Oral history – Centrul de Resurse pentru Comunitate

The Community Resource Center is not the actual creator, but rather serves as a convention here. In general, the projects focusing on oral history interviews with Roma in Romania were not carried out by permanent institutions specialized in oral history, but by various individuals who coordinated one or more projects that led to the creation of such collections, which varied greatly in quantitative and qualitative terms. Institutionally, many of the NGOs under which these projects were carried out have disappeared or changed their profile. In this case, CRC is no longer in operation, but the former project coordinator, Petre Matei, currently works as a researcher at the “Elie Wiesel” National Institute for the Study of the Holocaust in Romania, where this collection is used for academic and educational purposes. The collection includes 280 oral interviews. Most of these interviews were conducted with Roma who survived the deportations in Transnistria. Seven interviews were conducted with Romanian or Roma witnesses of the deportations (Romanians who prevented the deportation of certain Roma, or Roma who managed to escape deportation). Centrul de Resurse pentru Comunitate (The Center for Community Resources) was founded in 2009 in Cluj and generally carried out projects to help physically impaired or socially disadvantaged people through projects and volunteer work in the fields of social work and education. In 2014 and 2015, CRC conducted the project "Roma survivors of deportations in Transnistria. Social services, combating inequalities, promoting tolerance and multicultural understanding". Since few Roma survivors benefitted from their pensions as victims of WWII ethnic persecutions, the project proposed to identify the last surviving Roma and help them obtain their rights according to Romanian and German laws by establishing the link between claimants, archives, pension offices in Romania and Germany, etc. Besides, another long-term objective of the project was to create an archive of oral history interviews which could be later used for educational purposes (to raise awareness of the fate of the Roma during the Second World War) and thus promote tolerance for the Roma in the majority society. Since many survivors received their legal rights, team members were able to access very easily numerous Roma communities from different regions. Most Roma were interviewed in 2014-2015 (funding allowed long-distance travel), but they continued to be interviewed thereafter, albeit in smaller numbers and mainly near Bucharest. 273 Roma survivors born between 1905 and 1940 were interviewed.