Prague exhibition honours Roma who fought Nazi occupation

An exhibition on Czech and Slovak Roma who fought against Nazi German occupation opened in Prague on October 15, 2026, at Prague’s Museum of the Romani National Revival. It presents the life stories of 100 Roma partisans and soldiers selected from more than 1,400 fighters documented in archives.

The show addresses a chapter that Czech and Slovak historical writing has long neglected. Czech and Slovak Roma have usually been written into World War II history as victims of the Holocaust, and little else; Nazi Germany murdered approximately 90 percent of Czech Roma in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. Museum director Emil Scuka, a lawyer and former prosecutor, told several hundred attendees at the opening that this was a turning point. "We were not only victims; we were also heroes," Scuka said. He added that organizing the exhibition was a debt his generation owed to Roma heroes and asked visitors to bring children and grandchildren so they can see that Roma have heroes too.

Curator Radoslav Scuka said researchers found over 1,400 Romani fighters in archives and selected the 100 most interesting stories for the exhibition. Anton Facuna, a sergeant with the American Office of Strategic Services, is among them; he arrived in Slovakia by air in October 1944 for a covert operation. Josef Serinek, known as the "Black Partisan from Vysocina," got away from the Nazi camp for Roma at Lety and later led a large partisan unit called Capajev-Cerny in the highlands of Bohemia and Moravia. Czech President Milos Zeman posthumously awarded Serinek the Medal for Heroism in 2022.

Prokop Tomek, a historian with Prague’s Military History Institute, told Deutsche Welle that the figure of 1,400 Roma fighters matches the share of Roma in Czechoslovakia’s population and does not seem exaggerated to him. He called the exhibition "undoubtedly groundbreaking". According to DW, except for historian Jan Tesar's three-volume book Ceska cikanska rapsodie, Czech and Slovak historians have not researched Roma resistance against Nazism to this day.

The show follows decades of marginalization. Scuka said Czech and Slovak historical writing had pushed the topic aside for decades, so Roma decided to document the fates of their war heroes themselves. Many Roma in Czechia and Slovakia still do not publicly acknowledge their ethnic identity, partly due to Holocaust experiences passed down through generations. A 1927 Czechoslovak law required police to register all Roma, and that registration made the Nazis’ extermination easier. Czech historians and politicians continue to debate how far Protectorate authorities were complicit in that extermination.

The Czech government estimates that approximately 250,000 Roma live in the country today, but only 21,000 people identified as Roma in the 2021 census. Of the three largest ethnic minorities in a nation of 10 million, Roma face the greatest social disadvantage, hold almost no political representation, and remain nearly absent from Czech politics.