Is Remembering Enough?

Understanding the Romani World through Language, Family and Memory

Written during the night of 2–3 August 2026, Roma Holocaust Memorial Day

Is Remembering Enough?

On the night of 2–3 August 1944, around three to four thousand Romani children, women and men were murdered during the liquidation of the so-called “Gypsy Family Camp” at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Every year, we remember them.

But is remembering enough?

The Holocaust did not begin with Auschwitz. It was the culmination of centuries of slavery, persecution, exclusion and the gradual erosion of a people’s language, history and way of understanding the world. Those centuries did not end in 1945. Their consequences are still with us.

The international effort to improve the position of Roma gathered momentum after the First World Romani Congress in 1971. Since then, Romani organisations, governments, universities, charities, international organisations and countless committed individuals have worked to reduce inequality and improve opportunities.

Important progress has been made. Exceptional leaders, professionals and role models have emerged. Yet the everyday lives of many ordinary Romani families have changed far less than any of us had hoped.

After nearly forty years of travelling between Romani communities, I found myself returning to the same question.

Have we spent too much time trying to solve Romani problems, and too little time trying to understand the Romani world?

For many years, I believed I was helping to solve Romani problems. Only gradually did I realise that I first needed to understand it.

That realisation came from conversations rather than books. Again and again, I found that the deepest conversations became possible in Romani. The language carried far more than words. It preserved memories, relationships and ways of understanding that became difficult, and sometimes impossible, to express fully in another language.

The Holocaust stories carried by most Romani families have rarely entered classrooms, museums or archives. They survived inside families, passed from one generation to the next, often in Romani. Only a small part of that inheritance has entered the public historical record.

As those generations pass away, that inheritance disappears with them.

This essay grows out of the conviction that remembrance must lead to understanding, and understanding must carry responsibility. We owe it to those who were murdered to understand more deeply the world that centuries of persecution, culminating in the Holocaust, sought to destroy.

“Kasko san?”

One of the questions I often ask during my Romani language and culture workshops is this:

“Kasko san?”

I invite people to guess what it means.

Almost nobody gets it right because the question begins from a way of understanding belonging that is unfamiliar in most other cultures.

Rather than explain it immediately, let me tell you a story.

In November 2003, I was one of twelve young Romani leaders from across Europe attending a World Bank study programme in Washington, D.C., during the presidency of James Wolfensohn. I remember that visit particularly well because I celebrated my birthday there with a close colleague from Slovakia.

One afternoon we were walking past a row of fortune-tellers’ offices.

One shop window caught my attention.

“I think she’s Romani,” I said.

My colleagues were unconvinced.

“No,” they replied. “She’s Mexican.”

There was nobody inside. It was simply something about the window that looked unmistakably Romani to me.

I knocked on the door.

A woman opened it.

I greeted her in English.

Without looking directly at me, she politely explained that they were closed and asked me to return later.

As the door was about to close, I greeted her again, this time in Romani.

She stopped.

She looked directly at me.

The door opened again.

Her first words were:

“Kasko san?”

I explained that I had travelled from Hungary and that she was unlikely to know my family because my relatives lived in Europe.

She asked the question again.

This time I answered it properly.

Only then did the conversation become possible.

Before I left, she told me there was a man in Chicago called Kolye, and that he was my uncle.

Years later, after founding Kasko San, I received a telephone call from Chicago.

The caller introduced himself as Kolye.

He invited my family to visit.

We accepted.

Long before DNA evidence confirmed our relationship, we already knew we belonged to the same extended family network. We spoke the same family variety of Romani. Our pronunciation, expressions, vocabulary, turns of phrase and family names were immediately recognisable to both of us.

As often happens when Romani families meet for the first time, we began tracing our family histories, naming relatives and places remembered by both sides. Gradually, a much bigger story emerged.

Our conversations stretched from our family’s roots around Ćuprija in Serbia to Chicago, revealing how war, the Holocaust and the upheavals that followed had separated branches of the same family while language, memory and oral history had preserved the connections between them.

The DNA evidence simply confirmed what the language and our family histories had already revealed.

Only afterwards did I fully understand the question.

“Kasko san?” literally means “Whose are you?”

Not in the sense of ownership.

In the sense of belonging.

It asks where your belonging begins.

In many Western societies, people are introduced first as individuals.

Within many traditional Romani communities, people are first understood through the relationships to which they belong.

Looking back, I realised that the conversation had not changed simply because we were speaking a different language.

It had changed because Romani had opened a world that English could not.

Words That Carry Worlds

The encounter in Washington stayed with me long after I returned home.

It made me realise that what had changed that afternoon was not simply the language. The conversation had entered a different way of understanding people, family and belonging.

Over the following decades, while travelling between Romani communities and interpreting between different Romani varieties, I kept encountering words that could be translated into English accurately enough, yet something important always remained outside the translation.

The word Rom is usually translated simply as a Romani man.

The translation is correct, but within many traditional Romani communities Rom first means husband. The word immediately places a person within a family and within a network of relationships and responsibilities. It says far more than who someone is because it also tells us where that person belongs.

The same is true of Pachiv, often translated as honour. That translation is only a beginning. Pachiv is learned through family life, observation and example. People grow into it. They recognise it in others. They know when it has been upheld and when it has been lost, even if they have never tried to define it.

As I travelled between Romani communities, I found that the words sometimes changed. Dialects, histories and customs differed, yet the underlying ideas often remained recognisable.

Some communities still speak Romani fluently. Others do not. Even where everyday conversation has shifted into English, Spanish or another majority language, certain Romani words continue to survive because no other language fully replaces them. Those words continue to unlock relationships, memories and ways of understanding that would otherwise remain hidden.

That can be seen among Caló communities in Spain and Romanichal communities in Britain. Everyday speech has changed over generations, yet culturally important Romani words continue to preserve connections with an older way of understanding people, family and belonging.

Over time, I realised that I was not simply encountering similar customs, but recurring patterns that appeared across remarkably diverse Romani communities: ways of understanding family, belonging, hospitality, responsibility and community.

For me, Romanipe is the living cultural world that many traditional Romani communities continue to recognise despite centuries of migration, slavery, persecution, assimilation and language loss.

Languages preserve far more than vocabulary. They preserve memory, relationships and ways of seeing the world.

Only much later did I realise that the same language capable of reconnecting one dispersed family had once helped different Romani communities recognise one another during the darkest chapter of our history.

That discovery came in Berlin.

The Discovery in Berlin

When I visited the Memorial to the Sinti and Roma Victims of National Socialism in Berlin in 2012, I thought I already understood the broad outlines of Romani history.

I knew about centuries of slavery and persecution. I knew about 2 August. Through my own family, I also carried memories of relatives deported to Dachau and of forty-two members of our wider family murdered near Ćuprija in Serbia.

For years, I had repeated the same conclusion in conferences, meetings and conversations across the Roma movement.

The Romani diaspora had never truly united.

Different groups had travelled different routes across Europe. They spoke different dialects, followed different traditions and often knew very little about one another. International cooperation usually seemed to come from organisations, projects and congresses. I had never seen convincing evidence that unity had grown naturally from within Romani communities themselves.

Then I noticed a date: 16 May 1944.

It caught my attention because 16 May is also my cousin Ronaldo’s birthday.

I stopped to read.

What I discovered overturned something I had believed for years.

When the Nazis came to liquidate the “Gypsy Family Camp”, prisoners from different Romani communities refused to walk quietly to their deaths. Armed with little more than shovels, pickaxes, tools and whatever else they could find, they prepared to resist together.

For me, the most remarkable part of that story was not the resistance itself.

It was that people who had arrived from different countries, spoke different Romani varieties and belonged to different communities recognised something they shared that mattered more than their differences.

Until that moment, I had never encountered such an example in our recorded history.

It changed the way I understood our history.

Years later, I began to see another connection.

When the First World Romani Congress met in 1971, it adopted the name Roma, together with a flag and the anthem Gelem, Gelem. It was an extraordinary vision: that diverse Romani communities could recognise themselves as one people without losing their own identities.

Standing in Berlin, I realised that this idea had not begun in a conference hall.

In the face of death, decades earlier, people from different Romani communities had already lived it. There were no resolutions and no debates about identity. They recognised one another because survival demanded it.

This does not mean that Romani communities have always been united.

My own experience has taught me how deep the divisions between different groups can be, and how little many of us know about one another’s histories, languages and traditions.

Perhaps that is why the events of 16 May 1944 affected me so deeply.

For the first time, I had found a moment in our recorded history that challenged my own assumptions.

It did not diminish our diversity.

It revealed what could still exist beneath it.

That discovery stayed with me.

It also changed the way I understood 2 August.

2 August

Every year, on 2 August, we remember the Romani children, women and men murdered at Auschwitz-Birkenau and the hundreds of thousands of Roma and Sinti persecuted and murdered across Europe during the Holocaust.

We should remember them.

But remembrance is only the beginning.

While writing this essay, I often found myself thinking about The Deathless Woman, the first feature-length Romani-language Holocaust film produced in the United Kingdom. I had the privilege of working with director Roz Mortimer as Romani language consultant during its production. Working on the film reminded me once again how profoundly the Romani language had shaped my own journey, taking me to places and people I could never have imagined when I first began working as an interpreter and filmmaker.

The film follows the spirit of a Romani wife and mother who cannot rest because her story has never truly been heard. Whether understood literally or symbolically, I found that image impossible to forget. It asks a question that every generation must answer.

What do we owe those whose stories survived only because somebody chose to remember them?

For me, the answer cannot be remembrance alone.

Over the past four decades, I have gradually come to believe that understanding the Romani world cannot be separated from the language that has carried it, nor from the families who have preserved it through centuries of slavery, persecution, forced assimilation and the Holocaust.

That understanding carries responsibility. It calls on us to listen while those who still carry these histories are with us, to record the stories that remain within families, to create the archives our ancestors never had, and to ensure that the future of Romani communities is shaped not only by institutions and policies, but also by the voices, knowledge and lived experience of Romani people themselves.

Perhaps that is why the story of 16 May and the First World Romani Congress now feel connected to me.

In Auschwitz-Birkenau, people from different Romani communities recognised one another in the face of death.

In 1971, that same aspiration found political expression through the name Roma, the Romani flag and the anthem Gelem, Gelem.

Its composer, Žarko Jovanović, had himself survived several concentration camps. Those experiences shaped his understanding of what different Romani communities could mean to one another. When Gelem, Gelem was adopted by the Congress, it carried more than a melody. It carried a memory.

That memory still asks more of us than remembrance alone. It asks us to understand, to continue the conversations, to preserve the language, to record the stories and to strengthen the relationships that centuries of persecution tried to destroy.

Only then does remembrance become more than an annual ceremony. It becomes a responsibility carried from one generation to the next.

Further Reading

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Further Reading

To book a workshop email juice@kaskosan.org

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To book a workshop
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