If listening is a form of acknowledgment, can we hear the Roma? In this talk, Ioanida Costache (PhD candidate, Stanford University) problematizes the staggering silence and forgetting surrounding Romani persecution during the Holocaust, a history that has been muted or distorted for decades.

In France, Holocaust perpetrators did not segregate Jews in ghettos before deportation, and thus the first stages of antisemitic persecution affected Jews in everyday urban space. Indeed, in the West, the early stages of the Holocaust took place in the victims’ most familiar places, both in public and private spaces, where they lived and worked every day, in their apartments, their streets, and in daily environments.