Roma Women and the Holocaust: Sexual Violence in Romanian Camps

From 1941 to 1944, the German-allied Romanian regime led a genocidal campaign against the country’s Jewish and Romani populations.  Over 200,000 Jews and over 10,000 Roma died in occupied Ukraine. While the Romanian space of the Holocaust has only taken on significance in Holocaust studies after 1989, as post-communist investigations into archives grew dramatically during the transition period, the exploration of Roma genocide during the Holocaust remains yet understudied. Even when the Roma are a subject of study, few works focus on the situation of Romani women. Key goals of this paper are to develop a case study of Romani women’s experiences in the Holocaust as it played out in Romanian controlled space based on oral histories and archival documents, as well as secondary sources. This case study highlights Roma women, who evidence suggests, were a target of sexual violence on the basis of ethnicity and gender. The case study is situated in a larger body of information on women Holocaust victims in order to highlight existing literature and the contribution of this work to that core of knowledge. Women’s particular experiences of the Holocaust have been marginal in dominant accounts of history. We argue that their marginality is both protective and problematic. The dearth of knowledge produced from the standpoint of women survivors and the lack of analysis of women’s experiences, leaving a void in the literature that is only beginning to be filled.