It's a surprise - and no surprise - to discover that this single documentary about the Nazi genocide of the Sinti and Roma hasn't had any reviews yet. Although - or more likely because - the ongoing persecution of the Roma, which has much worsened during the CoVid pandemic, proves that all those social justice debates of the past decade are pure hypocrisy, at least as far as Europe is concerned.
Yeger's film starts out with the question that many Jews researching the Holocaust are eventually confronted with: with such an abundance of material, why has the Romani genocide remained so elusive compared to the Shoah? He interviews many survivors, like Celja Stojka whose Auschwitz paintings and lectures made her a celebrity in her native Austria. There is a long overdue bit on Mengele's "Kindergarten" where he collected Romani children to conduct experiments on them, as he was obsessed with the racial "anomaly" the Roma represented for Nazi race theory (descending from India, they are pure Aryan). The witness testimony of these "experiments" are the toughest part of the film and not for the faint of heart.
However, Yeger fails to address (or comprehend) the main reasons for the comparative lack of Romani testimonials: for one part, Roma could not emigrate to Israel, so they continue to live among those who oppress them. Also, the Roma avoid talking about the dead for cultural reasons, which made it easier to ignore them. Finally, the Nazis killed 80-90% of them in Germany, so there are simply not enough left to raise the issue in a major way.
Many of the interview partners are famous scholars and it would have been helpful to point out who, for instance, Ian Hancock is (he established the Romani term for the Holocaust "porajmos", meaning "The Devouring"). And at 99 minutes the film is much too short given the enormous scope of the subject. One could easily do an entire series on this. Roma have a substantially different view of Europe than the "gadje" (i.e. Everybody else), which would be important and fascinating to learn. Yet, as the view count and votes show, even a comprehensive first look at the Nazi persecution of Roma has failed to garner much interest.
