About
A small organisation with a long argument
The Roma Holocaust Memorial Centre exists because several hundred thousand Roma and Sinti dead are still, in most British classrooms, a footnote to somebody else's chapter.
- Constituted as
- Community Interest Company
- Based in
- Newcastle upon Tyne
- Founded
- 2023
- Raised the monument with
- ROMA ACCESS — Newcastle Association
How this started
There was nowhere in Britain to put a flower
Holocaust memorials in the United Kingdom are not scarce. Memorials naming Roma and Sinti as victims were, until recently, absent altogether — which meant that a Romani family in Newcastle marking the anniversary of a deportation had no public place to stand.
Working with ROMA ACCESS — Newcastle Association, the Centre raised the first monument in the United Kingdom dedicated to the memory of Roma and Sinti victims of the Holocaust. It stands in the city centre, near the Civic Centre, and it is open at any hour to anyone.
The monument turned out to be the beginning rather than the end. Once there was a place to gather, people arrived with papers: a grandmother’s registration card, a compensation letter refused in 1961, photographs with names written on the back in pencil. Almost none of it existed in any public collection. The archive grew out of that, and the school programme grew out of teachers asking what they were supposed to do with it.
How we work
Five commitments
These are published so that we can be held to them. If we break one, tell us.
- Consent is not a form
- Nothing a family gives us is published without their written agreement, and that agreement can be withdrawn at any point, for any reason, without explanation. Where consent covers research use but not publication, the record appears in the catalogue and nowhere else.
- Every claim carries its source
- Historical statements on this site are referenced to published scholarship or to a museum collection. Where scholarship disagrees — and on the number of dead it disagrees widely — we give the range rather than choosing the figure that makes the strongest impression.
- The community's own words
- We use Samudaripen. Where a survivor or a family uses a different word for what happened to them, we use theirs, and we say why. Translation of testimony is done by people, not by machines, or it is not done.
- History and the present are one subject
- Anti-Gypsyism did not end in 1945, and a memorial that treats the Holocaust as a closed chapter is doing half the job. Our education work says so plainly, and carefully: continuity of thinking is not equivalence of harm.
- Roma and Sinti led
- This is a community organisation, not an institution studying a community. Roma and Sinti people decide what is collected, what is shown and how it is described.
People
Who does this
A community-led team of human rights advocates, educators, and volunteers in Newcastle upon Tyne, working together to preserve memory and defend civil rights.
Get involvedFounder & Director
Robert J Vaszi
Human rights monitor and advocate in the Roma rights movement since 2000. Based in the UK since 2014, leading documentation of rights violations, civic engagement, and Holocaust remembrance across the North East.
Civic Co-Patron
Nicu Ion
First elected Roma local councillor in the United Kingdom. Key civic partner in establishing the Newcastle monument, building public authority engagement and community representation.
Community & Memorial Partnership
ROMA ACCESS Leadership
Roma-led grassroots association in Newcastle upon Tyne co-founding the permanent memorial, delivering local family advocacy, and coordinating annual commemoration ceremonies.
Outreach, Research & Testimony
Education & Archive Volunteer Team
Volunteer educators and researchers delivering secondary school sessions, developing classroom resources, and recording oral testimonies and primary documents.
Partners
Nothing here was done alone
That the Roma and Sinti Holocaust is not forgotten, and is properly recognised alongside other Holocaust memorials.
ROMA ACCESS — Newcastle Association
Co-founders of the monument. A Roma-led association working with families across Newcastle.
Schools across the North East
Partner schools hosting sessions and testing classroom material before it is published.
Holocaust Memorial Day Trust (opens in a new tab)
The United Kingdom's national body for 27 January. The Centre's commemorations are listed on their programme.
Governance and money
What kind of organisation this is
The Centre is a Community Interest Company. A CIC is a company that exists for a stated community purpose, with an asset lock: its assets cannot be extracted for private benefit, and if it ever closes, what it holds must pass to another body with a similar purpose. In practice this means the archive cannot be sold.
We take donations by bank transfer. We do not currently accept card payments, which means we pay no processing fee and the whole of a gift reaches the Centre. Donor details are not shared with anyone and are not used for anything except acknowledging the gift.
- Company number
- 15348328
- Registered address
- 44 Haydon Place, Newcastle upon Tyne
NE5 2UU