Romanian Roma Survivors' Recollections of 1942: Deportations to Transnistria with Dr. Ana Chiritoiu and Mr. Romeo Tiberiade

Abstract
In this talk,  Dr. Ana Chiritoiu and Mr. Romeo Tiberiade, the president of the "Pro Europa" Roma Party branch in Craiova, Romania, reflect on the deportation of Romanian Roma to the occupied territories of Transnistria during the Second World War. The discussion starts from recollections of the survivors of the deportation that Tiberiade recorded several years ago, as he realized that this generation’s memories of the past would disappear along with them. Then, they will relate the deportation to later waves of displacement experienced by Tiberiade himself in the early 1990s and, now, by his children, who migrated abroad due to discrimination and lack of opportunities. Even though each of these waves of uprooting and persecution differs from the others, when viewed from inside family and community life, their effects prolong one another and cause Roma to live under the threat of siege and displacement permanently.

Speaker bio
Mr. Romeo Tiberiade is the president of the "Pro Europa" Roma Party branch in Craiova, Romania.

Dr. Ana Chirițoiu is a social anthropologist and a collaborating researcher for this seminar series in Romani Studies. She received her PhD from the Central European University (Vienna/Budapest) in 2022 and is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology, Uppsala University. Ana has worked on Roma-related topics in Eastern Europe for over a decade, both as an academic and as an engaged researcher. Her research explores how the social exclusion of Roma reflects onto the emic ideologies that underpin the social reproduction of "Romaniness." Her current book project describes how Roma attempt to circumvent marginalization through the cultivation of virtue, especially in the spheres of kinship, social order, and vernacular law. Her future research project, titled "Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay," examines the challenges that the Roma’s long-term migration to Scandinavia and North America poses for the reproduction of their moral community. In 2020, Ana was a writing-up fellow at the Law & Anthropology Department of the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle (Saale). In 2022 she was a trainer in the judicial training organized by MPI and the European Judicial Training Network on the topic 'Cultural Diversity in the Courtroom: Judges facing new challenges.' As of 2019, she is an editor of Anthropology Matters Journal.

This event is hybrid, thus attendance is possible via Zoom.