In the last two decades, scholarship on the Roma and Sinti Holocaust has transformed significantly. The topic, which interested only a handful of anthropologists, ethnologists, historians, etc., turned into one of the most dynamic fields of historical research in the context Central Europe. María Sierra’s bookmarks an important turning point. It brings a summary of the research that has been conducted mainly in German and other languages of continental Europe to the English reader and does so in a very accessible way. At the same time, Sierra also offers her own original analysis of selected Roma and Sinti autobiographies and focuses on their experiences during the Second World War and its aftermath from the perspective of the history of emotions.

The book combines a synthesizing style with innovative analysis. It is quite easy to understand yet it provides important answers to at least two crucial questions omnipresent in the field. First, it deals with the question of continuities and discontinuities at various levels, including state policies and persecutory police practices that aimed at those inhabitants who were labeled as “Gypsies” in Europe as well as the production of the “Gypsy” stereotypes. Sierra therefore offers the reader a relatively robust historical narrative beginning essentially in the late Middle Ages, but in which the Enlightenment, Romanticism, and the formation of nation states play the most important roles. However, the story of the European anti-Gypsyism does not end with the climax of the Second World War. It remains open to the present day thanks to the subsequent analysis of Roma and Sinti autobiographies. Sierra also successfully avoids further petrification of anti-Gypsyism because she—at least for the beginning of the twentieth century—outlines a “parallel history”: a narrative of Roma and Sinti as inhabitants of highly heterogeneous European communities. Therefore, and secondly, the Roma and Sinti emerge in the book not as mere passive objects (victims) of oppressive social structure (anti-Gypsyism) and later of the genocidal process(es) initiated by the Nazis, which affected the entire Europe, although to varying degrees, but as agents of their own history. The book features many concrete Roma individuals who not only have names and faces (thanks to numerous photographs included in the text), different life trajectories, and choose different ways of acting, but also, and above all, their own voices. Sierra admirably uses a wide variety of written and oral testimonies to reconstruct the diverse experiences of Roma and Sinti under Nazi regime(s).

Despite the outlined strengths, the publication also has its weaknesses. Although Sierra provides English-speaking readership with an admirable overview of existing research on the Roma and Sinti Holocaust in the Nazi occupied Europe, the text lacks further reflection on the broader context of Holocaust studies—which can be considered as a characteristic feature of what was until recently a very closed off research field. The book provides only a somewhat vague geographical definition of the topic, with Sierra mentioning in the introduction that she is intending to provide “broader coverage of geography” (2). As a result, both her account of anti-Gypsyism and her description of the genocide include references to the situation in various countries and locations all over Europe. However, the central elements of the main story of anti-Gypsyism, the life of the Roma, the Holocaust, as well as the post-war remembrance is heavily focused on Germany and, to certain extent, also Austria. The Holocaust of the Roma and Sinti in Europe during the Second World War thus the book narrates through the lenses of the development within the Nazi Third Reich as the center from which the racial policies radiates to different parts of Europe. The crucial question of how such policy was negotiated on the ground in very different contexts, including satellite states, is mentioned, yet remains on the fringes of the book because the analytical focus is concentrated heavily on Germany and, subsequently, on the history of the so-called family camp within the Auschwitz camp complex. While borderlands of the changing states, resulting from Nazi expansion or the similar efforts of satellite states to realize their own territorial ambitions, and issues related to the role of local administration (i.e., national elites) play a very important role in current Holocaust research, Sierra does not systematically follow them. Western European readers—outside the narrow circle of specialists in the Holocaust and Romani histories—may not necessarily notice this limitation, but readers from Eastern Europe will be considerably disappointed given the initial promise.

Unfortunately, the book’s highly accessible, popular, and educational style comes at the expense of oversimplifying and reducing the history of the genocide of the Roma and Sinti into a moral appeal. The historical narrative is understood a means of combating stereotypes, prejudices, and racism against Roma in contemporary European societies. The overall aim of the book is to inform and educate the public so that these undesirable phenomena can be eliminated. However, this noble and plainly stated value position also leads the author to create a misleading idea of the unity of historical knowledge and those who practice it. The author's summary of the existing historiography thus tends to obscure the manifold past as well as present, productive as well as unresolvable conflicts, which constitutes (and will remain) an integral part of the writing of (not only) Romani histories.

María Sierra’s book is an extremely thought-provoking yet very readable text that will be appreciated equally by the general public as well as scholars engaged in the fields of Romani histories and Holocaust studies. One can only hope, given the very short time period between them, that the publication will be read in parallel with Ari Joskowicz’s Rain of Ash (Rain of Ash: Roma, Jews and the Holocaust, Princeton University Press, 2023). Together, these two books, each engaging with the reader in different way, create unintended but powerful dialog.