In my interviews for the Cocoon in Miskolc, Hungary, I usually asked subjects what they knew about their Roma family’s history during World War II. Their answers were detailed about war-time but became more general when it came to the Holocaust.
When I went to Canada, I interviewed a Hungarian Roma family who fled Miskolc five years ago for safety in Canada. It wasn’t until they arrived in Canada, and their son began researching the Holocaust for a school paper that they learned that their family members had been murdered at Auschwitz. We sat together in their Toronto kitchen and the father and son talked about why these memories had not been passed down and the details that they now knew.
Excerpts from a family interview I did in 2019 in Toronto for Cocoon “Following the Removals,” Miskolc HU.
THE FATHER : Our parents were afraid about it. Whenever something about the subject came up they didn’t want to talk about it. They were scared whenever some words slipped out about it, and they were afraid because if the children would know then they might say something in school, and then that would have been a problem for us. So we know that there was the death camp, and we are afraid that it could happen again, but when I was a child nobody, not my parents, not my grandparents, ever talked about this. Not even in school did I hear anything about it. I just found out since we are here in Canada in the last three or four years that they took my grandmother’s relatives.
THE SON : I asked my aunt because my great-grandmother told her stories, so she told me, that my great-grandmother’s siblings they took to Auschwitz. One got shot and killed and the other had a disease and died. They took them at dawn. She told me they were barefoot when they took them [from Miskolc] and they never came home.
Photo of a wall at the current exhibition, “Auschwitz : Not Long Ago. Not Far Away” at the Museum of Jewish Heritage, NYC