Paper short abstract:

Romanies’ memories of genocide during WWII is marginal theme in the memory policy in Latvia. The idea of a remembrance day of the Romanies’ genocide and a place of commemoration has still not been realized due to both little activity on the part of Roma society and the lack of a political lobby.

Paper long abstract:

More than 70 years have passed since the Roma genocide during the WWII, but only in 2014, did Latvian Roma leaders participate in a march through the city to the banks of the Daugava River, where a symbolic release of flowers took place. With this act, the Roma leaders wished to turn society's attention to the extermination of Roma during the WWII as well as point out that there is still no memorial site in Latvia where about 2000 victims which was about half of the Roma living in Latvia at that time could be commemorated.

The paper will explain how the Roma themselves speak about the genocide and how these stories are included within the broader communicative memory of the Roma as a community. As the Roma life stories show, memories of the genocide are quite fragile, which is consistent with the fairly inexpressive Roma memory policy in Latvia in general. Keeping and handing down memory should be based on the initiative of the community itself, but in the case of the Romanies this desire conflicts with the inability of their societies to come to an agreement or with the hope that the State would be capable to deal with this issue for them. The Latvian political elite could support the recognition of a Roma genocide commemoration day and the creation of a memorial. That would encourage the mutual integration of Roma into Latvian society, as well as allow both peoples to find their lost heroes, the Roma rescuers.