One Blood, One Flame: Volume I

The Oral Histories of the Yugoslav Gypsies before, during and after WWII

Polansky's first oral history project with Roma (Gypsies) started in 1993 in the Czech Republic. While researching Czech emigration to America after the 1848 revolution, he heard about thousands of documents in the same archive regarding a WWII Gypsy "death camp." When he asked the archive director to see the documents, he was told they couldn't be opened for 50 years. After much pestering he was finally allowed to see the documents in January 1994. Intrigued by reports there were no survivors, he was able to find more than 100 Roma and Sinti survivors in the village of Lety. Many survivors claimed Lety was worse than their later experience at Auschwitz. None of them would allow themselves to be filmed; they only allowed him to type their testimonies directly into his laptop. Fifty years after the war, the survivors were still afraid to speak on camera about their experiences. The oral histories of the Gypsy survivors of WWII in the former Yugoslavia were all filmed. Unlike their distant cousins in the Czech Republic, the Yugoslav Gypsies were not afraid to talk. They were just upset no one had recorded their stories a long time ago. Volume I contains oral histories from Romani survivors in the Nish area of Yugoslavia. The first German concentration camp in Yugoslavia during WWII was established in Nish where about 10,000 "hostages" (Jews, Roma and Serbs) were collected, and later executed. These oral histories are not only a record of what happened to the Yugoslav Gypsies during WWII, but also a testimony of how they lived for generations before the war, what happened to them during Tito's time, and how they are trying to survive today.

Please note that VOL II of the series will be available around the end of Dec and VOL III in March 2008.