Understanding the holocaust's profound impact demands a lens that extends beyond individual narratives, delving into the intricate web of familial relationships. For decades, scholarship has primarily focused on the experiences of individuals, often overlooking how deeply the family unit shaped survival, resistance, and the agonizing process of rebuilding lives during and after the genocide.
This comprehensive examination champions the "family perspective" as an indispensable approach, revealing its critical importance in comprehending the suffering and resilience of both Romani and Jewish communities, particularly in the Belarusian-Lithuanian border region, during one of history's darkest chapters.
By shifting our focus to the dynamics within families, we gain a more nuanced and empathetic understanding of the choices made under unimaginable duress.
Decisions about migration, hiding, or even defiance were rarely solitary acts; they were often collective, driven by a profound sense of responsibility for spouses, children, parents, and extended kin. This approach challenges conventional historical periodizations, demonstrating that familial bonds transcended the arbitrary divisions of pre-war normalcy, wartime terror, and post-war reconstruction.
It highlights how these deeply personal connections provided a continuous thread of meaning and motivation, even when faced with radical loss and dislocation.
The enduring power of family amidst genocide
During the holocaust, the family emerged as the central pillar for survival and decision-making, far outweighing individual imperatives.
Individuals, whether men or women, young or old, were embedded within family structures that guided their actions and shaped their destinies. Early scholarly work, while invaluable, sometimes risked oversimplifying gender roles in the holocaust by focusing on allegedly specific female experiences.
However, a family perspective allows for an acknowledgment that the terror of losing loved ones—parents, children, partners, siblings, and distant relatives—was universally felt, albeit manifesting in diverse ways across different family configurations and social strata.
Pioneering studies on children as victims of the holocaust have significantly enriched our understanding of daily life during this period and its aftermath.
Such research highlights that the motivations for fleeing europe were often intertwined with familial concerns, whether Zionist commitments, fear of antisemitism or communism, or a desperate search for surviving relatives abroad to recreate a family unit. Post-war decisions about resettlement were frequently dictated by the locations and situations of family and friends, not solely by political ideology.
Many individuals remained in their birth countries due to an unwavering responsibility towards elderly or sick relatives, or because they had married non-Jews, underscoring the enduring strength of these intimate bonds.
Family networks and migration
Family networks played a crucial role in motivating and enabling the post-war migration of both Romani and Jewish populations across central europe, and further afield to the United States, Scandinavia, and western europe.
For many Romani families, similar to Jewish survivors, the desire to escape the regions where they had endured unimaginable humiliation, violence, and loss was paramount. Contacts with relatives who had emigrated before or during the war became vital for subsequent chain migration.
However, a stark contrast emerged: unlike Jewish communities, Romani people largely lacked international charitable and political institutions to provide logistical and financial support for their displacement. This absence profoundly shaped their post-war struggles and experiences.
The methodologies employed in holocaust studies have also evolved, partly influenced by gender-focused research that expanded the range of acceptable sources.
The gradual acceptance of testimonial sources, including diaries, letters, oral histories, and individual petitions, now forms the core of many contemporary analyses. These ego-documents allow for the reconstruction of intimate relations and decision-making processes of people targeted by genocide, thereby facilitating a more empathetic transmission of the holocaust experience.
Without these varied contributions, fully understanding the complex familial dynamics during such an atrocious period would be impossible.
Wartime realities and postwar repercussions
This deep dive into the family perspective often overlaps with specific wartime and post-war experiences.
Chapters dedicated to institutional interactions frequently include individual responses, and vice versa. This interwoven structure highlights how family critically influenced the lives of Romani and Jewish individuals throughout these periods. Studies and countless testimonies demonstrate that while pre-war social networks, including friends, colleagues, and neighbors, were extensive, the circumstances of war drastically altered these priorities.
In times of extreme threat, social ties, particularly with non-Romani or non-Jewish friends and neighbors, became instrumental for survival, though the closest family members were almost universally prioritized for rescue.
For example, Volha Bartash's anthropological fieldwork vividly illustrates how Romani communities in the Belarusian-Lithuanian border region developed intricate strategies to protect their families.
Romani women courageously risked their lives to secure food for relatives in hiding, while Romani men joined partisan units, primarily to gain protection for their kin. Natalia Aleksiun further emphasizes the enduring human need for trust and intimate relationships even after the murder of family members, highlighting the key importance of surrogate family relations among Jews in hiding in eastern galicia.
Aleksiun provocatively questions the definitions of "righteous among the nations," noting the exclusion of family members, which prevented non-Jewish partners of rescued Jews from being nominated.
Challenges to family units and institutional responses
The immense burden placed on family relations during times of destruction is extensively explored by Michal Unger, whose research on separation and divorce records from the Łódź ghetto reveals the catastrophic breakdown of many marriages.
Life in the ghetto fundamentally altered the family environment, and not all units could adapt. Pre-war marital crises exacerbated by forced cohabitation in the ghetto, amidst hunger and despair, offered little chance for harmony. The war and post-war suffering often necessitated social experiments, particularly in rescue operations organized by national and international institutions.
Despite the critical role of biological relations, institutions sometimes prioritized children's interests over kinship ties, opting for placements in alternative settings.
Laura Hobson Faure's chapter presents the extraordinary story of two orphaned sisters cared for by various charitable organizations—non-Jewish and Jewish, french and american.
Their different strategies often led to the sisters' separation, yet their bond endured. Similarly, Jewish orphanages run by the JDC served not only parentless children but also economically struggling families. Full orphans constituted a small percentage, as many parents preferred institutional care over their children enduring hunger at home, despite the emotional cost.
The JDC's support for families with children even impacted migration patterns, reducing the willingness of Hungarian Jewish families to emigrate lest they lose this unique assistance.
The challenges of rebuilding lives extended to personal relationships.
Allied military structures, combined with unofficial prejudice, often hindered soldiers' efforts to marry Jewish holocaust survivors. A striking difference between Jewish and Romani post-war experiences was the absence of international charitable or ethnocentric institutions dedicated to Romani survivors.
While some favorable treatment existed in DP camps, it ceased with the end of IRO activities in the early 1950s. Testimonies and memoirs reveal continued discrimination against Romani people, who slowly established local organizations in germany to negotiate for belated compensation, including for forced sterilization of many Romani women.
The genocide against Roma and Sinti varied territorially, being less coordinated than that against Jews. Romani migration, such as thousands moving from slovakia to bohemian lands, often comprised hundreds of family resettlements, as analyzed by Helena Sadílková.
Joachim Schlör's work on a Jewish family from heilbronn, using extensive correspondence, illustrates the complexities of pre-war emigration and post-war guilt.
Liesel Rosenthal, who emigrated to great britain in 1938, initially faced accusations of being a "family traitor." Ironically, her emigration was instrumental in saving her parents and brother. Schlör highlights that even when family relationships are a source of conflict, catastrophes often evoke an obligation to save biological relatives.
He also challenges the "success story" interpretation of nuclear family rescues, revealing the profound sense of loss and guilt survivors felt for distant family members who perished.
Many holocaust survivors sought others with similar experiences post-war.
Lotte Weiss, for instance, prioritized finding a partner who had also survived auschwitz over a pre-deportation relationship. Her Jewish boyfriend, who survived in hiding, proposed to her immediately upon her return from concentration camps, but she felt "too old for him," shattered by her experiences.
Sarah Wobick-Segev's analysis of post-war German personal ads further demonstrates this, showing how coded language connected individuals with shared war experiences. These shared traumas could forge new proximities and affinities, while simultaneously distancing survivors from those who hadn't endured similar horrors.
The family lens: unifying periods and challenging narratives
One of the primary findings stemming from the family perspective is the undeniable inseparability of pre-war, war, and post-war periods.
Traditional periodizations, rigidly adhering to dates and divisions, crumble when confronted with how people discuss their familial ties.
Family, despite enduring radical loss and dislocation, acts as a continuous bridge across time. This is not a redemptive narrative suggesting familial love conquers all, but rather an acknowledgment that focusing on the family unit makes it impossible to confine findings to a single temporal frame.
Instead, narrowly focused chapters reveal the immense benefits of close analysis and contextual knowledge derived from this family-centered approach.
Certain ideas consistently resurface through this lens, particularly the fluidity of time frames and the increasing importance of familial support.
This latter point stands in stark contrast to contemporary sociological trends that critique the concept of family as anachronistic, often viewing biological ties as inferior to elective ones in an era of individualism. Yet, as this body of work vividly demonstrates, in times of extreme physical threat, social, political, and economic uncertainty, and throughout the post-traumatic period, family relations play a decisive and often paramount role.
Regardless of pre-war dynamics, individuals feel an overwhelming responsibility for their close or extended families during crises. This finding holds undeniable relevance for other peoples facing discrimination, marginalization, and violence today, though the aim is not to reach broad general truths but to highlight the family lens's productivity in holocaust studies.
During and after world war II, countless occupied peoples across europe confronted unprecedented deprivation and oppression.
The nazi regime, devoid of respect for war conventions or pity for civilians, engineered a racial hierarchy that placed Jews, Sinti, and Romani people at its bottom, slated for total destruction. Probing how this genocide unfolded against families, and how diverse religious, national, and ethnic groups responded as families, offers a more complete understanding of the holocaust.
This family-centered approach provides models of the sources, methodologies, and outcomes crucial for continued research and development of this vital conceptual framework.
Romani family life: an ethnographic-historical deep dive
The call for including the Romani experience of the nazi genocide within holocaust studies has grown significantly over the last decade.
Integrating Romani testimonies, particularly those of Romani women, not only yields more detailed knowledge but also opens new research paradigms. Despite increasing scholarship on Romani histories and memories of the nazi genocide, there remains a need to differentiate their experiences based on pre-war lifestyles (sedentary, nomadic, seminomadic), family background, social status, age, and gender.
Scholars increasingly stress the importance of a family framework and family-based approach in analyzing Romani life and their struggle for survival under German occupation. For instance, Paola Trevisan's study of the Sinti in fascist italy began with an ethnographic survey of Sinti families, and Sławomir Kapralski notes that sexual violence against Romani women was often intended to humiliate entire families and dismantle Romani culture itself.
The family framework uniquely embraces people of all ages and genders, providing a more comprehensive picture of the Romani ordeal.
This chapter applies a family lens to the daily life and survival practices of Romani people in the German-occupied Belarusian-Lithuanian border region.
It proposes a more complex understanding of individual experiences and memories, differentiating how Romani people from various family and social backgrounds were affected by and responded to nazi violence.
Answering the question of what the Romani family was like on the eve of world war II is crucial. Close readings of first and second-person accounts, alongside reconstructed family histories, describe the main family patterns and lifestyles. Oral histories and family genealogies reveal distinct structures and traditions between nomadic and sedentary Romani families, leading to different senses of belonging, collectivity, and solidarity.
Methodological challenges in documenting Romani families
Reconstructing Romani family structures and lifestyles in the interwar period presents significant methodological challenges due to a limited number of contemporary sources.
Romani histories are severely underrepresented in institutional archives in belarus and lithuania. The border region, part of interwar poland, was predominantly agrarian, with most Romani people leading nomadic or seminomadic lives, negotiating relationships with local landlords and peasants.
Their mobility made statistical surveys difficult. While travel routes were mostly local, some families journeyed long distances, forming new contacts and occasionally intermarrying with local Romani groups or non-Romani populations. Polish ethnographers of the time largely bypassed the Romani population, making their presence in local historical narratives scarce.
However, through detailed examination of local memorial books, museum exhibitions, and especially oral history research, a picture of Romani life emerges.
Photos from the 1920s and 1930s depict Romani horse traders, performers, and blacksmiths, despite exhibits rarely identifying their ethnicity. The invisibility of Romani people in local histories often reflects current perceptions rather than their pre-war presence.
Fieldwork in belarus and lithuania has uncovered deep familial memories among Romani communities, impressed by the persistence of their oral tradition.
Unlike other ethnic groups, Romani people showed immense respect for gifted narrators, recognizing oral narration as the primary method of intergenerational memory transmission, often occurring during family celebrations and daily gatherings.
Most Romani people in the Belarusian-Lithuanian border region are descendants of the "Litoũska Roma" (Lithuanian Roma) who lived in the vilnius area before world war II.
Many who remained in the soviet union maintained their mobility until 1956, allowing them to survive post-war hardships. Despite new state boundaries and visa regulations post-1991, they have largely maintained cross-border relationships and collective memory, shaping a major narrative of suffering and survival under German occupation.
Romani homes, often hubs of economic, familial, and social exchange, facilitated the spread of community news. Older generations, though reluctant to speak of the war directly, would share stories of lost relatives and acquaintances when meeting, recounting events until dawn, and crying together.
Despite the challenges, community-based research provides invaluable insights into the plight of Romani families, especially the difficulty of completely destroying large family units.
Nomadic and sedentary Romani families during the war
The oral histories and ethnographic data confirm that most local Romani communities were either nomadic or seminomadic, traveling seasonally from early spring until the first autumn frost.
Their travel patterns were typically local, though some families, like the Marcinkevichs, undertook long-distance trips lasting up to two years, establishing contacts and sometimes leading to intermarriage. Such long-distance travel required intricate local networks and multilingual fluency.
Family routes often traced back to birthplaces, highlighting deeply rooted generational connections. The extended Rutkowskie family, for example, deported to auschwitz, comprised many members born in various locations across the Belarusian-Polish-Lithuanian border region, indicating a seminomadic lifestyle.
This seminomadic lifestyle meant seasonal interactions with the non-Romani population, creating a flexible community adaptable to social, political, and economic changes.
In contrast to neighboring soviet belarus, where industrialization and collectivization led some nomadic families to settle, the wilno and nowogródek regions remained largely unaffected by soviet transformations pre-war. While some landlords were sympathetic to nomadic Roma, often due to their exotic appearance, their position within the broader ethnic, social, and economic relations was complex.
Nomadic groups, typically extended families of up to fifty people, operated on principles of cooperation, solidarity, mutual support, and a clear division of labor by age and gender. Children as young as six had responsibilities, while men handled horse care, trade, and external relations, guided by a traditional court (sendo) of Romani law experts.
During winter, tabors often split into smaller units, finding accommodation with local peasants.
These Romani families, often catholic or orthodox Christians, became temporary household members, assisting with farming and sharing meals, actively participating in village festivities. Some formed deeply personal bonds, symbolized by godparenting or even intermarriage, more common among sedentary Roma.
Older Belarusians generally exhibited more tolerance towards Romani people than younger generations, though confrontations and stereotypes persisted. Stories of winter hardship, forcing families to build temporary dugouts, and summertime accusations of theft illustrate ongoing tensions.
The attitudes of the non-Romani population varied during the nazi occupation; some risked their lives to hide Romani women and children, while others closed their doors.
Half-sedentary families and mixed marriages
Sedentary Romani families before world war II typically lived surrounded by non-Romani neighbors, as Romani settlements were rare.
Almost every interviewed sedentary family had non-Romani members pre-war. The Halavackie family, for instance, were successful blacksmiths with their own forge and farm, owning horses and cows, and employed workers. The mother, a local orphan, married the blacksmith who did not travel.
This family remained in their hometown during the German occupation but adopted nomadism afterward, reflecting a broader trend where mobility became a survival strategy. The degree of sedentism varied, with some families like Pavel Yanovich's, having a Romani woman marry a polish man and settling in brasław, yet periodically traveling with Romani relatives and engaging in traditional occupations like horse trading.
The mother's ethnicity significantly influenced family choices during the occupation.
The Tychina family, with a Romani mother and a Polish father, owned a house and land in ejszyszki but still engaged in short-term summer mobility. Their descendants today pride themselves on their high pre-war social status and connections.
These examples challenge the stereotype of Romani people as poor, landless vagrants, showing a spectrum of social and material statuses within Romani relatives. Some higher-status Romani families sought integration with local nobility and acculturation. It's also important to note that not all nomadic Roma were poor; those with purebred horses, covered wagons, and expensive carpets were considered well-off, luxuries often beyond the means of local peasants.
Marrying a "gadjo" (non-Romani) was not the norm in conservative Romani communities, especially among nomads, and non-Romani relatives could pose an obstacle to acceptance.
Stories from before the october revolution illustrate the complexities of inter-ethnic relations.
Darja Marcinkevich recounted how a Romani man from lithuania married a young Russian girl near siebież. Darja learned Romani language and traditions, bore thirteen children, some of whom were adults before the war. The younger children and Darja herself were tragically murdered by local police near vidzy in autumn 1942.
This highlights the vulnerability of all Romani families, regardless of their integration. Another anecdote described an educated Romani doctor, initially welcomed by a community unaware of his profession, later excluded for breaking traditional moral codes associated with human body impurities.
Despite their nomadic, seminomadic, or sedentary lifestyles, flexibility existed. Sedentary families sometimes joined nomadic relatives for summer travel, though the nomadic had no fixed home. Sedentary Romani households typically comprised nuclear families, while nomadic couples often had many more children.
Sovietization's direct impact on Romani family values was limited due to its brief pre-war duration. However, Romani families, particularly the well-off and those practicing traditional occupations like trading and fortune-telling, suffered from property confiscation and deportations, with many Romani men and women ending up in gulag camps after 1937, though more research is needed on specific repercussions.
The first wave of violence and nomadic Roma
The responses of Romani families to German violence varied greatly based on lifestyle, interactions with non-Romani populations, and other circumstances, determining their survival choices.
When war erupted in June 1941, many Romani families in the borderland were already on the move, at the peak of the nomadic season. Entire extended families, comprising dozens of wagons, would travel together. An informant recounted a large family witnessing a dogfight between soviet and German planes, discovering a downed soviet pilot, and attempting to bury him before handing his documents to soviet soldiers.
Unlike some other parts of the soviet union, few Romani men from the western regions were drafted into the red army. Post-soviet scholarship sometimes suggests Romani people in the western soviet union initially did not perceive the German invasion as a direct threat, possibly recalling less harsh German occupation during world war I.
Many, including Roma, hoped for a return to pre-soviet times, believing the Germans would oust the Bolsheviks. However, this hope quickly dissolved.
Romani musical performances in occupied minsk were reported in 1942, but these idyllic scenes often masked a horrifying reality where Romani families were forced to sing and dance at executions, adding a cruel cultural dimension to their physical destruction.
Throughout the summer of 1941, nomadic Roma continued their traditional crafts and services for rural populations, inevitably encountering mobile killing squads (einsatzgruppen) who viewed them as potential disseminators of information or resistance fighters.
The killings of nomadic Roma were regularly reported by the einsatzgruppen operating in the baltic states and belarus; their very lifestyle and occupations became a crime under the new order. By late summer and early autumn 1941, organized mass killings of nomadic Roma escalated in the Belarusian-Lithuanian border region.
Over eighty nomadic Roma were arrested and killed near lida in august-september 1941, with Lithuanian volunteers assisting local police. This was typically the time nomadic groups sought winter accommodations, but their presence in the countryside could not escape village administration.
Tabors were captured both in the countryside and on the move.
Testimonies from Jewish survivors describe the murder of over a thousand nomadic Roma, including disabled persons and children, in novogrudok in 1942. Local police relentlessly hunted them, bringing them into the city for murder.
One chilling account from december 1942 describes a group of over fifty "gypsy people," whose naked children were left to die on ice, prolonging their suffering. Parents, particularly mothers, cried, screamed, wailed, and pleaded for quick death rather than witnessing their children perish from cold.
One Romani mother, driven insane by torture, began to laugh, sing, and dance. This level of violence against Romani families, compelling parents to watch their children die, or exposing children and husbands to sexual violence against mothers and wives, is a defining feature of the nazi genocide against Romani people in the soviet union.
Young people were forced to perform in front of their dead family members, leaving survivors deeply traumatized. The extreme cruelty against infants and pregnant women was frequently recounted. As Sławomir Kapralski highlights, this violence carried a cultural reading, perceived by Roma not just as personal tragedy but as the destruction of Romani tradition itself.
The peak of this persecution occurred in summer and autumn 1942, with shootings of Romani families documented in four borderland locations, likely linked to anti-partisan operations.
Such atrocities often relied on denunciations by locals. One harrowing family narrative, from Lubov Pasevich, describes her tabor being ambushed by Germans led by a local Belarusian. Forced to dig their own pit, they were shot and fell in, some still alive and whispering.
Lubov, a child, survived by falling into bushes, hitting her head, and feigning death, illustrating the brutal reality of genocide and the desperate, often miraculous, instances of survival among the youngest victims. These accounts underscore that understanding the holocaust demands confronting not only the mass scale of destruction but also its intimate, family-shattering horror.