The project combined archival research with ethnographic participant observation of commemoration practices and oral history interviews. This included interviews and conversations with “ordinary” Roma, activists, policy makers, educators, historians and museum workers.
My comparative study has revealed that, in spite of significant differences in Belarusian and Lithuanian official memory politics, the Roma communities of both countries face similar challenges. These challenges are, to a great degree, legacies of the Soviet time, for example, the omissions in the post-war documentation of the Nazi crimes in the Soviet Union. Powerful national narratives of World War II, which focus on the fates of titular nations, are another obstacle to the inclusion of memory of ethnic minorities. At last, some local commemoration initiatives of Roma have failed because of the lack of coordinated support, insufficient material resources and administrative accesses.
At the same time, it was possible to observe some positive dynamics in the commemoration of Roma genocide in Lithuania. In 2019 the Lithuanian parliament officially recognized the Nazi genocide of Roma. My field research has revealed diverse memory agents who supported the Lithuanian Roma community in their struggle for official recognition. Local activists, museum workers, Jewish NGOs, Catholic Church and scholars were among them.
In Belarus the Nazi genocide of Roma has not received official recognition yet, and the commemoration happens mostly within family and community cycles. The number of memory agents is much lower than in Lithuania, which can be attributed to the (relative) isolation of the country and infavourable political climate.
At a theoretical level, ROMPAST paid close attention to the entanglements of different kinds of memory, as well as to its societal aspects. The project has yielded new insights into the socio-political context of the work of memory; the relationship of official, family and community memory; living memory and archival history. The theoretical findings of the project have been summarized and prepared for publication in several research articles. The project outcome was presented in international conferences and workshops. The dissemination programme included the online research workshop “Memory and Recognition of the Nazi Genocide of Roma in the Baltic Context” organized by the IOS Regensburg and Vilnius University (16 June 2021).
