91�鶹������Ʒ����

Jews and Roma were taken away to dig their own graves on the sports field of Maria Kopylenko’s village. Her aunt and her cousin were taken there. Her cousin was holding the hand of a girl who was shot. 

So, she fell into the pit with them and waited until night fell to escape. “It's actually a miracle, it's God's work that my cousin survived.”

In 1943, Koloman Kadet’s father was deported by the Wehrmacht and has been missing since then. His Hungarian Roma family was living in hiding during the war

“I just want to know where the Germans buried my father. I would give anything for that.” 

Raisa Biryuchenko escaped the war and now lives with her son and grandsons. During the Second World War their home was ruined. “I was forced by the Nazi soldiers to watch as they shot my little brother. My mother and I were then deported to Poland to join forced labor.” Raisa vividly recalls the day on which she and her mother escaped by jumping off the moving train and into the fields.

Wladimir Litowtschenko is a proud Roma. His father received many decorations as a soldier at the front during the war. His mother stayed at home with the children, his older siblings. “It was very hard during the war and afterwards. Sometimes there was famine. War is war, you understand.”

Alla Matyushenko’s uncle was a soldier in the Red Army. 

He was in one of the first Red Army tanks to enter Berlin during the liberation.

“We had to go into hiding after my father was deported to a concentration camp. He returned and died a few days later. I am a proud Romani. I brought 11 children into the world and won't let anything, or anyone get me down.”

Hanna Pechnikova’s grandfather worked as a security guard, her grandmother worked in the kitchen. “And that's how we survived.” After the war, she always felt well treated as a Roma.

Bartoloměj Begala is a Hungarian Roma. His father, who was deaf-mute, was forced into a labor camp. He recalls that his family suffered from poverty even after the war. He went to school without a bag nor anything to eat. 

Anna Koníková recalls that the men were deported for forced labor. The women and mothers were raped. Anna had to drink from puddles during the escape to survive. 

On their way to deportation, Karel Berousek’s family was warned by a local police officer not to go to the assembly point and to hide instead in the countryside until the end of the war. His other family members were deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau. 

Olga Andreychenko’s father fought in the war. He was wounded, contracted tuberculosis and died in 1953.

Olga Budínská was only one year old when she survived the persecution of the Nazis. Today, she lives in a small town outside of Prague in very poor conditions. Even after the war, she experienced violence and harassment: “Even long after the war, and even today, we are discriminated against as Roma. Some members of my family were forcibly sterilized.”

Ivan Danchenko’s uncle was killed in the war. He himself fled and returned to modern day Lviv, Ukraine, after the war.