Michael Stewart

Michael Stewart is currently completing a comprehensive history of the persecution of Europe’s Romany peoples from 1933-1945 and the campaigns for restitution and acknowledgement which followed. Stewart’s book treats the diverse forms of persecution neither as the unfolding of a central plan nor of structural features of Nazi rule, but rather the coming together of utopian ideas of a Volksgemeinschaft with the apparatus of the modern nation state. From the Romany point of view, this was a holocaust of their families, and Stewart attempts to provide both a history of this persecution and an understanding of how it was experienced by the Roma and Sinti. Austria—where Roma were described as “gravediggers of the Nordic blood”—was a central site of this persecution, with nearly 90% of the country’s Romany population eliminated by 1945.