Forgotten Dead: The Memory of the Roma Holocaust

This roundtable discussion explores the circumstances under which the Roma Holocaust was partially forgotten in Central Europe during Socialism and the various ways its representation nevertheless emerged, especially in the cultural sphere.

The event begins with the screening of József Lakatos’s 1981 Forgotten Dead, a short film (17 minutes) dealing with the Roma Holocaust. The pioneering work represents a mixture of the documentary genre, with interviews, including survivors’ testimonies and that of a fiction film.

Blinken OSA Archivum’s current exhibition offers a starting point for the discussion. Titled Commissioned Memory. Hungarian Exhibitions in Auschwitz, 1960/1965, it introduces a monumental fine arts collection commissioned for the 1965 Hungarian exhibition in Auschwitz, as well as an exceptional work from 1960 (Vampire Hitler, based on Simon Wiesenthal’s 1946 drawing), created for the same venue.

The exhibition material is amended with György Jovánovics’s 1974 Plan for a Roma Holocaust Memorial, the earliest Hungarian artwork dealing with the issue that was missing from both 1960s exhibitions. A video interview with the artist will be published on the Archivum’s blog, the complete Hungarian transcript in Artmagazin, whereas the English version is available online.

Participants: Angéla Kóczé, Anna Lujza Szász, Daniel Véri

Registration (both for Zoom and attending in person) under this link.

The program is in English.