Prague Exhibition Honors Roma Resistance Fighters Who Battled the Nazi Occupation

On October 15, 2026, several hundred people, most of them Roma from Czechia and Slovakia, gathered at the Museum of the Romani National Revival in Prague for the opening of an exhibition on a chapter of Czech history that has gone largely unwritten. It covers the role of Czech and Slovak Romani resistance fighters during the Nazi German occupation and the breakup of Czechoslovakia between 1938 and 1945.

Until now, Czech and Slovak Roma have appeared in the history of the Second World War almost only as victims of the Holocaust against Roma and Sinti. The toll was severe: in the so-called Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, Nazi Germany murdered roughly 90 percent of the Czech Roma. Far less known is that many Czech and Slovak Roma fought the occupiers, some as partisans in resistance groups and others as soldiers in the Czechoslovak Underground Army, known as Defense of the Nation, or ON.

The museum's director, Emil Scuka, a lawyer, former prosecutor and one of the best-known Czech Roma activists, hopes the show will change how Roma are seen in the war. "We were not only victims; we were also heroes," he told the audience. He said many people, even among Roma themselves, do not know that Roma fought against Nazism. Putting on the exhibition, in his view, was a debt his generation owed these fighters, and it was now being repaid. He urged those present to bring their children and grandchildren so they could see that Roma have heroes too.

Scuka also said the subject had been pushed to the margins of Czech and Slovak historical writing for decades, and that Roma therefore decided to document the fates of their war heroes themselves. The curator, Radoslav Scuka, said the archives yielded more than 1,400 Romani fighters. From them, the team chose the 100 most compelling stories, which the exhibition presents as detailed life histories.

Two figures stand out. Anton Facuna was a sergeant in the American intelligence agency, the Office of Strategic Services, and was flown to Slovakia on a secret mission in October 1944; Slovakia had been a puppet state of Hitler from 1939 to 1945. Josef Serinek, nicknamed the "Black Partisan from Vysocina," escaped from the Nazi concentration camp for Roma at Lety. He went on to found and command the large Capajev-Cerny partisan unit in the Bohemian-Moravian Highlands. In 2022, Czech President Milos Zeman posthumously awarded him the Medal for Heroism. Late in life, Serinek shared his memories with historian Jan Tesar, who later wrote the three-volume "Ceska cikanska rapsodie," or Czech Gypsy Rhapsody.

Apart from Tesar's work, Czech and Slovak historians have not studied Roma resistance. Prokop Tomek of the Military History Institute in Prague told DW he knows of no scholarly historical work on the topic. He did not find the figure of 1,400 exaggerated, saying it matches the Roma share of Czechoslovakia's population, and he called the exhibition undoubtedly groundbreaking.

The silence has a present-day echo. Many Roma in Czechia and Slovakia still do not publicly acknowledge their ethnicity, partly because memories of the Holocaust have been passed down through generations. Historians and politicians still debate how far the Protectorate's Czech authorities were complicit in the extermination of Czech Roma. What is certain is that the police registration of all Roma, written into Czechoslovak law since 1927, made the Nazis' task easier.

The government estimates about 250,000 Roma live in Czechia today, yet only 21,000 people identified as Roma in the 2021 census. In a country of 10 million, Roma are among the three largest minorities, but the most socially disadvantaged and scarcely represented in politics. With scholarship so thin, the exhibition may become a starting point for further research.