My presentation will begin with a letter to Amelie Baumann-Blach, who was murdered in Auschwitz on June 26, 1944, and will analyze the testimony of Ella Davis, who, as a child, survived Auschwitz and eight other concentration camps and who died in Columbia, South Carolina, in 2004. Through my recollection of their lives, deaths, and the traces they have left behind, I provide a deeper understanding of Romani women’s experiences in the Holocaust and an analysis that open our understandings of Holocaust history, inter-generational transmission of knowledge, and the gendered polyvocality of memory practice. In so doing, I engage with the gendered possibilities of claiming kinship for history making, collective memory and building common futures, for us Romnja and for everyone.

Prof. Dr. Ethel Brooks is Chair of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies and Sociology at Rutgers University. Brooks is a Tate-TrAIN Transnational Fellow at the University of the Arts London, where, in 2011-2012, she was the US-UK Fulbright Distinguished Chair. Brooks was appointed under President Obama to the United States Holocaust Memorial Council, where she served from 2015-2020. She is Chair of the Board of the European Roma Rights Centre and member of the Barvalipe Academy of the European Roma Institute for Arts and Culture, the RomaMoma Think Tank, and the US Delegation to the IHRA and its Roma Genocide Working Group. Since 2007, she is co-Director of the annual Feminist Critical Analysis course in Dubrovnik, Croatia. Brooks is the author of the award-winning Unraveling the Garment Industry: Transnational Organizing and Women’s Work. Her current book project focuses on encampment, claimstaking and Romani futures.