Exercise 4: Importance of remembrance

The goal of this exercise

This exercise aims at highlighting the importance of remembering, commemorating and understanding past atrocities for a better present and future. It focuses on Roma cultural manifestations of the past trauma.
 

Instruction for teachers and students

In the exercise art and music are discussed as forms of resistance. For in-class assignments, students need access to the internet and an electronic device (mobile phone, laptop or iPad) that they can use in class.
 

Methods

Short questions and discussions regarding cultural forms of remembrance are used in this exercise. In particular, two cultural forms of remembrance will be discussed: paintings and music.
 

Introduction

Remembering the Roma Holocaust, in general, is imperative to understand past injustices and recognize present forms of discrimination. Besides drawing lessons through remembering the Roma Holocaust, communal solidarity can be created through memorial artwork.[1] Below, two forms of remembrance are presented below: paintings and music.

For more on the importance of commemorating and remembering the Roma victims, read a recent post by Sydnee Wagner published in the Prospect Magazine about the importance of Roma Holocaust commemoration:

1.  Consider the famous drawings below by Ceija Stojka (1933-2013) who was a Roma self-taught artist, and one of six children born into a family of nomadic horse-traders in Austria. She was deported as a young girl at age 10. Ceija Stojka
    

“turned the ordeals of the camps into an art of immense power. At 10, she was deported to Auschwitz, the first of three camps she would outlast. She slept on the pathway to the gas chambers, and hid among heaps of corpses; she survived by eating tree sap. In 1941, her father was deported to Dachau; he would later be murdered at what was euphemistically called a ‘euthanasia center’. (…) Yet survivors themselves…have forced themselves to make sense of the horrors they endured in art — and as Auschwitz recedes into historical distance and the last survivors disappear, there are voices even the greatest skeptic of representation cannot afford to tune out. For more than 40 years after the liberation she kept quiet about what she had withstood. Then it flooded out: scenes of rhapsodic childhood and unspeakable torture, painted with runny pigment and in brazen colors, impassioned, unashamed, irrefutable. She made more than 1,000 such paintings and drawings between 1990 and her death in 2013.”[2]

Class discussion

• Please think of sites of historical commemoration?
• What are these sites and how are certain historical events commemorated?
• Can drawings or paintings be considered as a site of commemoration? How?

Learn more about Stojka from the RomArchive.

Look at Stojka’s paintings. Then each student selects one of paintings that describes the Holocaust and takes time to think about the picture and the feelings it evokes. Subsequently students try to construct a narrative about what the chosen paintings may mean. .   

Music as a site of commemoration

Similarly, music can be a site of commemoration, especially for the descendants of Roma Holocaust survivors. Consider Dr. Petra Gelbart’s, a grandchild of Roma Holocaust survivors, expressions of remembrance through music.

After watching the video, discuss the following questions:

• What kind of messages does this song contain?
• Why is music a site of commemoration?
• What do you think about the lyrics and melody of this song?
• Do you know other songs about the Holocaust?

Based on the answers, the teacher may highlight how past events become part of cultures and are carried on from one generation to another. It is also important to emphasize that singing, painting and other forms of art use an international “language” — images, sounds and melodies — and therefore can speak to anyone, regardless of their culture or nationality. Importantly, Stojka called singing “performance of memory” as songs call on past experiences. As a form of resistance, songs came in a form of “barely audible solitary singing” or as “loud singing… as a daring public expression of resistance” (Grobbel, 2003 p. 144-145). In concentration camps, songs could provide a form of entertainment, to briefly escape from the reality of oppression, and also helped preserve culture and traditions (ibid.).