Half a million European Roma were exterminated by the Nazi regime many more were subjected to
a policy of racial discrimination similar to that suffered by the Jewish people. However the
persecution and torment of Roma in Hitler's Europe has little presence in the history books.
The Roma and the Holocaust places the Roma genocide in the context of the widespread violence
of the Second World War while offering an explanation that places it within a broader
trajectory of anti-Roma persecution in modern societies. The book explores the separation and
destruction of families the sterilisation of adults and children the plunder of property and
deprivation of livelihoods slave labour medical experiments the horror of extermination
camps and the mass murder that the Romani people were subjected to. María Sierra uses the first
section of the book to provide a much-needed critical overview and synthesis of the fragmented
research and scholarship in the area that has been conducted in various languages. In the
second section Sierra shines a light the autobiographical accounts of several Roma survivors
of the Nazi genocide in order for the voices of the victims who have claimed recognition and
rights for the Roma people to be heard. This journey through the memories of Philomena Franz
Ceija Stojka Lily Van Angeren Otto Rosenberg Walter Winter and Ewald Hanstein in addition
to other testimonies is contextualized within the framework of other Holocaust survivors'
memoirs and has been approached from a history of emotions perspective. With the Romani people
having been denied recognition as victims of Nazism after the end of the war this book
crucially helps to bring about agency for the survivors supporting their struggle for the
right to memory in the process.
