The Time to Remember project is an educational and memorial program for young people

Jan. 30, 2024

The project “Time to Remember” is an educational-commemorative program for youth . The project's goal was to increase youth engagement, particularly by facilitating conversations between Ukrainian Roma youth, German stakeholders, and participants and players in worldwide Roma youth networks. It focused on adapting successful international commemorative approaches to Ukrainian reality and creating a long-lasting tradition of youth commemoration on a local and national scale.

It was supported by the “Meet-Up” program of the EVZ Foundation (Stiftung "Erinnerung, Verantwortung und Zukunft"), and implemented in collaboration with the Central Council of German Sinti and Roma, Play Back Theater Ukraine, and Family Ethnography and Ukrainian Center for Holocaust Studies.

The project includes several stages of realization; in particular, there were organized non-formal education sessions in Poland, Krakow, and Berlin, Germany, as well as online.

During the educational training in Krakow, 20 participants from a mixed group from Ukraine and Germany took part in art therapy training sessions. The project aimed to empower Roma youth in Germany and Ukraine, focusing on the Roma genocide to fight for equality and against racism, addressing the lack of recollection and education about the event.

Training included small and large groups working on the history of the Roma genocide, working with memory, and dealing with generational and collective traumas. As a result of training, participants were able to stage documentary performances for a large group of the Roma community during the Dick He Na Bister event in Krakow and had discussions with the audience afterward. Moreover, our program included a visit to Auschwitz-Bercinau on August 2 for Roma Genocide Remembrance Day as a part of education on remembrance.

Link to social media posts (video)

The commemorative ceremony "Time to Remember" was organized on the occasion of Babyn Yar Memorial Day on September 29 online, to honour the memory of the victims of the Roma Genocide during the Second World War in Ukraine, where Meet Up project participants took an active part.

Link to Facebook recording

The second part of the project took place in Berlin, Germany. We continued to work on such topics as memory, commemoration, and decolonization. During the workshops, we discussed how to address the traumas gained during World War II and the ongoing war in Ukraine. Participants of the workshop studied the roots of colonization, colonial history, and a host of other topics about the current state of affairs in Ukraine with the assistance of our trainer.

Furthermore, as a result of our collaboration with Roma organizations in Germany during our event in Berlin, we had a guided tour of the Ceija Stojka exhibition at the European Roma Institute for Arts and Culture, as well as a guided tour of the Memorial to Europe's Sinti and Roma Murdered Under Nazism and the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, both provided by the Association Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe.

As a result of the workshop, participants shared their reflections in digital format, using different media.

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