Dr. Helena Sadílková

Professional Background

Helena Sadílková is an assistant professor in the Department of Central-European Studies at Charles University in Prague (Czech Republic), where she also serves as head of the Seminar of Romani Studies. She also earned her PhD from Charles University. Sadílková is a member of the board of the Prague Forum for Romani Histories at the Institute of Contemporary History at the Czech Academy of Sciences and co-editor-in-chief of the Czech Romani studies journal Romano Džaniben.

Dr. Sadílková works on the wartime and postwar history of Roma with a focus on the territory of former Czechoslovakia. Her research interests include the history of state socialism, social movements, and socio-political participation of Roma as a historically marginalized community. She has done archival and field research in Czechia and Slovakia, where she has studied interactions between members of Romani communities and the local non-Romani population, including local authorities' role in the process of negotiating policies related to Roma. She is particularly interested in looking at Romani experiences and perspectives and the written sources that document them. Dr. Sadílková also works on memory culture and recognition in relation to the Nazi persecution of the Roma and Sinti. She worked in cooperation with the Museum of Romani Culture in Brno to prepare the memorial of the Holocaust of the Czech Roma and Sinti in Lety u Písku and to ensure a dignified commemoration of Roma and Sinti Holocaust victims on the site of the former concentration camp, which the Czech state finally acquired in 2018 after it became known that plot was being used as a pig farm.

Her publications include "Asserting a Presence in the Public Sphere: Autobiographies by two Romani Holocaust Survivors in Communist Czechoslovakia" (together with M. Závodská in Donert C., Rosenhaft E.: The Legacies of the Romani Genocide in Europe since 1945, Routledge, 2022) and "The Postwar Migration of Romani Families from Slovakia to the Bohemian Lands. A Complex Legacy of War and Genocide in Czechoslovakia" (in Čapková K., Adler E.: Jewish and Romani Families in the Holocaust and its Aftermath, Rutgers University Press, 2020).

Fellowship Research

During her fellowship, Dr. Sadílková will search for ego documents capturing any type of postwar testimony from Romani and Sinti survivors from Czechoslovakia about their wartime experiences. She will explore the different niches of memorialization and commemoration of the Holocaust of the Sinti and Roma in postwar Czechoslovakia that Romani survivors have used to present their wartime fates, either in public or in communication with different public bodies and state administration. They did so in a social environment that silenced wartime narratives that problematized the claim that the whole of the Czechoslovak nation had been a mass-victim of Nazi aggression and/or ignored specific features of the racial persecution of the Roma and Sinti. She will analyse the contexts in which Romani and Sinti survivors were willing to and were allowed to share some of their memories outside the private sphere and how the specific circumstances of these communications influenced the way in which they phrased their accounts. Documents produced in this process are an important contribution for the production of knowledge on the Romani Holocaust in the postwar years and our understanding of these processes as negotiations on the then-position of the Roma in the postwar society and the ways in which Romani and Sinti survivors positioned themselves in these.

Residency Period: March 1, 2022 through September 30, 2022