Rain of Ash: Roma, Jews and the Holocaust by Ari Joskowicz Princeton University Press, 368 pages, £28
How do we know what we know about the Holocaust, especially its victims? What is the relationship between history, evidence, and memory? For whom have the “guardians of the past” spoken and why? Huge questions like this underpin Ari Joskowicz’s remarkable new book, examining the fraught history of relations between Romani and Jewish victims of the Holocaust. Both were targeted by the Nazis, yet as Joskowicz notes, “Roma and Jews did not have a shared experience of persecution under Nazism. They suffered next to but rarely with each other.”
Intriguingly – and perhaps unexpectedly – Joskowicz focuses on the relationship between Roma and Jews through the prism of the Second World War’s aftermath rather than devoting significant space to wartime persecution and murder. He traces the production of knowledge about both victim groups after the war, situating their interactions within different political, social and cultural contexts. In so doing, unlikely protagonists emerge: Jewish poets; Romani survivors and activists; Jewish archivists, scholars and survivor-document collectors; restitution lawyers; as well as Holocaust memorials and archival institutions that concentrate mainly on the Jewish past. Although the paths of persecution of both groups were entangled, the reasons for our lack of recognition of this are varied, and as Joskowicz argues, have much to do with hierarchies and inequalities that persist.
Underlying the public debates about the Holocaust that often play out over exhibitions, films and publicly funded memorials is the unseen labour of documentation: the material stuff of history that informs our knowledge of the past. Yet debates rarely seep into these documentary foundations – how they were collected, funded and controlled. Joskowicz emphasises that “usable knowledge about past injustice requires resources”. He lays bare how knowledge about the Romani Holocaust has been constructed, elucidating the different and unequal financial, political and other resources to which Roma and Jews had access after the war.