We have been living in ‘the era of the witness’ (Wieviorka 2006). In this era, the representations of the horrors of the past draw on eyewitness accounts. Professional historians, investigative journalists, schoolteachers, and museum curators seek to include the voices of the victims in their writings, exhibitions and classes on war and genocide. Guidelines for Holocaust educators recommend personal stories as a remedy against forgetting and the best way to ‘translate statistics into people’ (Guidelines for Teaching).

The figure of a witness underwent a gradual transformation in European public discourse – from those ‘who did not survive [the Holocaust] but left their testimonies’ to a Holocaust survivor as a ‘bearer of history’ (Wieviorka 2006). During World War II, thousands Jewish eyewitnesses wrote letters and kept diaries that described the destruction of their communities. Not all these ego-documents survived the war, especially in Eastern Europe. However, many of them were collected by the postwar Jewish committees that documented Nazi crimes. In the decades to follow, the survivors who left Europe for Israel and North America produced voluminous memoirs and memorial books, entrusting paper with their bitter memories and unbearable losses. While some turned to writing and arts for trauma relief, others engaged in conscious documentation attempts, creating early Holocaust archives. Eventually, the oral history fever of the 1980s, facilitated by widely available audiovisual recording technology, enabled ordinary people to share their stories and leave their message to future generations (For the analysis of Holocaust testimonies, cf. Wieviorka 2006, Pollin-Galay 2018).

As fascinating as it may sound, this story is not one for all victims of the Nazi genocide. A young journalist who sets to dig out the fates of a prewar Romani community in her hometown, will be soon challenged by the lack of available sources. So will be a European teacher who aspires to add personal stories to her class on the Nazi persecution of Roma in Eastern Europe.

As a scholar and educator, I was in the same position. In 2014 I embarked on my own microhistorical project on the fates of Roma in the borderlands of Belarus and Lithuania. With a glimpse of luck, I could identify a rare mention of the Romani genocide in a local memorial book, a memoir of a Soviet partisan or postwar trial records. The voices of the victims themselves rarely came up to the surface in such narratives (Bartash 2019).

Although hundreds of thousands of European Sinti and Roma lost their lives to the Nazi genocide, we still know too little about the victims and their life paths (Donert 2021: 1). Furthermore, we have a limited understanding of how diverse Romani communities experienced and responded to the blanket genocidal violence in wartime Europe under German rule. Romani survivors seldom wrote memoirs and were rarely invited to European court rooms to testify about the horrors they endured (Bartash 2019, Joskowicz 2023).

To showcase the community perspective, I have engaged in oral history research with the families of Roma. Most of the people whom I interviewed, did not see World War II with their own eyes or were too young to remember. They recounted the memories of their family members who survived the war and genocide in the western borderlands of the German-occupied Soviet Union (Bartash 2020).

The narratives of my Romani acquaintances were different and yet similar to one another. Many of them talked about mass shootings, extremes of survival in the woods, Soviet partisans and partisans of various national groups. Women recalled the fates of their female relatives who sacrificed for their children and often became victims of sexualized violence. Like pieces of a puzzle, these family histories were slowly coming together and shaping a grand narrative of Romani suffering and struggle for survival.

I was immediately able to sense this metanarrative, when reading Tears of Blood in its original version, as if family stories of my Romani interlocutors received continuation. This is the power of an early testimony and the genius of its creator, Bronisława Wajs (Papusza, 1908–1987), who managed to reflect the survival experiences that were not limited geographically to Volhynia but shared by many Romani individuals and families across German-occupied Eastern Europe.

Tears of Blood is a powerful voice of the community and one of the earliest eyewitness accounts of the Romani genocide, written by a woman. This book introduces the recently re-discovered manuscript of this long narrative poem in Papusza’s own hand (1,086 lines), which is at least four times longer than the previously known text published in communist Poland (Papusza 1956). The censored version largely omitted Papusza’s personal experiences of war and violence, as well as the themes that were seen as politically controversial at the time. This included the scenes of mutual Polish-Ukrainian ethnic cleansing, as well as the episodes in which Papusza’s family sought to survive by playing music to different fighting parties or passing under a different ethnic and religious identity. It is only in the original version of the poem that we can hear the authentic voice of Papusza and embrace the whole complexity of interethnic and interpersonal relations in wartime Volhynia.

In this book we approach Tears of Blood not only as a masterpiece of Romani literature but as a survivor testimony and a historical source on the Nazi genocide of Roma. The poem stands out thanks to its narrative genre and overwhelming frankness, offering a horrific account of the persecution that Roma endured at the hands of Germans and Ukrainian insurgents, of the Polish-Ukrainian mutual ethnic cleansing, and women’s experiences of male-driven warfare and violence.

Although the idea of poetry as a historical source is not entirely new, few poems allow for a historiographical reconstruction of events past. Papusza’s poem fulfils this test well. Close to Homeric epic in the choice of genre (as claimed by Shapoval in this volume), Tears of Blood mostly follows a chronological order and mentions names of actual personalities and localities. The editors further trace such pieces of information to regional history and geography, as well as Romani cultural practices, providing the reader with nuanced commentaries in Part II of the book. The four chapters – written by historians and literary scholars Viktor Shapoval, Emilia Kledzik, Mikhail Tyaglyy and Sofiya Zahova – contextualize the poem in the light of the Nazi genocidal policies towards Roma and Romani literary scene. Based on the poet’s papers and recent research in Poland, Emilia Kledzik reconstructs the biography of Papusza. She calls into question a public image of the poet that was constructed by her close acquaintance, editor and censor, Jerzy Ficowski.

Viktor Shapoval shares his unique experience of working with Papusza’s manuscript with the reader. Drawing on his deep knowledge of Romani language and cultures, Shapoval reveals hidden meanings behind Papusza’s text that has taken years of his painstaking work. Sofiya Zahova further traces the impact of Papusza’s legacy on today’s Romani literature worldwide. No other poet has shaped modern Romani literature in the way Papusza did, concludes Zahova.

Historical contextualization of the poem would be hardly possible without ground-breaking archival research by our Ukrainian colleague, Mikhail Tyaglyy. In his chapter, Tyaglyy thoroughly reconstructs the logic and the chronology of the persecution of Roma in Volhynia. Tyaglyy bravely addresses such horny issues as the hostility of the local Ukrainian population towards traveling Roma and their victimization by UPA fighters.

As the reader will learn from Kledzik’s contribution, poet Jerzy Ficowski joined Papusza’s caravan in western Poland¹ in 1949, while working for the Main Commission for the Investigation of German Crimes in Poland [Główna Komisja Badania Zbrodni Niemieckich w Polsce]. Across the Soviet bloc, such commissions documented the damage from the German occupation to the local economies and populations. They drafted their reports, based on forensic examination and the interrogation of eyewitnesses. These reports were later published by the local press and used in national and international trials over the Nazi and their collaborators (cf. Bartash 2019, Sorokina 2009 for the work of the Soviet Extraordinary Commission).

Ficowski’s mission was to prepare a report on the Nazi persecution of Roma for the Main Commission, even though the report never got published (cf. Kledzik in this volume). Introduced to Papusza’s community by a mutual acquaintance, Ficowski conversed with them about their wartime experiences in Volhynia that had been part of interwar Poland. He noted down their narratives on paper cards. Among Ficowski’s respondents were male members of the Wajs and Krzyżanowski families, including Papusza’s husband Dionizy Wajs. These notes later became part of different editions of his books on the Gypsies in Poland (cf. Kledzik 2020 for a critical discussion).²

Papusza was also asked to give a testimony, which she promised to write down and send to Ficowski (Kledzik in this volume). Yet her wartime memoir took a form of a long narrative poem that she was able to finalize only in the summer of 1952. Like for other Roma survivors throughout Eastern Europe, postwar years were extremely challenging for Papusza and her community. Devastated by the war and genocide, they spent immediate post-war years in Volhynia, looking for the lost relatives and mobilizing resources for a cross-border move to postwar Poland (Dębicki 2004: 192–222). It was not until spring 1946 that Papusza and her relatives moved westwards. They joined the stream of fellow Poles who, voluntarily or involuntary, left their homes in the eastern half of interwar Poland (now incorporated into the Soviet Union). With few possessions in hand and often on their own carts, they crossed the new Polish-Soviet frontier (Bartash 2023 a: 167–169). Papusza’s extended family soon faced new difficulties, having to earn their living and look for winter accommodation in unfamiliar and often hostile environment of western Poland from where remaining Germans were being still expelled, while Polish settlers were moving to this area (cf. Kledzik in this volume; Kochanowski 2001).

As my Romani interlocutors recalled, the postwar hardship absorbed their families to the degree that there was a little time and space for remembering genocide victims. That is, memorials in carved stone had to wait. While survivors tackled their tasks of feeding families and caring for orphans and the sick, they often supressed their bitter memories (Bartash 2023a). It is not accidental that Papusza begins her poem with the lines:

Painful memories came to the surface mostly when they were provoked by the events that occurred in the present, for example, if a survivor met an old acquaintance or a person who resembled a lost family member (Bartash 2023: 174–175). Community gatherings, too, provided the survivors with safe spaces for grieving and mourning (For the discussion of patterns of remembering in Roma communities, cf. Kapralski 2023).

It seems that Ficowski’s intervention played a role of a trigger for Papusza’s memory and trauma that eventually transferred into the poem. Once unblocked, the process of working-through became irreversible: ‘the author was overwhelmed by the visceral urge to get rid of the memories of a traumatic experience as soon as possible through leaving its detailed description on paper. This tension dictated the peculiar emotional and dynamic rhythm of writing the manuscript of Tears of Blood’ (Shapoval in this volume). As Shapoval’s analysis of Papusza’s handwriting suggests, she was extremely tired, and her fatigue led to multiple errors, omissions and repetitions.

From this perspective, Tears of Blood is to be seen as a trauma text. Many of its horrific scenes translate a mental state of the poet as she experienced and witnessed war horrors, lived through the moments of despair and lost a sense of reality. In one of such episodes, Papusza can no longer stand watching children starving. She falls into a state when she disconnects from reality and starts singing a song out loud, though being close to a battlefield. Ignoring an attempt of her husband to stop her, Papusza leaves to search a battlefield for food:

Papusza is overwhelmingly candid with her audience, transferring the experience of a person pushed to her physical and mental limits by the persecution, malnutrition and challenges of survival. This transfer happens unconsciously, before any attempt of rational reflection. A literary scholar, Gabrielle Schwab, emphasizes the crucial role of ‘the unconscious and of transference’ in the writing of violent histories. Schwab notes:

To make trauma accessible, a form needs to be found that translates into language or symbolic expression an experience that is only unconsciously registered and left a mere trace on the affective and corporeal levels. Literature and the arts can become transformational objects in the sense that they endow this knowledge with a symbolic form of expression and thereby not only change its status but also make it indirectly accessible to others (Schwab 2010: 7–8).

A Holocaust scholar, Hannah Pollin-Galay, outlines three main ‘genres’ of a survivor testimony (that she associates with a place and the context in which testifying happens): ‘personal, in the way that the witness’s voice sounds, and allegorical, in its possible rhetorical outcome’; ‘a communal witness voice, an “I” that incorporates political or national institutions’ and, correspondingly, ‘monumentality, the greatness or dignity of the narrator’; and a ‘collective perspective and point toward forensic accusation as an ethical result of testifying’ (Pollin-Galay 2018: 17).

Tears of Blood stands at the intersections of these genres. First of all, the poem translates the experience, emotion and mental state of the author who survived the war and genocide as a married Romani woman in her middle 30s, childless at the time. Her family status helps explain her choices and behaviour under extreme circumstances:

Though Papusza’s personal experience is central to the text, it does not mean that she did not perceive herself as a writer (or singer) of her people’s history. On the contrary, Papusza sees her mission in narrating the collective ordeal of Roma and does so with great dignity. Her monumental anti-war message to the world draws on the experience of her people:

Tears of Blood goes beyond ‘the personal’ and ‘the collective,’ turning to the fates of Papusza’s immediate kin and bigger community, Polska Roma of Volhynia. Her husband Dionizy Wajs and her friend Moliunia are among the protagonists of the poem. In one of many life-threatening episodes, pictured by Papusza, she calls other members of her community by name: Janek, Bronia, Krzysia, Zosia (lines 505–506).³ Other characters – the playing children, the elderly Romani women who sing a fairy tale, the parents grieving for their children lost to the winter cold – are composite. A gifted singer and narrator, Papusza managed to give a voice to many: the female and the male, the young and the old, the living and the dead. The poem’s dreadful scenes took place in real life and were lived through and witnessed by her and the people she knew.

Papusza not only experienced the war as a member of her community, but she narrated the events, drawing on aesthetic patterns and communicative norms, available to her through her culture. Shapoval aptly notes that the poem resembles a testimony in the Romani traditional law, that is, an oral act of testifying in front of the community and the members of a sendo (Romani ‘court’; cf. Shapoval in this volume).⁴ As noted by Pollin-Galay, survivors do not testify in a sociocultural vacuum: ‘In setting out to testify, witnesses do not negotiate this polyphony of generic options in a vacuum, but do so with the help of narrative habits learned over decades, implicit ethical and political goals, expectations about their eventual audiences’ (Pollin-Gallay 2018: 16).

Likewise, in her search for self-expression, Papusza takes inspiration from Romani cultural tradition and folklore texts, turning to such images as the bird of the dead and a crying forest. She addresses her pleas to the God, the sun, the forest and stars. Previous editions of the poem articulated these images, while downplaying and omitting Papusza’s personal experience, as well as factual parts of the poem. In the Romani original, presented in this book, these images coexist in harmony with a human experience, communicating the feelings of despair, fear or, at times, joy and hope for the brighter future:

As a historical source the poem is, first of all, a testimony to the world that seized to exist after World War II. Known to the world as a Romani poet from Poland, Papusza spent the first half of her life, traveling in the former ‘western provinces’ of the Russian Empire that became ‘eastern borderlands’ of interwar Poland. As a child the poet lived and traveled in the surroundings of Lublin, in the Neman valley, Galicia and throughout Volhynia and Polesia (present-day Poland, Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania). For instance, several biographical episodes, later recalled by Papusza as life-changing, took place on the Neman River. Presumably, she learned how to read and write in Polish from a Jewish shopkeeper in Grodno (Hrodna) where she lived with her mother after World War I (Dębicki 2004: 27, Machowska 2011: 35–36).

Even if half-legendary, such episodes reflect the nature of the region that was multicultural, multiconfessional, and multilingual. It would not be an exaggeration to say that its multicultural environment shaped Papusza as a person and a poet. Tears of Blood reveals multiple intercultural influences, as does Papusza’s dialect and her fluency in different local languages (cf. Shapoval in this volume).

Historiography often portrays the eastern voivodeships (administrative divisions) of interwar Poland as ‘backward’ for their agrarian economy and low levels of literacy among the population (For example, cf. Gross 2021). Papusza’s writing and reading skills indeed made her exceptional not only among her people. Yet, Romani families from the region do not see their life in interwar Poland in terms of backwardness and poverty. These lands offered vast opportunities for mobile trade and horse barter, and, it seems, the Polish state was not particularly interested in banning Romani mobility. Countless fairs attracted horse dealers from all over the region; and their schedule often defined the routes of caravans (Bartash 2023b: 72–73).

The majority of Polska Roma to which Papusza’s family belonged made their living from horse trade. The Wajs family, therefore, had an exceptional status in their own community – they earned money by playing music for the local nobility and rural communities. Mobility, even if seasonal, was part of their lifestyle. Through their occupation, the Wajses maintained networks of contacts among local peasants and landlords throughout the region, from Volhynia to Wilno. They relied on these networks, when looking for winter accommodation among the local peasants (Bartash 2023b: 72).

In modern terms, Papusza and her generation had transnational biographies lived at the shifting borders of Eastern Europe. In moving from one marketplace to another and dealing with representatives of different milieus, they also crossed social, linguistic, and cultural boundaries. Their flexible lifestyle made them more modern than the populations among whom they lived and traveled (Bartash 2023b: 73).

For the sake of historical clarity, not all Romani families from this region used to travel, and there was a lot of flexibility in their lifestyles. Edward Dębicki who survived the war as a child in Volhynia, mentioned in his memoir that his paternal grandparents, Jan and Bronisława Krzyżanowski, owned a cottage and land in Aleksandria (today Oleksandriia in Ukraine) before the October Revolution (1917). The family had cattle and hired servants. The World War I and the October Revolution put the end to their family well-being: the war took the life of Jan who served in the Russian Army; the Bolsheviks – their properties. Left with a horse and a wagon, Bronisława and her children joined a group of traveling Roma (Dębicki 2004: 10–11). Other well-to-do families of Roma reacted in a similar way, escaping the repercussions of the October revolution or, later, Stalin’s deportations from the east of interwar Poland annexed in 1939.

It is worth mentioning that the Romani picture of Volhynia was not homogenous. Like all over Eastern Europe, multiple Roma communities lived and traveled in the region. They differed in their histories, professions, language and cultural tradition; and these differences were reflected by their self-naming. At the time, it was normal for a Rom or Romni to identify with a bigger group, for instance, Polska Roma, and a rodo, an extended family or a lineage.

Papusza’s parents belonged to Polska Roma. Thus, Papusza’s mother, Katarzyna Zielińska, came from the family of Galicyjaki who used to travel in Galicia before World War I, while her father came from the families of Warmijaki and Berniki (Ficowski 1986: 213–214). During my ethnographic fieldwork in Polesia in 2009, I had a chance to converse with several families who identified themselves as Berniki. Before World War II, these families traveled throughout Polesia and Volhynia, trading in horses and offering their services as veterinarians and healers in local towns and villages.

Along with Polska Roma, there were other sedentary and half-sedentary communities in Volhynia. For instance, Dębicki mentions that his maternal grandmother came from the family of Roma who identified themselves as Mukany (Dębicki 2004: 11). Until today, Mukany have been locally known as sedentary Roma from the Belarusian-Ukrainian borderlands who speak a local Slavic dialect. In Tears of Blood and the memoirs of Wajs family, such groups often go under the collective term ‘Ukrainian Roma’. Additionally, Papusza’s relatives mentioned the presence of Ruska Roma during in Volhynia World War II (Papusza 1956: 159). Although their dialect was close to that of Polska Roma, they were Orthodox Christians and spoke mainly Russian outside the community.

Furthermore, interethnic marriages occurred, as well. That is how some non-Roma became part of the community and their networks of support. Such networks were of vital importance for the people in hiding. Local contacts kept the families in hiding informed about the dislocation of German and partisan units, as well as about the ‘political’ orientation of a given village. Through such networks, people obtained food and a shelter and, occasionally, work and false identity papers (cf. Aleksiun 2020). The members of Papusza’s community recounted to Ficowski how they were sheltered by a Ruska Roma woman, married to a Ukrainian man. The Romni let them in her home and provided with food and clothing (Ficowski: Materiały warsztatowe: 57–62).

Nevertheless, the differences between the Romani groups came to play a role during the war. As Mikhail Tyaglyy’s analysis shows, occupation authorities and German military units practiced different policies towards sedentary and traveling Roma (cf. Tyaglyy in this volume). The latter were first to fell victims to the Nazi violence. Since the first days of the war in the Soviet Union, German mobile killing units (Einsatzgruppen) that moved in the wake of Wehrmacht murdered communist activists, Red Army soldiers, Jews and Roma. Their mission was to ‘clean up’ the newly concurred lands of any ‘unreliable’ people, preventing the acts of defiance and resistance. Traveling Roma were often seen as potential spies and killed on the spot (cf. Holler 2021).

However, as Tyaglyy’s contribution convincingly demonstrates, it was not until the spring-summer 1942 that the murder of Roma in Volhynia became systematic. This timing coincided with the final stage of the Holocaust in Volhynia when last Jewish residents of ghettoes were killed. In April 1942 few Jews were still alive to witness the unfolding tragedy of Roma. In Łokacze (Lokachi in Ukrainian), 30 Jewish men from the local ghetto were forced to dig a grave and burry more than 100 Roma victims, rounded up in the local villages (cf. Tyaglyy in this volume).⁵ Most probably, those families rented winter accommodation from local peasants like they used to until the German occupation.

The persecution intensified in summer 1942, with first documented attempts to collect data on sedentary families in the countryside. The wave of violence against traveling and sedentary families then lasted through the entire 1943, taking lives of 1,500–2,000 people and marking the Volhynian landscape with over 20 mass killing sites of Roma (cf. Tyaglyy in this volume). ‘A little tragedy on the margins of “big histories”,’ as Tyaglyy puts it, meant a devastating loss for the community of several thousands. Entire families lost their lives to the Nazi genocide, as well as to the military conflict(s), starvation, disease and the cold.

The Nazi persecution of Roma took different forms – from forced labour in local concentration camps and ghettoes to mass killings in the local woods and fields. The majority of Roma (and Jews) from Volhynia were not transported from their small homelands to concentration camps in Poland and other occupied countries. The persecution of Roma had a much more local and intimate nature. It took place in the localities through which their nomadic routes laid and to which their family histories were connected.

German occupation soldiers and the local police rounded up Romani victims in villages or on their way there, as well as in the woods during anti-partisan actions. Such crimes, known to historians as the Holocaust by bullets, were committed with a great cruelty and in a broad daylight (cf. Desbois 2008). They were often witnessed by the local population who have, until recently, lived in these places. The Yahad-In Unum project that documents the last eyewitnesses to the Holocaust, have collected 12 eyewitness testimonies on the murder of Roma in present-day Ukrainian provinces of Volyn and Rivne, namely in Ratne, Sarny, Berestechko, Kamen-Kashirskiy, Bakhiv, Kysylyn and Kovel. These interviews testify about the excessive violence against Roma that stamped on the local memory for decades (Interviews 448U, 450U, 453U, 455U, 471U, 472U, 473U, 474U, 525U, 552U, 554U, 563U, Yahad-In Unum collection).

Yet, the local non-Roma population – the people whom they formerly knew as their hosts, commercial partners, classmates, lovers and godparents to their children – played an ambiguous role in their fates. Some turned traitors and even assistants to the perpetrators. Others simply closed doors before their faces. However, some undertook the risks of cautioning when needed, helping and rescuing their Romani acquaintances.

On the one hand, the poem and Ficowski’s notes mention the situations in which Poles and Ukrainians gave their hand to the Roma in hiding. For instance, a peasant woman, for whom one of the Krzyżanowski family worked as a shepherd, alarmed the man about the German plan to murder all Roma in their locality, thus enabling his escape. She knew this information from her husband who worked as an interpreter for Germans (Ficowski: materiały warsztatowe, 63–79). Ryszard Krzyżanowski recalled how, presumably in 1942, he was detained by a German in the forest near the village of Zofiówka (today Sofiivka). When interrogated about his identity and residence, Krzyżanowski pointed to a house of his Polish acquaintance. When approached, the acquaintance confirmed that the young man dwelled in his house and was not a ‘Gypsy’. Ryszard and his father were then temporarily living with the Polish family (Ficowski: materiały warsztatowe: 57–62). On the other hand, Ficowski’s materials recount acts of denunciation by the locals including shepherds and other people who came across Romani families in the woods (Papusza 1956: 159, 168).

Moreover, the local police and volunteers broadly participated in identifying, detainment and murder of Roma. Even though the poem narrates the persecution of Polska Roma by Ukrainian police and insurgents, ‘Ukrainian Roma’ experienced violence as well. During a recent German testimony project, one of the last Romani survivors from Volhynia, Mykola Yuzepchuk, and his family reflected about the local complicity in the genocide: ‘There were such people who had (earlier) drunk horilka⁶ together with the victims, celebrated weddings (because Roma were often musicians); and the same people shot them down’ (Лівіцька 2018). Thus, a long period of a relatively peaceful cohabitation preceded the murder.

Mykola was between 10 and 13 years old when he was rounded up together with 60 Romani families in Vyderta in 1943. Vyderta was not a new place for their family. In fact, it was Mykola’s birth place, since his parents for years used to stay in the village over winter. Judging from their family name, the family of Yuzepchuk might have been ‘Ukrainian Roma’. At such a young age, Mykola witnessed the torturing of his older sister by impalement. Mykola and his mother found themselves in the middle of the shooting. Wounded but not dead, Mykola fell in the pile of bodies; his dying mother covered him with herself. To make sure that no one survived, the policemen penetrated the victims with bayonets. Suffering from multiple wounds, Mykola would have been buried alive under the bodies of his killed family members, unless his older cousin had come to inspect the place. He heard the boy’s moans and helped him out. Besides a long-lasting physical pain, a deep trauma overshadowed his whole life. When interviewed at the age of 88, Mykola complained about the nightmares in which he felt the pressure of ‘yet warm bodies’ (Лівіцька 2018). The life story of Mykola Yuzepchuk is unique and one of many, another proof that harrowing episodes of Tears of Blood are not a fruit of pure imagination.

Not coincidentally, Papusza dates her poetic testimony from 1943 to 1944. The poem starts with the scene when her family has to leave all their possessions in the city of Włodzimierz (today, Volodymyr) and head to the woods (lines 44–67). We also learn from these lines that her family experienced forced labour, although Papusza does not mention the name of a labour camp or a ghetto. Ryszard Krzyżanowski recounted to Ficowski that their family were placed in the ghetto in Kostopol (Kostopil in Ukrainian) and were forced to work in agriculture. They managed to secure the help of a Polish policeman and flee from the ghetto (Ficowski: materiały warsztatowe: 57–62). Tyaglyy provides the information on the placement of 92 Roma in the labour camp in Ludwipol (today, Sosnove near Berezne in Ukraine) in April 1942 (cf. Tyaglyy in this volume).

Yet, as we learn from the testimonies, collected by Ficowski, Papusza’s kin were able to spend the winter of 1942–1943 in Włodzimierz. Dionizy Wajs and his band played music in a canteen for German officers (Ficowski: materiały warsztatowe: 80–81). In early spring 1943 they learned from the city administration about the German intention to kill ‘Gypsies’ in the city.⁷ Fearing repercussions for themselves, local Poles started denying accommodation to Roma families, meaning the latter had no choice but to seek refuge in the woods. While hiding in the woods, rumours about the murder of local Poles by the UPA (Українська повстанська армія, Ukrainian Insurgent Army) reached them (Ficowski: materiały warsztatowe: 63–79).

Apparently, the title of the poem Tears of Blood: What We Suffered under the Germans in Volhynia in 1943 and 1944 reveals not only the experience of Papusza’s group but the dynamics of violence in the region. In 1943 Volhynia was, undoubtedly, one of the deadliest places in the world. The region was jeopardized by German brutal policies, their constant clashes with Soviet partisans, the confrontation between Soviet partisans and UPA, alongside the Ukrainian-Polish ethnic conflict.

UPA’s violence cost approximately 60,000 Volhynian Poles their lives and leveled dozens of Polish settlements. The insurgents used farming equipment to commit the murder of innocent women, children, men and the elderly or burnt them alive. The Polish underground reciprocated violence with violence, causing deaths of at least 2,000–3,000 Ukrainians (Motyka 2011: 449). The members of Papusza’s community recalled to Ficowski one of such massacres, when the Polish underground burnt the population of a Ukrainian village in an Orthodox church after the Ukrainian insurgents had placed on fire a Catholic church with the clergy inside (Papusza 1956: 165–166).

In the Ukrainian-Polish ethnic conflict, religion served as an ethnic marker. While most Ukrainians were Orthodox or Greek Catholic Christians, Poles were Catholics. The same marker differed Polska Roma from Ukrainian Roma and made the former feel solidarity with the Polish population. In many lines of the poem, Papusza laments the Polish victims of UPA’s violence. For the sake of their own safety, Papusza’s family sought to speak Ukrainian and present themselves as ‘Ukrainian Gypsies’, whenever coming into contact with UPA fighters or Ukrainian villagers. In one of such episodes, Papusza and her family introduce themselves to the villagers by Ukrainian names and say that they cross themselves to the right (in the Orthodox fashion, people cross themselves to the right) (lines 440–444).

Harrowing scenes of ethnic cleansing and its aftermath have found their way into the poem. Papusza skilfully uses metaphor and refers to wild and homeless animals to picture the situation in which she and her family had to stay in the houses of killed Poles:

As interethnic violence in Volhynia escalated, the countryside population split, siding with one group or the other. Throughout the region, Ukrainian insurgents drew on local networks of support and human resources. To protect themselves, local Poles organized self-defence units. Others joined the Polish underground or the Soviet partisan movement. The Soviet partisans, in their turn, sought to undermine German military efforts and prevent anti-Soviet resistance in the region. Therefore, they directed their outrage at the networks of UPA’s supporters, as well as the families who worked for the German occupation authorities and the local police. For example, Papusza mentions the case when the men from a Ukrainian village were taken captives by Soviet partisans (lines 580–585).

Even though the ‘Gypsy question’ was not central to the ideology of the Ukrainian national movement (unlike the Polish or Jewish question), Roma were still victimized. The poem and Ficowski’s records mention different forms of victimization – from threats and physical abuse to murder. As Tyaglyy illustrates, anti-Gypsy prejudice and the perception of Roma as spies and informants for Soviet partisans came into play as well, determining decisions of individual commanders (cf. Tyaglyy in this volume).

In the midst of war chaos and violence of ‘all against all,’ Papusza’s family of musicians sought to survive, literally, on the move. In Tears of Blood, they constantly change their dislocation, follow Soviet partisans, seek seasonal work from Ukrainian peasants and stay in empty houses in winter. Papusza articulates their musical performances as an important survival strategy. Thus, Tears of Blood includes fragments of songs in Romani, Ukrainian and Russian that they performed for partisans and villagers. According to Papusza, they kept their harps through the war and took care of them ‘like of their eyes’ because ‘playing music saved us from [sure] death’ (lines 380–383). Their art opened doors and warmed hearts:

Paradoxically as it may sound, victimhood does not mean passivity and the lack of choice. In Tears of Blood, victims act, reflect about their plight and make important decisions. Papusza offers us a nuanced picture of Romani agency and resistance – from daily survival to armed struggle – and calls to resist:

Many lines of Tears of Blood poeticize the encounters of Papusza’s family with Soviet partisans who saved their lives on multiple occasions. In one of such episodes, the partisans of the Chapaev unit⁸ warn them about their sabotage plans, so the Roma would manage to cross a bridge before it was blown up. Ficowski’s records, too, mention different forms of cooperation between Polska Roma and Soviet partisan detachments. For instance, Ficowski’s interlocutors recounted how their people provided a Soviet unit with information about a storehouse that belonged to one of the paramilitary groups. A joint takeover of the storehouse allowed them to win badly needed provisions for their families (Ficowski: materiały warsztatowe: 57–62).

The Soviet partisan movement was a major military actor in Volhynia and Polesia. To a great degree, the rise of the movement in the region can be explained by favorable geography, namely swampy forests of the Prypyat valley that created excellent conditions for partisan activities. The first units were formed by the Red Army militaries who found themselves in an encirclement, as early as summer 1941. By the end of 1942, the movement in the region had become well organized and consisted of 32 detachments and 71 underground groups (cf. Tyaglyy in this volume). Their tactics included sabotage activities, political propaganda among the local population and armed struggle against Einsatzgruppen, local police and UPA units. By 1943, some detachments transformed into forest settlements with dugout dwellings, storages, sanitary facilities, kitchens and craft workshops (Bartash 2021: 120).

The Soviet partisan movement was probably the only military force at that time, which readily extended some protection to Roma. For this reason, it has been remembered by them mostly in a positive light. Hundreds of Romani men, women and children found shelter among the Soviet partisans. My own study of their biographies shows that, before enrolling in the movement, they often experienced genocidal violence or lost their families and homes to the war and genocide. While in the movement, Romani partisans performed a variety of tasks – from acting as horsemen and nurses to leading fighters and commandos (For biographies of Romani partisans, cf. Bartash 2021).

Tetiana Gorbuncova (Markovska) from a family of local horse traders stayed with her caravan near Sarny, Volhynia in late summer 1942 when their whereabouts were found out by the local police. Her parents and sisters were arrested and, after a short internment, killed together with other Roma. Only Tetiana and her three brothers managed to escape the bitter fate. After hiding in the local fields and swamps, they were able to join a local partisan unit that later integrated into a bigger detachment, the Lelchicy partisan brigade. The brigade that carried out scouting tasks was active in Polesia (Гогун и Церович 2009).

Tetiana became a partisan at the age of 15–17. While her brothers served as scouts and radio operators, Tetiana was responsible for a partisan kitchen. For a long time, she was the only chef who cooked for the whole unit. In her interview with Maria Cerovic and Alexander Gogun, Tetiana recounted her life as a young female partisan in a male-dominated environment. She also mentioned her encounters with a legendary partisan commander, Sidor Kowpak, who was on mission to consolidate the partisan movement in Polesia in fall 1942 (Гогун и Церович 2009). Papusza, too, mentions this commander by his informal name ‘Kolpakow’ (lines 564–565).

Officially, the Soviet partisan movement adhered to the ideology of internationalism and sought to include people from different ethnic backgrounds. For instance, the Lelchicy partisan brigade, in which Tetiana Gorbuncova and her brothers partook, had 661 members in early 1944: 644 male, 17 female; 593 Belarusians, 30 Ukrainians, 25 Russians and 13 of other nationalities (Лельчицкая бригада).

Yet, anti-Semitism and anti-Gypsy prejudice sometimes came into play when individual commanders made decisions on acceptance of new members. Moreover, as the evidence from Tears of Blood and Ficowski’s records suggest, it was not easy for an extended family of Roma to get enrolled. According to one of Papusza’s family members, partisans were reluctant to accept women and children: ‘But early in the morning Russian partisans came and we all [intended] to enrol with the partisans, but they did not want to accept us. Only men, but not the women and children. Those [men] who were not married went [and joined the partisans]’ (Ficowski: materiały warsztatowe: 57–62).

Like other militaries active in the region, Soviet partisans, first, pursued their military goals – rescuing civilians was not their main task. Therefore, the enrolment was much easier for prospective fighters, that is, younger healthy men. As it appears from partisan archives, historical expertise of Romani men in looking after horses was in high demand as well. For instance, Piotr Stayanovich (b. 1909 in Pinsk region), a fighter of the Lazo unit, took care of the unit’s horses in addition to his participation in combat. In his award letter, Piotr is said to be a ‘brave, courageous and persistent’ fighter who was also appreciated by his comrades as an excellent horseman: ‘While in the unit, he looked after the horses. With him our horses were always groomed and the horse harness was always in order’(Bartash 2021: 111).

The families of active partisans were often allowed to stay in the so-called civilian or family camps that functioned as detachments to military units. In such camps, they engaged in a variety of tasks, associated with reproductive labour, for instance, obtaining food, cooking and doing laundry.

Although Papusza and her family were not directly associated with Soviet partisans, they still cooperated with them in many ways, for example, by sharing resources and exchanging data. The members of Papusza’s community recalled that partisans ‘sent our women to scout for them. They were killed’ (Papusza 1956: 223). Most probably, their knowledge of the local population and geography made Romani women desirable scouts for Soviet partisans (Bartash 2021: 116).

Even if it was dangerous, Romani families agreed to cooperate with Soviet partisans to secure their protection. The family of Papusza often stayed in the forest zones under partisan control and got informed about the military situation in the region. This, however, considerably increased the vulnerability of Romani families from other sides that were in confrontation with the Soviet resistance. Tetiana Gorbuncova, for instance, mentioned that her family, killed by the local police near Sarny, used to accommodate partisans in their tents (Гогун и Церович 2009).

Besides organized forms of resistance, some families gathered in small self-defence groups together with the people from other backgrounds – for instance, Jews and POWs in hiding. Sometimes they had weapons and guarded their forest encampments. In his memoir, Edward Dębicki recounted his family experience of hiding in the woods where they cooperated with a Jewish family and three Soviet POWs with whom their family developed a close friendship (Dębicki 2004: 198; Bartash 2023 a: 172–173). Such experiences, shared by Romani families with people from other ethnic groups, made them closer one to another.

Many lines of Tears of Blood express solidarity with the Jewish people, also shedding light on the ways in which the two persecuted groups interacted. While in many regions of Europe, Jews and Roma rather watched one another’s suffering from afar, Volhynian ground offered spaces for solidarity and support. Romani-Jewish encounters took place not only in ghettoes, concentration camps and at killing sites but in hiding and resistance (for an excellent discussion of the Jewish-Romani relations in wartime Europe, cf. Joskowicz 2023).

Already in the beginning of the poem, Papusza mentions ‘two poor Jews are in our company, all their family killed’ (lines 85–86). Further, she recounts a night visit paid to her by a Jewish girl, when she stayed with her family in a former Polish settlement. This episode not only narrates the act of sharing of food and clothing but translates a feeling of closeness and connection between the two women who for a moment allow themselves to forget about the danger of being discovered by armed men:

The image of two women walking in the night re-emerges in the poem again when Papusza runs away from a killing site together with her friend Moliunia. The women walk through the forest, where even birds pray to God that ‘angry snakes and gadjos would not kill us’ and that they would meet ‘a good Russian’ (lines 543–553). These episodes well reflect the plight of the women who try to survive in a militarized, male-dominated environment.

Papusza does not pronounce the threat of sexual violence but alludes to it by mentioning ‘beautiful Roma girls’ who ‘perished in the concentration camp from forced labour’ and whom they remember ‘like stars’ (lines 589–593). A continuation of this plot can be found in Ficowski’s records. According to one of the stories from the time of their internment in the ghetto in Kostopol, two girls from their community were taken to the kitchen and, later, requested by the commandant at night: ‘They took two girls to the kitchen to cook. It was 1 am or midnight; the commissar phoned to send both girls to him. He kept them [in his place] all the night. He did with them as he pleased – detaining them [in his place] all night. They came back and cried’ (Ficowski: materiały warsztatowe: 57–62).

Tears of Blood offers another dimension of women’s suffering by portraying the tragedies of mothers who failed to provide for their children and lost their battle to the cold and hunger:

By narrating such experiences Papusza challenges the very understanding of victimhood. Who is a genocide victim and who is not? Are those little lives lost to the cold in the winter forest victims of the Nazi genocide? We will never be able to count the victims who died, having been pushed to their limits by the perpetrator. But if we adopted the community perspective, the scale of Romani tragedy would appear in a different light. As a result of the German occupation and escalation of ethnic violence in Volhynia, the lifestyle that had been normal for generations of Roma turned dangerous and not feasible. They could no longer make a living from their traditional occupations, such as horse trade and commerce, and could not stay with peasants in winter. German policies stipulated criminal responsibility for hosting traveling families or supporting them in other ways, and the locals feared consequences for themselves.

For most Romani families, it meant that they were to survive winter either in the woods, in the conditions hardly tolerable for human body,⁹ or on the move from one abandoned home to another. It is true that many Romani families who used to keep on the move before the war, were familiar with its natural environment and climate conditions. Many lines of Tears of Blood show Papusza’s attachment to nature and her deep knowledge of the local flora and fauna.

While traveling, Romani families used to stay in the vicinity of water and woods, and their diet included a variety of wild food. Those skills, undoubtedly, metabolized into their survival potential. However, none of them were used to go through a freezing winter on the move. Without proper dwelling and clothing, survival was highly challenging even for healthy adults; infants and elderly people were much more vulnerable. During anti-partisan actions when occupation soldiers surveyed the woods families often had to hide in swamps for days:

Oral histories of Romani families from the western borderlands of the German- occupied Soviet Union show the multiple ways in which parents sacrificed for their children. Mothers deliberately took a risk of going to nearby villages and asking for food among peasants. Many women, in fact, were killed in villages or on their way. Fathers sought to enrol in Soviet partisan units as fighters to enable the acceptance of their families in the civilian camps where living conditions were more arranged (For examples, cf. Bartash 2020).

Tears of Blood deepens our understanding of the ways in which the Nazi plans extended to the level of human suffering and captures the most harrowing experiences of Romani genocide, namely: the realities of the community survival when pushed to the extremes and the collapse of the most essential cultural norms of Polska Roma, for example, those associated with ritual purity and alimentary prohibitions, such as the taboo of consuming horse meat:

The ‘cultural evidence’ from the poem presents a whole array of the Romani experiences of the genocide, and the discussion of such evidence has potential to contribute to a broader discussion of cultural genocide.¹⁰ To offer one more example, traditional etiquette stipulated wearing long skirts for women, since female lower body was considered impure. The lack of appropriate clothing added an additional level of suffering and humiliation to the female experiences of German occupation:

Finally, our historical and cultural interpretation of the poem calls for a closer integration of Romani and regional histories. Tears of Blood offers us a unique opportunity to embrace the complexity of interethnic and interpersonal relations as lived and perceived by Polska Roma in German-occupied Volhynia. Through the prism of their experiences, the Nazi genocide is hardly separable from the persecution they endured at the hands of Ukrainian insurgents and the hostility of the non-Roma population. That is why, the Romani genocide cannot be taken out of its micro-historical context and studied as an isolated phenomenon. Such an approach would unavoidably lead to marginalizing Romani experiences and memories of the Nazi genocide, preventing a proper comprehension of why and how it happened.

Therefore, the volume’s overall objective is to tackle historical injustice and make the history of Romani genocide part and parcel of the mainstream of European and global historiography. We are convinced that Tears of Blood has a greater potential to retell the ordeal of Roma to public at large than any scholarly publication. And we hope that the open access publication of the poem will contribute towards this important goal.