A Monument to Forgetting: Roma Genocide and Memory in Croatia

In this episode, we look at a memorial erected in 1977 at the local graveyard near Hrastina in northern Croatia.  The memorial is dedicated to a group of Roma and Sinti victims who were killed by the local Croatian fascists, Ustašas, on the night of 24-25 April 1945. This is among the last mass killings of Roma and Sinti in Europe during the Second World War, as the massacre took place only days before the end of the war. However, for decades, the events in Hrastina, as well as the monument itself, were a subject of misremembrance since the identities of both the victims as well as the perpetrators was obfuscated. The monument was dedicated to those who were “racially and politically” persecuted without stating that they were Roma and Sinti, and the crime was attributed to the SS rather than the Ustašas. This episode unpacks the massacre in Hrastina and how the subsequent misremembrance of its victims and perpetrators evolved.We are joined by Danijel Vojak, a historian and Scientific adviser specializing in the history of the Roma in Croatia and Southeast Europe. Based at the Institute of Social Sciences Ivo Pilar in Zagreb, his research focuses on the genocide of Roma in the Independent State of Croatia. Over the course of his career, he has published extensively on the persecution of Roma and helped open new avenues of research into this often-overlooked history. Featured guest:Danijel Vojak (Institute for Social Sciences Ivo Pilar, Zagreb). Podcast host: Lovro Kralj.Daniel will talk about the memorial and the misremembrance surrounding it.Music accreditation: Blue Dot Sessions. Tracks – Opening and closing: Stillness. Incidental, Gathering Stasis, Pencil Marks, Uncertain Ground, Marble Transit and Snowmelt. License Creative Commons Atttribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (BB BY-NC 4.0). Andy Clark, Podcastmaker, Studio Lijn 14