How two museums are advancing remembrance of the genocide of the Roma through the IHRA Recommendations for Teaching and Learning about the Persecution and Genocide of the Roma during the Nazi Era
“If the world does not change now, if the world does not open its doors and windows, if it does not build peace – true peace – so that my great-grandchildren have a chance to live in this world, then I cannot explain why I survived Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, and Ravensbrück.”
Ceija Stojka, Roma survivor, artist, and activist
Introduction
For decades, the story of the genocide of the Roma during the Nazi era remained largely untold – neglected in classrooms, unacknowledged in memorials, and absent from public discourse. Earlier this year, the IHRA, in close collaboration with Roma civil society and experts, developed the Recommendations for Teaching and Learning about the Persecution and Genocide of the Roma during the Nazi Era to support more inclusive and accurate engagement with this history.
Now, museums from two IHRA Member Countries – the Camp Westerbork Memorial in the Netherlands and the Swedish Museum of the Holocaust – are helping those voices be heard. Though their approaches differ, both institutions are showing how the IHRA Recommendations can be used in meaningful, public-facing practice. In doing so, they are not only telling history – they are restoring voice, agency, and memory.
At Camp Westerbork: Telling a full story
In May 2025, the Camp Westerbork Memorial will open a new three-room exhibition informed by the IHRA Recommendations. Its purpose is clear: to present the history of Roma not only as a story of persecution, but as a story of people – of lives lived, traditions passed on, and memories preserved.
Images from the exhibition at Camp Westerbork Memorial
The exhibition brings together artworks by Roma artists, authentic objects, and multimedia material that foreground Roma voices. Interactive displays invite visitors to reflect on the atrocities of the past while also engaging with the resilience of survivors and their descendants. Importantly, the exhibition resists framing Roma solely as victims; instead, it emphasizes dignity, culture, and continuity – reflecting the IHRA’s call to approach teaching about this history with empathy and nuance. Speaking on the role of the Recommendations in the establishment of the exhibition, Bas Kortholt, Researcher at the Camp Westerbork Memorial, says, ‘‘The Recommendations were of great value in writing the exhibition texts and creating digital personal stories that can be viewed and listened to in the exhibition. In that manner, the Recommendations functioned as both a reference work and handbook that we could constantly go back to.’’
The exhibition also does not shy away from uncomfortable truths. Alongside the crimes of the Nazis, the exhibition directly addresses the role of Dutch citizens and institutions in facilitating deportations and repression. This insistence on confronting national complicity speaks to one of the IHRA Recommendations’ central principles: that education must be rooted in accountability, not myth.
The goal is not to equalize pain, but to expose patterns of exclusion and persecution.
The efforts at Westerbork extend far beyond the museum walls. In April 2025, the Memorial Centre led an online campaign for International Roma Day, in partnership with more than 20 institutions in the Netherlands and abroad – including the Anne Frank Foundation, the National Holocaust Museum, and the National Committee for 4 and 5 May. Using the shared hashtag #Romaday, the campaign highlighted Roma life before, during, and after the war.
Over the coming months, a range of programs that center Roma voices will continue to take place:
A digital archive of 50 personal stories, created in collaboration with students, artists, and relatives, will go live this summer on the museum’s knowledge portal. The initiative, also informed by the EU Horizon MEMORISE project, links past and present through intergenerational memory work.
Guided tours at the historical site that will always be co-led by professional educators and Roma community members. This approach reflects the Recommendation that Roma communities should be actively involved in educational processes and the shaping of historical narratives, rather than merely represented within them.
School outreach programs will use theater monologues and musical presentations to bring survivor testimony into classrooms across cities such as Rotterdam, Maastricht, and Amsterdam – reaching students in environments where this history is still unfamiliar.
An 80-minute documentary created with Dutch filmmaker Bob Entrop explores the long-term psychological impact of persecution on Roma survivors and their families. Public screenings are planned for Amsterdam, Westerbork, and other cities throughout the year.
And from August onward, the Caravan Museum– a traveling installation created by Roma organizations – will be hosted on-site. Inside a caravan outfitted with modern museum technology, visitors will encounter video interviews, cultural artifacts, and oral histories that portray not only oppression, but joy, tradition, and resistance. Taken together, these efforts reflect a singular commitment: that remembrance must be co-created with the communities whose stories are being told. At every level– exhibition, education, outreach – Roma and are not justsubjects of history, but active partners in how that history is shared.
In Sweden: Exhibitions, education, and empathy
At the Swedish Museum of the Holocaust, the IHRA Recommendations have found a clear home in their educational program. While the museum’s exhibition Untold– dedicated to the genocide of the Roma and – was developed before the Recommendations were released, the accompanying school program for secondary students was explicitly shaped by their pedagogical framework. In particular, the program draws directly on the Recommendations’ core questions: Why teach? What to teach? How to teach?
Images from the exhibition and the workshop that took place at the Swedish Museum of the Holocaust
For the museum’s educators, the answer begins with empathy. Personal testimony forms the heart of the school program, with life stories of Roma survivors who came to Sweden after the war. These stories allow students to move beyond statistics and engage with the lived experience of the genocide – a key principle of the Recommendations, which call for a dignity-focused approach rooted in individual voices.
Although it predates the IHRA Recommendations, the Untold exhibition aligns closely with their spirit. It aims to provide a comprehensive picture of the genocide of the Roma – tracing the roots of antigypsyism, the rise of racial biology, and the machinery of Nazi persecution, through to the long-delayed recognition of the genocide and the situation of Roma communities today. Many of the objects and testimonies included had never been exhibited before, and the exhibition’s title speaks to the invisibility and marginalization of this history.
The museum also addresses one of the more complex educational challenges identified by the IHRA: how to speak about different genocides without reducing them to competitive narratives of suffering. In a country where the Holocaust is more widely taught, the program uses structural comparisons to help students understand how antisemitism and antigypsyism manifested in parallel – through racial laws, propaganda, forced deportations, and mass murder. The goal is not to equalize pain, but to expose patterns of exclusion and persecution.
Importantly, the museum localizes its content to reflect the national context – another IHRA recommendation. Survivor testimonies are tied to Swedish experiences: how these individuals arrived in the country, how they rebuilt their lives, and what barriers they continued to face. The program links past to present by including discussions of contemporary antigypsyism in Swedish society today.
At the heart of this work lies the understanding that it is not just about restoring facts – it is about restoring agency.
‘‘With the IHRA’s recommendations, the fate of the Roma is not just an aside to the Jewish Holocaust,’’ says Dan Hultqvist, Museum Educator at the Swedish Museum of the Holocaust. ‘‘For a long time, Roma have been mentioned only as one of the other ‘victim groups’ of Nazi crimes. Now the Roma are being recognized as being persecuted and murdered because of their ethnicity and not because of some attributed characteristic that the perpetrators largely used to legitimise the persecution and genocide.’’
In its quiet but deliberate way, the Swedish Museum of the Holocaust is proving that even in formal education settings, the genocide of the Roma can be taught with care, complexity, and humanity – and that doing so enriches, rather than fragments, historical understanding.
From faded margins to frontline memory: The impact of inclusion
What unites these two very different institutions is a shared belief: that the voices of Roma survivors must be heard – and that memory should be accurate and shaped together with those whose lives it represents. In both the Netherlands and Sweden, remembrance is being redefined not as a passive act of commemoration, but as a participatory process grounded in dignity.
At the heart of this work lies the understanding that education about the genocide of the Roma is not just about restoring facts – it is about restoring agency. Survivors are not just sources of testimony; their stories, perspectives, and experiences are actively shaping how the next generation learns about the past.
By embracing the IHRA Recommendations as a framework – whether in an exhibition, a guided tour, a school program, or a digital campaign – both museums are demonstrating what meaningful implementation looks like. Not every institution will take the same path, but these examples show what becomes possible when institutions choose to listen and act.
Download the Recommendations
To explore how your institution can engage with this history more accurately, thoughtfully, and support meaningful remembrance and education – download theIHRARecommendations for Teaching and Learning about the Persecution and Genocide of the Roma During the NaziEra.
For Mirjam Karoly, education about the genocide of the Roma is necessary for building just and inclusive societies. The IHRA Recommendations for Teaching and Learning about the Persecution and Genocide of the Roma during the Nazi Era are a step towards cultivating authentic empathy for Roma lives.
At the International IHRA Conference on the Persecution and Genocide of Roma during the Nazi Era, participants shared archival evidence, expert insights, and deeply personal experiences.
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