet Union, with an indication of the general and specific between the Reichskommissariats Ostland and Ukraine, internal contradictions between branches of administration and police departments (Dr. Anton Weiss-Wendt, Oslo), the contribution of the security police structures, the Central Directorate and Wehrmacht units to the "solution" of the "Gypsy question" and statistical results of anti-Gypsy policy (PhD Oleksandr Kruglov, Kharkiv). For successful research work, the sources with which the historian works and on which he relies are of paramount importance. In this regard, special attention was paid to the documents of the Extraordinary State Commission on the Establishment of the Crimes of the German-fascist invaders and their features as a resource on the topic; Martin Holler (Berlin) analyzed the “strong” and “weak” sides of the documents of the ChGK, which must be taken into account by every researcher working on the genocide of the Roma. The features of another significant layer of documents, created, in contrast to the first, relatively recently – complex historical testimonies recorded on videotape and currently stored at the Institute of Visual History at the University of Southern California – were characterized by Anna Lenchovska (Kyiv).
Regional features of Nazi policy towards the Roma in Ukraine the thematic emphasis was transferred directly to the lands of Ukraine. The presented speeches highlighted the specific features of the policy of the occupiers in different regions of Ukraine: in Transcarpathia (Dr. of History Mai Panchuk, Kyiv), Galicia (Candidate of History Zhanna Kovba, Kyiv) and in Crimea (Mykhailo Tyagliy, Kyiv). A distinctive feature of regional studies is that with a more "large-scale" focus on the borders of one region, the researcher has the opportunity not only to trace how the local occupation administration implemented the orders coming from the imperial center, but also to introduce into scientific circulation and identify the role of local factors and local factors that often fundamentally modified the already established policy. Thus, it turns out that the fact of religious and ethnocultural proximity of a significant part of the Crimean Roma - Chingeni - to their Muslim Crimean Tatar neighbors contributed to a radical change in Nazi policy towards the Gypsies on the peninsula and allowed a significant part of the Crimean Roma to survive. We note that it is precisely in a more intensive study of regional features - while not losing sight of general patterns - that, in our opinion, the primary tasks facing domestic researchers lie.
The above research methods, for all their necessity, cannot remain the only possible ones, since they assume a view of the Roma as a faceless object of scientific description and dry analysis. Meanwhile, we are talking about people who experienced abuse, persecution, destruction... That is why the third session of the Genocide in the historical memory of the community and society again provided for a shift in the focus of the study - this time into the sphere of the personal and collective reaction of the victims. Each group experiencing persecution reacts to tragic events in accordance with the accumulated collective experience, developed in the ethnopsychological work of survival strategies, involves its own behavioral models.
It is known that over the centuries, the Roma have developed special mechanisms of relations with the authorities, which could influence the situation during the war and ensure survival. The features of the collective and personal survival strategies of the Roma describe specific patterns that distinguished, say, the reaction of the Roma from the behavior of another group that is universally persecuted - the Jews, and also summarizes the experience of treating the Roma in various situations. Another unexplored aspect is the peculiarities of the historical memory of the Roma and the degree of preservation of information about the tragedy in the post-war mass consciousness of the group, as well as the extent to which the experience determined the post-war behavior, adaptation of the Roma and their integration into society.
When studying one or another example of genocide, one cannot be limited only to a scientific, historical approach. It is obvious that mass tragedies and our understanding of these events carry a huge educational and pedagogical potential. As in the case of the Holocaust of the Jewish people, the suffering and persecution of the Roma open up many opportunities for teachers to convey universal moral and ethical issues to children, demonstrate dilemmas of moral choice, involve students in the process of empathy, and thus achieve greater effectiveness in learning. Is this potential used by the authors of Ukrainian textbooks and manuals? The answer given in the presentation by Oleksandr Voytenko, an expert from the All-Ukrainian Association of History and Social Studies Teachers “Nova Doba”, is disappointing: not only is the genocide of the group, which played a bright shade on the palette of the multinational and multicultural history of Ukraine, not represented in textbooks – it is as if the Roma did not exist at all in Ukrainian history!
Moving from specific historical issues to their refraction in the present, the participants familiarized themselves with the proposals of Serhiy Yermoshkin (Odesa), who combined the unique experience of a state official and a Roma by origin - "first-hand" reflections on the ways of further activities in the study, teaching and perpetuation of the memory of complex modern organizational and political conditions. In fact, this topic became dominant during the round table that took place later, Modern perception of the tragedy of the Roma of Ukraine during the Second World War. The role of the state and civil society in the study and perpetuation of the memory of the deceased. The most heated discussion during the round table was caused by questions about the degree of involvement in the genocide of various segments of German and Ukrainian society, about the responsibility for the memory of the genocide among contemporaries, about ways to involve the state in solving the problem of the absence of memory of the genocide in public consciousness.
Perhaps it is quite understandable that for the first time in Ukraine a conference on this topic was held by an organization that has gained some experience in organizing the study and teaching of the fate of the Jews of Ukraine during the years of Nazism. Half a century ago this happened in the West, now it is happening here. This is natural: in the field, which has stood out in recent decades as a separate complex of humanitarian disciplines, under the name Holocaust Studies, research methods and approaches have been accumulated that are used to analyze a wide variety of cases of genocide; In the case of the tragedy of the Roma, which occurred in the same geographical and chronological period, certain parallels and comparisons suggest themselves (despite the fact that, along with similar features, these phenomena also contain many differences).
It is obvious that further movement in the field of studying the fate of the Roma during the war is impossible without using methods from various humanitarian disciplines, as well as knowledge of contextual areas of history (the history of Nazi Germany and World War II, the national history of the states where the Roma lived, the history of Roma communities themselves, etc.).
Mykhailo Tyagliy
