Our work
Four strands, one argument
Remembering, collecting, teaching and standing alongside people. Separating them out is a convenience for a website; in practice they are the same job.
Commemoration
A place to stand, four dates in the year, and the small acts that keep a monument from becoming street furniture.
The Centre maintains the United Kingdom's first monument to the Roma and Sinti victims of the Holocaust and holds a commemoration there each year on 2 August. We also mark 27 January, 8 April and 16 May, and we help families mark their own anniversaries privately.
Commemoration
Archive & research
Most of what survives is in people's houses. Our job is to find it, record it properly, and give it back.
We collect, digitise and catalogue material relating to the persecution of Roma and Sinti: registration cards, transport lists, compensation correspondence, photographs, and recorded testimony. Material is scanned and returned. Nothing is published without written consent.
Archive & research
Education
Free lessons and assemblies, written to fit inside a Holocaust scheme of work that is already full.
We visit secondary schools across the North East and host groups at the monument. Sessions are led by community educators and are free to state schools. All classroom material can be downloaded, reused and adapted.
Education
Community work
A memorial that treats the Holocaust as a closed chapter is doing half the job.
We work with Roma and Sinti families in Newcastle on the things that follow from this history and have not stopped: school exclusions, housing, reporting, and the everyday assumption that a Romani family is a problem to be managed.
Community work
Where the work overlaps
One family’s papers can end up in all four
A registration card deposited by a family is scanned by the archive, described and catalogued; it becomes a source in a Key Stage 4 lesson on reading documents; the name on it is added to the Wall of Remembrance and read aloud on 2 August; and the conversation that produced it usually starts with community work, not with research. That is the whole shape of the organisation in one object.