Silence, Distortion, or Discrimination? Roma Memories and Norwegian Memory Politics of WWII

Abstract

The Nazi genocide had devastating consequences for Norwegian Jews and Romas. However, their experiences and memories have been treated very differently in Norway with respect to official recognition and public attention. This article investigates the mnemonic marginalization of the Roma and the persistent gap between the historical recognition of Roma persecution and its representational absence in national narratives of war and victimhood. It suggests that continued exclusion of the small Roma minority from national identity narratives in Norway results not only from temporal, topographical and narrative characteristics of their memories, but also from discursive connections of negative stereotypes that discredits them as blameworthy victims and results in testimonial injustice. Moreover, it explores the challenges of representing Roma memories without reproducing stigmatizing cultural tropes. The article suggests empathic mnemonic counter-narratives as a strategy for countering dominant framings of the Roma as “the others” and for promoting a more inclusive and self-reflexive politics of remembrance.

1. Introduction

“I waited and waited and waited… for him to talk about us Roma, but it never happened. I thought I would learn more about us Roma and our history, but there was almost nothing about us,”1 states 18-year-old Massimo Dahl, reflecting on a guided tour at Norway’s Resistance Museum in the sixth episode of the Swedish documentary series Den försvunna historien (“The Lost History”) (SVT 2021). The series explores the histories of Norwegian, Swedish, and Finnish Roma and consists of six episodes. Each episode bears the name of the person whose “lost history” is to be rediscovered. In doing so, the series adopts a genre familiar from World War II (WWII) and Holocaust documentaries—the personal quest for hidden or forgotten family stories and intergenerational memory. The last episode, entitled Massimo Dahl, follows the young Norwegian Roma’s attempt to uncover what happened to his family during WWII. Dahl is the great-grandson of Polykarp Karoli, whose brothers Milos and Zolo Karoli, along with many other relatives, were deported to the Nazi extermination-camp Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Since its inauguration on 8 May 1970—the 25th anniversary of Norway’s liberation from German occupation—the Norwegian Resistance Museum (Norges Hjemmefrontmuseum: NHM), located at the symbolic site of Akershus Fortress in Oslo, has played a dominant role in shaping and disseminating the official master-narrative of Norway’s wartime and occupation history. A central argument for establishing the museum was the need to communicate this formative historical experience to generations who had not lived through it. Founded on the initiative of veterans from the Norwegian resistance movement (collectively referred to as Hjemmefronten: The Home Front), the museum’s purpose is to narrate the years of German occupation from 1940 to 1945. As the name suggests, the interpretative framework of the exhibition centres on the Home Front as a heroic epoch, institutionalizing an understanding of WWII as a period of collective resistance—a moral struggle between “good Norwegians,” domestic collaborators, traitors, and German occupiers, in which the “good Norwegians” ultimately prevailed (Storeide 2019; Corell 2011; Storeide 2007; Eriksen 1995).

This master narrative of the Home Front has been crucial to Norway’s postwar national self-understanding, as the reconstruction of the country was framed as the work of this same community of “good Norwegians.” Dahl’s decision to visit NHM in his search for his family’s wartime history is therefore entirely natural—the museum represents an authoritative site of memory for WWII in Norway. Yet his disappointment is telling: his journey through the exhibition in 2021 highlights the absence of Roma wartime experiences from Norway’s dominant national narrative and collective memory of the war.

This article examines the marginalization of the Roma within Norwegian national memory culture. The Roma are, in many respects, doubly marginalized: their memories of the Roma genocide have received limited recognition in official mediations of WWII, and scholarship within the field of memory studies has largely overlooked them. Notable exceptions include Solvor Mjøberg Lauritzen’s sociological analysis of antiziganism in Norway (Lauritzen 2023), which offers important insights into the reproduction of stereotypical representations of the Roma, and Madelen Brovold’s literary analysis of Roma figures in Norwegian children’s literature (Brovold 2025).

This article seeks both to confront this condition of mnemonic marginalization and to examine the structural and cultural dynamics that have contributed to it. As will be demonstrated, there exists a striking dissonance between, on the one hand, recent historical and institutional efforts to document and acknowledge the Roma experience—such as the work of Myking (2009), the research report produced by the Norwegian Centre for Holocaust and Minority Studies (HL Centre) mandated by the Norwegian parliament (Rosvoll et al. 2015), as well as the works of Brustad et al. (2017), Rosvoll (2021), Bergkvist (2022), and Rosvoll (2025); the Norwegian Prime Minister’s official apology in 2015 for the state’s complicity in the Nazi genocide of the Roma; the inclusion of Roma victims in the HL Centre’s memorial room and Holocaust core exhibition in 2021; and the publication of Roma survivor testimonies (Skogaas and Lilleholt 1978)—and, on the other hand, the persistently low position of the Roma within Norway’s hierarchy of victimhood. The Roma constitute a very small national minority in Norway today, but their limited presence in Norwegian memory culture cannot be explained solely by their small numbers.

The analysis draws on theoretical and methodological perspectives from interdisciplinary memory studies, particularly the distinction between communicative and cultural memory (Assmann 1992, 1999). Certain lived memories are preserved and institutionalized as cultural manifestations through political rituals, textual representations, and monuments. These mediated forms of remembrance shape how subsequent generations imagine and relate to a past they have not personally experienced. The memory culture that has developed around WWII and the Holocaust—articulated through annual commemorations, monuments, museums, literature, film, and artistic practices—forms part of this broader process of cultural memorialization. Ultimately, what is remembered and what is silenced, who is represented in museums, memorials, and official apologies, are questions deeply entwined with issues of power, recognition, and the politics of memory.

While other victim groups—resistance members, war sailors, Jews, partisans, and escape helpers—have all been granted official memorials, albeit mostly within the past three decades, the Roma continue to face repeated denials. Recognized as one of Norway’s five national minorities in 1998, the Roma remain, as of autumn 2025, the only minority without a reconciliation process or an official action plan, despite being the group most exposed to prejudice and discrimination (Moe 2022, pp. 68–71).

There is a striking discrepancy in public accessibility of aesthetic and cultural articulations of Roma experiences and memories and their lack of translation into empathetic engagement or active remembrance within the public sphere. An aesthetic, cultural, or political articulation is, by definition, a communicative act—and if the receivers fail to engage with it, the communicative process remains incomplete. How, then, can this marginalization and the failure to activate Roma memories be explained? I will discuss if the marginalization of Roma memories is related to the characteristics of the narrators, the narrative itself, the historical and political context, or rather the audience.

This article opens with a historical overview of the genocide of the Norwegian Roma. It argues that, although the Roma genocide narrative diverges substantially from the Norwegian master narrative of WWII in terms of temporality, topography, narrative structure, and agency role attribution, these differences alone cannot account for its continued marginalisation. Next follows an examination of recent developments in Norwegian memory politics and the efforts to integrate Roma experience. Through an analysis of political initiatives, research reports, survival testimonies, non-fiction literature, and selected exhibitions, the article demonstrates that Roma survivors have neither attained the same level of recognition nor the same epistemic authority as other survivor witnesses. The article goes on to discuss the discursive connection between persistent stereotypes of Roma as “the dangerous others”, which serve to devalue Roma victims within the hierarchy of victims and brand them as “blameworthy victims” (Williams and Campbell 2025). The article’s conclusion highlights the need of empathic mnemonic counter-narratives to confront the mnemonic marginalisation the Roma and the overall homogenising and exclusionary Norwegian memory culture and identity discourse.

2. Historical Background

The Roma2 migrated to Norway in the latter half of the nineteenth century, following the abolition of domestic passport restrictions in 1860 and the simultaneous emancipation of Roma slaves in Romania, which prompted many Roma to travel to other parts of Europe. Those who settled in Norway acquired Norwegian citizenship.3

This changed subsequently after Norway became an independent state in 1905. From then on the Norwegian authorities initiated a process of nationalist consolidation through a strict assimilation policy targeting “the others”—primarily all forms of minorities—known collectively as the fornorskingspolitikk (‘Norwegisation policy’). The Roma were hit particularly hard, as the authorities considered it impossible to turn them into Norwegians. Consequently, an aggressive exclusionary policy was launched against this small minority, involving active measures to revoke their citizenship unlawfully, intimidate them into leaving the country, and prevent Roma from entering Norway.

The first step was the new immigration act of 1915, which required employment as a condition for immigration while simultaneously denying work permits to Roma. In practice, the law made immigration to Norway impossible for Roma. During the 1920s, Norwegian authorities pursued an increasingly active policy of exclusion, even though the Roma population was extremely small. That same year, the Ministry of Justice initiated an extensive registration of Roma and their legitimate citizenships were literally crossed out in their passport.

In 1927, the Ministry of Justice introduced a new paragraph into the immigration law, commonly known as the “Gypsy clause,” which denied Roma the right of residence in Norway. The increasingly precarious living conditions and fear of child removal led many Roma families to leave Norway by the late 1920s. The authorities’ exclusionary policy had thus achieved its intended “success.” This was not unique to Norway. Sweden introduced legislation restricting Roma immigration in 1914, and Finland and Denmark likewise gradually adopted restrictive policies toward the Roma (Kotljarchuk 2020, pp. 101–4).

When the Nazis came to power in Germany in 1933, they quickly implemented an aggressive policy to nazify the German society. “Gypsies” (“Zigeuner”) were stigmatized and persecuted as Asoziale (“asocials”). Norwegian Roma that had been expelled by Belgium were situated in Germany at the time and decided to return to Norway to escape persecution, unaware that the Norwegian authorities had already erased their citizenship. On 20 January 1934, a group of 68 Norwegian Roma—women, men, and children from the Karoli, Josef, Modest, and Modi families—arrived by train in the Danish border town of Padborg. The Danish border guards contacted Norwegian authorities, who denied any knowledge of the group, even though the family heads Josef Karoli, Czardas Josef, and Carl Modest were born in Norway and had held Norwegian passports for over twenty years (Bergkvist 2022). Consequently, the 68 Roma were handed over to the German police and confined in Altona near Hamburg. After some time, the families were expelled to Belgium, where they became the subject of correspondence between Belgian and Norwegian authorities. The Belgians pointed out that the group possessed Norwegian citizenship, passports, and birth and marriage certificates, yet Norwegian authorities repeatedly rejected any connection between the group and Norway. The Roma attempted to continue to France, but were denied entry there as well, becoming political pawns shuffled between Belgian and French authorities.

When Nazi-Germany went to war, the Roma were left entirely on their own, exposed to the Nazi regime of persecution in occupied Europe. Some of the Norwegian Roma managed to reach northern France, where Roma were interned in camps with bad conditions, but had better chances of survival and were not deported to Auschwitz. Most Norwegian Roma, however, remained in Belgium, where in the autumn of 1943 systematic mass arrests of Roma were carried out. The detainees were gathered under brutal conditions in the SS camp Mechelen and, in January 1944, deported to the “Zigeunerlager” in the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp. Of the 66 Norwegian Roma deported from Belgium to Birkenau, only two men and two women survived.

After the end of WWII, the surviving Roma were not allowed to return to Norway, as the “Gypsy clause” remained in force. In Sweden the ban on Roma immigration was removed in 1954 (Kotljarchuk 2020, p. 101). In the mid-1950s, Norwegian authorities were compelled to reconsider the anti-Roma immigration policy. Members of the Josef family managed to enter the country—partly clandestinely and partly using falsified French passports. In the summer of 1955, relatives from France visited them in Norway; however, the visitors were expelled by the police and forcibly deported by ship from Oslo to Antwerp. By this time, public discourse had begun to shift. The liberal–radical daily newspaper Dagbladet emerged as a critical voice, condemning the police’s racialised practices and questioning whether the “Gypsy clause” was compatible with the self-image of democratic Norway—then celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of its independence.

The newspaper’s editor, Helge Seip—who also served as a member of the Norwegian parliament (Storting) for the Liberal Party—brought the issue before the Storting, framing it as a matter of universal human rights and arguing that the “Gypsy clause” constituted a de facto Norwegian racist law. The ensuing debate linked the continued enforcement of the clause to broader questions about Norway’s capacity to sign and uphold the principles of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, given that the existing immigration legislation institutionalised racial discrimination.

The deportation case was eventually brought before the courts, and the Ministry of Justice was ordered by the Supreme Court to reverse its decision and repatriate the expelled Roma. When the Storting enacted a new immigration act in the summer of 1956, the clause was formally repealed. Nevertheless, the legislative change did not necessarily translate into a substantive improvement in Roma access to Norway, since the new law retained provisions permitting the exclusion of individuals presumed to be itinerant and linked to criminal activity (Brustad et al. 2017, p. 183).

Massimo Dahl’s great-grandfather, Polykarp Karoli, was the first in his family to have his citizenship reinstated in 1957; his brother Milos, a survivor of the “Zigeunerlager” in Birkenau, was granted citizenship and permission to enter Norway only in 1959. It is crucial to note that while the repeal of the paragraph acknowledged the Roma’s right to Norwegian citizenship, this restoration was not made retroactive to the wartime years. Consequently, Roma survivors were denied both prisoner compensation and war pensions (Bergkvist 2022).

3. The Roma Narrative of Persecution: More than “Five Dark Years”

The wartime experiences of Norwegian Roma differ fundamentally from the Norwegian master narrative as, for example, presented by the Norwegian Resistance Museum (NHM). The dominant Norwegian memory of WWII is tightly structured around the “five dark years on Norwegian soil” between 9 April 1940 and 8 May 1945 (Storeide 2019; Corell 2011; Storeide 2007; Eriksen 1995). In contrast, the temporal, topographical, and narrative dimensions of the Roma genocide are markedly distinct.

The Norwegian Roma were not in Norway on 9 April 1940; they had long been declared unwelcome on Norwegian soil. The central date in the Roma genocide narrative is 20 January 1934, and the pivotal location is Padborg, on the border between Denmark and Germany. The Norwegian authorities’ denial of any responsibility for the 68 Roma at Padborg—and their continued refusal to acknowledge them in the years leading up to the war—proved fatal. The Roma’s WWII experience is thus characterized by specific temporal and geographical displacements: the war was experienced in France and/or Belgium, not in Norway.

Over the past three decades, the dominant master narrative of the Norwegian resistance has been challenged by the Holocaust, which has since been incorporated into national memory. A heated restitution debate on Jewish assets in Norway during WWII in the 1990s culminated with a parliament decision in 1998 on a subsequent financial settlement, which among other outcomes led to the establishment of the national Holocaust monument and the HL-Centre in Oslo in 2000. However, not until the International Holocaust Remembrance Day commemoration at the site of the Holocaust monument in Oslo on 27 January 2012 did the then-Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg (Labour Party) issue an official apology to the Norwegian Jews for the Holocaust occurring on Norwegian soil, with Norwegian complicity. Yet significant differences remain between the Holocaust narratives of Norwegian Jews and those of the Norwegian Roma, even though Auschwitz functions as a topos for both.

In the Norwegian Holocaust narrative, the central events are the nation-wide arrests of Jews in autumn 1942, and the deportation of 529 Jews aboard the ship Donau on 26 November 1942 from the harbour in Oslo (the site of today’s Holocaust memorial). The Donau-deportation was the largest single deportation from Norway during the German occupation. Upon their arrival at Auschwitz on 1 December 1942 all women, children, and elderly were sent directly to the gas chambers, while men deemed fit for labour were assigned to forced labour in IG Farben’s sub-camp Buna-Werke (Auschwitz-Monowitz). Al-though 1 December 1942 represents the deadliest day in Norwegian wartime history, it is the date of the Donau-deportation, 26 November, that has become the symbolic day of Holocaust remembrance in Norway. This underscores the importance of events taking place on Norwegian soil for national memory culture. The Norwegian Roma, by contrast, arrived at Auschwitz-Birkenau in January 1944, when most Norwegian Jews had already been murdered. They were placed in the “Zigeunerlager” of Birkenau.

Which date marks the start of the Roma genocide narrative? The date of the German attack on Norway, 9 April 1940, held no particular significance for Norwegian Roma. Does it begin with the rejection at Padborg in 1934, the introduction of the “Gypsy clause” in the 1927 revision of the immigration act, or perhaps the 1915 legislation that laid the foundations for exclusion? Without these two laws—and the persistent efforts of Norwegian authorities to strip the Roma of their citizenship—the tragic events at Padborg in 1934 would not have occurred. This rejection thus represents the culmination of Norway’s exclusionary policy, leaving the Roma entirely at the mercy of the Nazi extermination machinery.

And when does the Roma genocide narrative end? In the Norwegian master narrative, the Nazi capitulation on 8 May 1945 marks a jubilant conclusion. Spring 1945 also symbolizes the heroic rescue and triumphant homecoming of political prisoners from Nazi concentration camps through the Red Cross’s relief operation. However, Jewish victims who were still alive in 1945 were excluded from this operation, and their repatriation to Norway was organized only after Nazi Germany’s defeat. For the surviving Roma, however, the fall of Nazi Germany in 1945 did not mark the end of persecution. They were forced to fight for more than a decade to regain the right to enter Norway.

Distinctive aspects of the Roma experience include, first, that their story is not solely about Nazi persecution and world war but also fundamentally about Norwegian minority policy across an extended historical period. The official Norwegian narrative focuses on the brutal years of German occupation (1940–1945), but for the Roma, the Nazi genocide constitutes only one catastrophic chapter in a much longer history of stigmatization, discrimination, and exclusion. What distinguished Nazism was its deliberate policy of physical extermination.

Consequently, the issue of perpetrators and complicity, the mnemonic agency role attribution, assumes an entirely different character in the Roma narrative. Questions of responsibility and participation concern not only German actors but also the role of Norwegian authorities as ethnic cleansers through exclusionary legislation and minority policies before and after the war. The increased attention to the Holocaust has brought the question of Norwegian complicity to the fore, yet in the Roma case, this question extends far beyond the occupation years (1940–1945) to encompass—at least—the period from the 1915 immigration act to the repeal of the “Gypsy clause” in 1956. These particularities may complicate the incorporation of Roma memories into the national master narrative, as the Roma narrative fundamentally challenges the prevailing notion of the “good Norwegians.”

4. Memory Politics and the Roma: A Struggle for Recognition

In 2012 the Memorial for the Sinti and Roma of Europe murdered under National Socialism was inaugurated near the former Reichstag building in Berlin-Tiergarten. Three years later the European Parliament declared 2 August (the date of the murder of the last Sinti and Roma in Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1944) the annual European Roma Holocaust Memorial Day to commemorate the 500,000 Sinti and Roma victims of the Nazi genocide. These measures, as well as the work of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) to promote knowledge and attention of the Nazi genocide of the Roma, constitute relevant international frames for understanding the shift in approach in the official Norwegian memory-politics towards the Roma. In 2012, the issue of the history and situation of the Roma was discussed by the Storting, and in 2013, the HL Centre was tasked with investigating what happened to the Norwegian Roma during WWII, including the pre- and postwar policy of Norwegian authorities and the “Gypsy clause”.

The investigative report of the HL Centre was published in 2015 under the title Å bli dem kvit: Utviklingen av en «sigøynerpolitikk» og utryddelsen av norske rom (“To get rid of them: the development of a “gipsy policy” and the extermination of the Norwegian Roma”) (Rosvoll et al. 2015). The report foregrounds the rejection at Padborg in 1934 as a central event, presenting it explicitly in a prologue and featuring a photograph of some of the Roma in front of Padborg station on the cover. The report highlights the Norwegian authorities’ rejection of the Roma in Padborg in January 1934 as the focal point demonstrating the link between Norwegian policies and Nazi genocide.

The report documents that Norwegian Roma were unjustly deprived of and denied Norwegian citizenship and were rightfully considered Norwegian citizens when they fell into Nazi hands. It further asserts that Norwegian authorities’ racist exclusion policies continued until 1956, when the “Gypsy clause” was repealed and Norwegian Roma were allowed to return. The report concludes that the number of Norwegian victims of genocide, that so far consisted of 772 Jews, must be expanded to include 66 Roma (Rosvoll et al. 2015, p. 172). In doing so, the report integrates the Roma into both the Norwegian Holocaust and genocide narrative as distinctly Norwegian victims.

It was this report that underpinned then-Prime Minister Solberg’s (the Conservative Party) official apology on the International Roma and Romani Day, 8 April 2015:

“On behalf of the Norwegian state, I hereby apologize to Norwegian Roma. I apologize for the racist exclusionary policies pursued in the decades before and after World War II. I also apologize for the fatal consequences these policies had for Norwegian Roma during the Holocaust.”

(quoted from Carlsen and Helljesen 2015)

She also acknowledged that the victims among Norwegian Roma should be included on an equal footing with other Norwegian losses. By doing so, she authorized the Roma memory narrative as part of the official Norwegian master narrative. In her speech, the Prime Minister promised collective restitution without specifying its form. In 2018, the cultural centre Romano Kher was established. However, the creation of an official national memorial to the Roma victims of the Nazi genocide was not included in this process. In 2022, the Oslo City Council proposed to establish such a memorial, but the Ministry of Local Government, meanwhile under a Labour–Centre Party coalition government led by Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre (Labour Party), rejected the proposal—a rejection reiterated in 2023 (Strømmen 2023). However, thanks to the painstaking efforts of the Roma activist Solomia Karoli, and with the support of the directorates for Arts and Culture and for Culture Heritage, a local memorial bearing the names of the Roma victims of the Nazi genocide was unveiled at Christian Frederiks Plass in central Oslo on 21 November 2025. The fact that the Norwegian King officiated at the unveiling, in the presence of representatives from the government, the Storting, and the Oslo City Council, contributed to endowing the memorial with a sense of official recognition. Even so, the press coverage of the unveiling was very limited.

The year 2021 marked a pivotal moment for the integration of the Roma genocide into Norway’s official, institutionalized memory culture, not at the NHM, but at the HL Centre. Hence, the HL Centre, and not the NHM, has been a leading promoter of Roma memories through research and musealisation in Norway. In line with the conclusion of the 2015 report Roma names were inscribed on the wall of the HL Centres’ memorial room. In the memorial room, located in the final section of the Holocaust core exhibition, the names, birth dates, and death dates of all victims are written in black writing on a white wall. It is relatively unique for Norway that all victims of Nazi mass murder can be individually identified in this way. The memorial room thus institutionalizes a symbolically potent counter-narrative to the genocide’s overwhelming statistics.

In the Swedish documentary series on the genocide of the Roma (SVT 2021), Massimo Dahl, the great-grandson of Polykarp Karoli, is confronted with the realization that his family’s history is absent from the official Norwegian narrative of WWII as it is institutionalized and exhibited at NHM at the time of his visit in 2021, despite the Prime Minister’s apology six years earlier. The program depicts Dahl contacting the HL Centre to inquire whether they have any knowledge of his family’s history. In the program, Massimo Dahl visits the core exhibition, where photographs of the Karoli family now had been put on display, and the memorial room where his murdered relatives are commemorated. He exclaims, “My family is in the museum” (SVT 2021). This moment illustrates the profound significance of having one’s history represented in a museum and, by extension, included in collective societal memory. Experiencing the inclusion and public exhibition of one’s history as relevant to society confers both value and a sense of belonging (Coffee 2008, p. 263).

The original 2006 exhibition had addressed the Nazi persecution of the Roma as part of a broader discussion of Nazi racial ideologies and genocidal policies, but it did not focus specifically on the fate of Norwegian Roma. In 2021, this section was expanded to cover the Norwegian exclusion policy and the “Gypsy clause,” international policies toward Roma before WWII, and the genocide of Norwegian Roma—the section that Massimo Dahl visits in the documentary. Like the rest of the exhibition, its design relies on large photographs—such as images of the Roma contingent in Padborg in January 1934—accompanying explanatory text and a few 3D objects, with Roma-related items focused on passports and identity documents. This exhibition segment is relatively brief compared to the section on Jewish history and is physically located at the rear of the exhibition space, requiring visitors to be particularly attentive in order to encounter the Roma narrative. It should be noted that the 2006 exhibition was physically designed in a manner that allows little flexibility for alterations.

Meanwhile, Norwegian Romas are also addressed in the temporary exhibition U/Synlig: Hverdagsrasisme i Norge (“In/Visible: Everyday Racism in Norway”) in the HL centre’s MINO annex, originally scheduled for 2023 but still on display as of November 2025. A metro map is used as a visual tool to present multiple sub-timelines of the history of racism in Norway, one of which includes key events in the persecution of the Roma. Additionally, the exhibition highlights assimilation policies and their consequences. Both sections situate Nazi persecution and genocide within a broader transnational history of racism and nationalism that did not begin or end with the Nazis in Germany. Thus, the exhibition functions as an important supplement to the Holocaust core exhibition.

The research report of 2015 was published as a non-fiction book by Cappelen Damm in 2017 under the title Et uønsket folk. Utviklingen av en «sigøynerpolitikk» og utryddelsen av norske rom 1915–1956 (“An undesired people. The development of a “Gipsy policy” and the extermination of Norwegian Roma 1915–1956”) (Brustad et al. 2017). The book can be regarded as a memory-activist effort to generate sympathy and attention for the Roma’s history of persecution, also in Norway, and to embed the report’s conclusions in public memory. The book, emphasized through its title, underlines how Roma experience with Nazi persecution and annihilation policies was part of a broader history of stigmatization, discrimination, and exclusion, constituting a life history of an “undesired people.” A further notable feature of the book is how the authors carefully underpin their arguments and authorize themselves as authors and narrators by underlining the link to the research report written on behalf of the parliament and their formal status as researchers at the HL Centre. The text combines their scholarly narrative with extensive quotes from primary testimonies that convey personal experience, traumas and survival of the Roma.

In this way, the book draws attention to survivor testimonies of Norwegian Roma that have been largely forgotten. Despite the large public interest in primary testimonies of veterans and political and Jewish victims in Norway, the memories of the Roma survivors Milos Karoli and Frans Josef, published in 1978, are mainly overlooked. The narrative construction of the 2017 nonfiction book can be seen as an attempt to raise attention the Roma as victims, generate empathy, and counteract their devaluation in the victim hierarchy. Nevertheless, the book failed to renew interest in the original testimonies of Milos Karoli and Frans Josef from 1978, whose role in Norwegian memory culture I will discuss next.

5. Survival Testimonies of the Roma: A Question of Ignorance or Credibility?

Certain victims, diaries, and testimonies have attained a canonised symbolic status in Holocaust memory culture, such as Anne Frank, Primo Levi and Elie Wiesel. There is no Roma witness or testimony with a comparable symbolic status in either Norwegian or international memory culture. Witnesses have had, and continue to have, an invaluable role in preserving the memory of Nazi crimes. Annette Wieviorka has shown how crucial it was for the memory of the Holocaust and Auschwitz that survivors were given a prominent role in the trial against Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961–1962 (Wieviorka 2006). Those who experienced the Holocaust become manifestations and links between the past and the present precisely because they can recount what happened as personal memories, having lived and survived it themselves. Particularly since the 1980s, Holocaust survivors have gained considerable authority as historical narrators in what Wieviorka has termed the “era of the witness”, cf. the title of her book (Wieviorka 2006).

Surviving veterans of the resistance and Nazi captivity have had significant symbolic importance as mediators of WWII in Norway as well. Both private individuals and institutions have collected, and in some cases published, interviews with veterans and camp survivors; previously published testimonies or documents discovered in drawers and cupboards have been (re)published. However, in the case of Roma witness accounts, there is a remarkable silence and absence. Is this because there are no testimonies, or “because of the oral Romani culture,” as is often claimed? Nearly fifty years ago, two primary Roma testimonies were indeed published: by Milos Karoli, a survivor of the “Zigeunerlager” in Auschwitz-Birkenau, and Frans Josef, who survived flight and internment in France, thereby making these accounts publicly accessible in Norway. Why have these not attained the same status as testimonies of political and Jewish survivors published at the same time?

In 1978, Peder Skogaas and Kåre Lilleholt published the book En for hverandre: Sigøynerne Milos Karoli og Frans Josef forteller (“One for Another: The Gypsies Milos Karoli and Frans Josef recount”) through one of Norway’s largest publishers, Gyldendal Norsk Forlag. The book is presented as a biography but is, in fact, the witness accounts of Milos Karoli and Frans Josef, recorded by Skogaas and Lilleholt. The text combines multiple narrative perspectives—omniscient author, monologues, and dialogues—in which the omniscient author functions as a “guide” providing overarching historical and political explanations, while the monologues and dialogues are based on interviews with Milos Karoli and Frans Josef. Milos Karoli and Frans Josef were five and fifteen years old, respectively, when, as part of the Norwegian Roma contingent in Padborg in 1934, they were denied by the Norwegian authorities and handed over to the German border police.

A striking feature of Karoli’s and Josef’s narratives is the presentation of persecution as part of everyday life, in which the Nazi persecution is portrayed as a continuation—albeit with lethal intensification—of the persecution they endured both before and after. Their general life experience is that of “an undesirable people,” regardless of when and where they find themselves. Furthermore, the accounts are suffused with a desire for legitimacy as narrators of history and, not least, as human beings. Karoli’s and Josef’s testimonies demonstrate a perceived hierarchy of victimhood in which Roma people feel inferior and wish to be recognised as victims of Nazi racism “on a par” with Jews: “Not that it was worse for us than for so many others, but we were so few that we noticed it more when someone disappeared” (Frans Josef, in Skogaas and Lilleholt 1978, p. 42). Jewish survivors often underline their Norwegian identity, but this is even more pronounced in the narratives of the two Roma witnesses, who repeatedly stress that they felt Norwegian, had Norway as their homeland, and only wish to be loyal Norwegian citizens: “We feel that we are not welcome in many places, and time and again we see that the Germans who ravaged here during the war are welcome, while we, who are Norwegian, are chased away” (Milos Karoli, in Skogaas and Lilleholt 1978, p. 125).

A particularly notable feature of Karoli’s and Josef’s narratives is the repeated insistence that they are harmless. Thus, the accounts convey continued stigmatisation and discrimination. The attitude of “one for another,” which is also the book’s title, is portrayed as the defining characteristic of Roma people, rather than being dangerous or criminals. It is evident that the two Roma witnesses perceive a continuity in social stigma and seek to counter it through their narratives. By highlighting solidarity as a positive trait characteristic of Roma culture, the testimonies serve as counter-narratives to the majority’s stereotyping of them as “the dangerous others”. Situating the genocide narrative within a broader story of discrimination and persecution reinforces that it is a common experience for Roma people to feel unwanted, feared, ostracised, and considered a threat to society. Karoli and Josef tell their story to demonstrate the solidarity they see as central to Roma culture and stress that, while they wish to preserve their cultural traditions, it poses no threat to the Norwegian society.

Eight years earlier, the resistance fighter, Sachsenhausen survivor, and long-serving postwar Prime Minister Einar Gerhardsen (Labour Party) had published his bestselling memoirs Fellesskap i krig og fred (“Unity in War and Peace”) (Gerhardsen 1970), whose main message is that the community of “good Norwegians” who fought against the occupiers and collaborators during the war also stood together in rebuilding Norway and establishing the welfare state for the same “good Norwegians”. Gerhardsen thus represents the close connection between the master narrative of the Home Front and Norwegian self-understanding and identity, which remains influential even today. Karoli and Josef likewise emphasise that they are loyal Norwegians and can be, and wish to be, part of this community based on “one for another.” It is striking that the two Roma witnesses do not hold Norwegian authorities accountable for their experiences. The Norwegian exclusionary policies are conveyed primarily through the omniscient narrator, likely reflecting the editors’ work and the need to provide overarching explanations for readers. Are Milos Karoli and Frans Josef cautious about confronting Norwegian authorities because it might make them less desirable as victims? They emphasise their own harmlessness rather than blaming the authorities for discrimination, reducing the cause of Norwegian exclusionary policy to misunderstandings and prejudices among non-Roma people. In this way, they attempt to build credibility and elicit empathy as victims, without placing the responsibility for the perpetrator where it belongs, perhaps out of fear of provoking irritation among the readers.

The 1970s were a decade in which the master memory—the Home Front narrative—remained dominant; however, other topics and voices were introduced onto the agenda, such as the question of war pensions, psychological after-effects and trauma (post-traumatic-stress-disorder, PSTD, first became a formal medical term and diagnosis in 1980), and the experiences of merchant seamen (krigsseilere), Jews, and Norwegian volunteers to the Wehrmacht and the SS. Two years before the publication of Milos Karoli’s and Frans Josef’s stories, the testimony of the Norwegian-Jewish Herman Sachnowitz, deported to Auschwitz, one of eight survivors of the Donau-deportation and the sole survivor in his family, was published. Det angår også deg (“It Concerns You Too”) (1976), edited by Arnold Jacoby, has been immensely successful in Norway and continues to be reprinted almost 50 years later. Sachnowitz’ testimony brought the Holocaust to Norwegian public attention (Reitan 2016, pp. 152–53). In 1979 the testimony became the object of a writing competition for public schools in Norway and over the winter that same year the national broadcaster NRK broadcasted a reading on the radio. Furthermore, the popularity of Sachnowitz’s testimony may have benefited from the American television series Holocaust (1978/1979), which firmly placed the Holocaust on the public agenda internationally and may have made Sachnowitz’s experiences of the Holocaust seem even more relevant and timelier for a Norwegian audience.

The reception history of the testimonies of Herman Sachnowitz, Milos Karoli, and Frans Josef could not be more different. While Sachnowitz’s book is a canonised Holocaust testimony in a Norwegian context and has been hailed as one of the most significant books on WWII in Norway, Milos Karoli and Frans Josef are largely forgotten. As in Karoli’s story, Auschwitz-Birkenau is a focal point, but in Sachnowitz’s story it concerns a large Jewish family in the Norwegian city Larvik who was arrested, deported with the Donau and sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau. The fact that the persecution story unfolds on Norwegian soil and is told by a survivor returning to Norway in 1945 might make it seem more relevant to Norwegian readers. In addition, the exhortatory title Det angår også deg (“It Concerns You Too”) might strengthen the readers’ commitment. One issue remains unsolved: does Sachnowitz (1976) appear as a more sympathetic narrator than Karoli and Josef? The cover of En for hverandre (“One for Another”) may have alienated readers from the stories of Milos Karoli and Frans Josef. It features a photograph of a dancing, stereotypical “Gypsy woman” with long dark hair, a floral blouse, and a long pink skirt in front of a caravan, highlighting exotic and stereotypical traits of Roma people. This stereotype likewise draws on the trope of “the Gypsies as uncontrollable, emotional, and fiery,” also referred to as the “Gypsy King complex” (term by Maria Rosvoll and Natasha Bielenberg, quoted in Lauritzen 2023, p. 136), and parallels the notion of the “noble savage” (Hancock 1987, pp. 47–49). In contrast to its negative counterpart—the construction of the Roma as “the dangerous others,” where uncontrolled emotions render the “Gypsy” threatening to the established social order— the romanticisation nevertheless produces a problematic distortion through processes of exoticisation. The cover thus evokes classic stereotypes and diverts attention from the book’s actual message. Dominating stereotypes and prejudices may deflate the relevance and level of credibility of the Roma and result in “testimonial injustice” (Fricker 2007, pp. 18–23). Similarly, the continued prevalence of negative stereotypes in media representations, textbooks and everyday discourse may contribute to the distortion of Roma as victims, as will be discussed next.

6. The Persistent Stereotype of “The Dangerous Others” and Roma as “Blameworthy Victims”

The discussion on the place and role of the Roma within Norwegian WWII memory culture cannot be disentangled from the broader cultural and societal perceptions of the Roma in Norway. The repeal of the so-called “Gypsy clause” in 1956 did not, unsurprisingly, bring about an immediate end to discrimination or prejudice against the Roma. After more than four decades of aggressive exclusionary policies pursued by Norwegian authorities—policies that were well supported by large segments of the press, the police, and the social welfare system—it would indeed have been remarkable if deeply ingrained biases and imaginaries had simply vanished overnight.

Nevertheless, it is important to acknowledge and credit the efforts of those who fought for the repeal of this racist immigration clause and who later contributed to the drafting of the White Paper on the Improvement of the Social Conditions of the Roma (1972–1973). Cultural representations by authors such as Peder Skogaas and Kåre Lilleholt sought to bring public attention to Roma culture and everyday life. Yet, despite their contributions, the Roma continued to be predominantly represented through negative stereotypes and media framings that may have reinforced rather than dismantled the existing prejudicial discourse.

The 2015 research report concluded that the perception of Roma as unasjonal størrelse—as a unnational or rather anti-national entity—as a homogenous group existing outside the national imaginary (Rosvoll et al. 2015, pp. 169–70) permeated Norwegian authorities’ actions both before and after WWII. This constitutes part of the discursive connection between past and present in defining the Roma minority as outside the Norwegian community. Despite having been victims of the Nazi extermination apparatus, Roma met with no goodwill or empathy from Norwegian authorities. Norwegian Roma were neither regarded as victims nor persecuted, but treated as a potential future burden. Consequently, Norwegian authorities did not wish for them to return to Norway and, although the prohibition on Roma immigration was officially lifted in 1956, the new immigration law linked “nomadic behaviour” to criminal activity. By that it upheld the image of Roma as the “dangerous others”, a potential social burden and the devaluation of Roma as victims and Norwegians continued to exist.

Since the 1930s, for example, the Karoli family, the largest and most prominent Roma family in Norway, has been considered one of country’s most dangerous families (Rosvoll 2021, pp. 11–12) and subject to exclusively negative press coverage. From the 1970s onward, a protracted conflict between the brothers Polykarp and Milos Karoli contributed to enduring internal divisions within the family. These disputes were repeatedly sensationalized in the press, which reported on quarrels, physical altercations, stabbings, and mutual accusations of criminal conduct. A notable example was a fraud case in the early 1990s, which attracted widespread media attention for several years. In her research on the press coverage of the case, Veronica Myking demonstrates how journalistic narratives often conflated Roma identity, the Karoli family, and criminality (Myking 2009, pp. 82–88). Through repeated media framing as “Gypsy kings”, “circus Karoli”, and solely through the lens of criminality, the Karoli family became emblematic of broader social anxieties, indicating an interplay between mediated memory, stereotype formation, and the politics of belonging. This could have diminished empathy and public attention toward Roma victims, fostering perceptions of “blameworthy victims”. For members of the family, the Karoli name has carried such a profound stigma that many have chosen to change it.

Official apology speeches, in which political leaders and state authorities critically engage with the negative aspects of their nation’s past, carry significant symbolic weight and have emerged as a distinct genre of critical historical reflection, inclusive democratic practice, and efforts toward reconciliation (Storeide 2019, p. 471). Nevertheless, it remains an open question whether such symbolic acts exert a meaningful influence on public attitudes or become embedded within a living form (“communicative form”) of collective memory (Assmann 1999, p. 409).

In the 2022 attitudes survey conducted by the HL Centre, 32 percent of respondents stated that they did not wish to have social contact with Roma; in comparison, 4.7 percent said the same about Jews and 15.3 percent about Muslims (Moe 2022, pp. 8–9). This aligns with the previous centre’s attitude surveys since 2011 that have shown that one-third of the population would be somewhat or strongly opposed to having Roma as neighbours or friends (Moe 2022, pp. 68–71). In the spring of 2024, the major Norwegian daily Aftenposten revealed that the Norwegian police had compiled a registry of 650 Roma individuals, justifying it as a crime-prevention measure (Tronstad et al. 2024). The Data Protection Authority concluded that the registry was not unlawful (Datatilsynet 2024). This raises the question: was the 2015 official apology merely symbolic politics on the part of Norwegian authorities?

How can textbooks, museums and other aesthetical and cultural representations convey the Roma and the history of discrimination and persecution without reducing them to the very stereotypes they aim to confront? In the last part of the Swedish documentary on Roma genocide, Massimo Dahl and his mother view photographs provided by the HL Centre, depicting Roma in Norway before the expulsion in the late 1920s. His mother exclaims, “These are the pictures Norwegians should see, so they can see us Roma in Norway” (SVT 2021). Her remark highlights a central dilemma in the visual representation of minorities such as the Roma: much of the available material has been produced by governmental and administrative authorities, whose perspective is focused on the Roma as “criminal” and/or “the foreigner.” By exhibiting materials produced by state authorities such as mug shots that depict Roma in degrading or subordinate positions, or that highlight stereotypical traits of “nomadic behaviour” to underscore their “otherness,” exhibitions risk reproducing—or even reinforcing—the “perpetrator’s gaze.”

In both exhibitions at the HL Centre where Roma history is included, photographs and facsimiles are primarily drawn from individual files maintained by the Belgian and French foreign police or Norwegian authorities. Both exhibitions are undoubtedly well intentioned in their efforts to convey the history of the Roma, yet the photographic materials on display operate along a delicate boundary: first, between communicating the discrimination and racism directed at the Roma and reinforcing the very stereotypes of “the nomadic others” that the exhibitions seek to challenge; and second, between being drawn into the perpetrator’s gaze and avoiding a “blame-the-victim” framing that may inadvertently perpetuate notions of “the dangerous other” rather than confronting and countering them.

Research on Roma representation in Eastern European museums has shown that the Roma are disadvantaged in the hierarchy of visibility and wording within museum representation (Radonic 2015, pp. 74–75). Representation of the Roma genocide is often relegated to the back, presented briefly, represented by a memorial plaque with minimal additional context, or reduced to digital display, rendering it less visible than Jewish victims. The positioning of the Roma genocide at the rear of the HL Centre core exhibition, however, is due to the physical constraints of the existing exhibition.

A fundamental challenge in presenting minority histories is the risk of portraying the minority as a homogeneous group and overlooking the internal diversity that naturally exists. This can be mitigated by emphasizing individual life stories. While the exhibitions address central aspects of the Roma as marginalized people, they also highlight the need for re-humanisation. The exhibitions contain few individualizing artefacts and narratives, and through their predominant focus on “the unwanted people,” they create an impression of the Roma as a homogeneous group. I argue that presentation must generate empathic mnemonic counter-narratives to the perpetrator’s perspective by making victims’ voices and identities visible. A re-humanisation strategy could also involve explicitly addressing the lack of private or self-produced material instead of relying on perpetrators’ materials and perspectives.

An essential counter-narrative was published by Maria Rosvoll, one of the researchers behind the 2015 report and the subsequent 2017 non-fiction book, with the biography Zolo Karoli. En europeisk historie (“Zolo Karoli: A European History”) in 2021. Together with his brothers Milos and Polykarp Karoli, Zolo grew up in Norway and was part of the group rejected at Padborg in 1934. Zolo Karoli was deported from Belgium to Auschwitz-Birkenau in January 1944 with his wife, two small sons, parents, and most of his siblings; he was later transferred to Buchenwald, where he was killed two days before the camp was liberated on 11 April 1945 (Rosvoll 2021, p. 11). His wife survived but never returned to Norway. The subtitle, “a European history,” signals that the Roma as an “undesired people” is a transnational and European phenomenon. Most subchapters bear titles consisting of place, month, and year, emphasizing Zolo Karoli’s constant movement. The narrative clarifies that his continuous travelling was not due to the stereotype image of “Roma culture or way of life,” but because he and his family were unwanted and continually forced away wherever they went.

The biography falls under the genre of “biography against forgetting”, a genre familiar from Holocaust literature, that seeks to give a face to one of countless victims. By constructing a narrative despite gaps in the source material, it counters the statistical abstraction of the Holocaust. Highlighting a single fate personalizes the incomprehensible brutality. Espen Søbye’s bestseller Kathe—alltid vært i Norge (“Kathe—always lived in Norway”) (2003) about the Norwegian-Jewish girl Kathe Lasnik, who was murdered in Auschwitz upon arrival 1 December 1942, can be said to have initiated this genre in Norway. In her introductory chapter, Rosvoll asserts that there is no Roma Anne Frank or Primo Levi (Rosvoll 2021, p. 12). Rosvoll aims to write the fate of an individual Roma, to be a “historian of the soul” (Rosvoll 2021, p. 12) and to uncover what it was like to live as Zolo Karoli. Rosvoll initially claims that choosing Zolo Karoli as her protagonist was random but then notes: “The only photograph I have found of him as an adult shows an exceptionally handsome man. With his thick, dark hair and black eyes, he could have walked straight into a film. So perhaps the choice is not entirely coincidental after all” (Rosvoll 2021, p. 13). The photograph, taken by the Belgian foreign police, is reproduced on the cover. Like Søbye, Rosvoll had to find alternative strategies to fill gaps in knowledge. Unlike Søbye who had help from Kathe Lasnik’s surviving sisters, Rosvoll’s is left with a shortage of sources: Zolo Karoli left few material traces, and the few written sources that exist are in authorities’ archives, reflecting the perpetrators’ gaze portraying Roma as criminals and a social problem: “This book is necessarily limited by the predominance of written sources, which reflect the perspectives of the dominant classes and hold greater authority than oral traditions.” (Rosvoll 2021, p. 170).

A pervasive feature of the book is Rosvoll’s attempt to move beyond the discriminatory gaze of authorities and discover who Zolo Karoli truly was—a task that seems impossible. Individualizing and constructing Zolo Karoli’s life story reestablishes his dignity, builds his credibility as a victim, and counters existing stereotypes portraying Roma as “the dangerous others” and “blameworthy victims.” By continuously addressing information gaps and the reliance on the perpetrator perspective Rosvoll simultaneously confronts and resists their authority over Zolo Karoli’s narrative. Zolo Karoli’s widow remarried after the war and had a daughter. Through the latter, Rosvoll uncovers what “neither Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, German, nor Belgian administration or police ever knew” (Rosvoll 2021, p. 170)—that which the perpetrators never seized: that Zolo Karoli’s “name in Romanes, his soul name, was Becti” (Rosvoll 2021, p. 170). Thus, Rosvoll’s biography is a powerful mnemonic counter-narrative preserving Zolo Karoli’s own identity, Becti, which authorities in various countries could neither criminalize nor erase. Similarly, in the memorial room at the HL Centre the names in Romanes have been added to the Roma victims’ name if known, which have huge symbolic impact hence the recognition of Roma own/private identity.

7. Conclusions

This article has discussed the mnemonic marginalization of Roma memories of WWII in Norway and demonstrated that the wartime and genocide narrative of the Roma diverges from the official Norwegian major narrative in terms of its topography, temporality, narrative, agency and mnemonic role attribution: the Nazis’ persecution and genocide did not take place in Norway, persecution does not unfold solely during the occupation years of 1940–1945, and discrimination and persecution do not appear as a collective experience associated with Nazism and WWII, but rather as a general life experience for Roma that persists to this day. In this narrative, both Norwegian authorities and the majority population play the roles as perpetrators and bystander, quite opposite to the dominating Norwegian master narrative of resistance of war and oppression and national identity as “good Norwegians”.

Primary Roma testimonies, such as those of Milos Karolis and Frans Josef, have received markedly less attention than the testimonies of resistance fighters and political or Jewish victims, and are today largely forgotten. As published survivor testimonies, they form part of Norway’s cultural memory; however, this does not automatically mean that they are read, that they, cf. Aleida Assmann, enter the active communicative memory discourse of the society (Assmann 1999, p. 408), or that the witnesses are met with empathy or understanding. Whether a testimony is heard or regarded as significant depends on factors such as the perceived sympathy and credibility of the narrator, the coherence and comprehensibility of the content and narrative structure, the degree to which the audience responds with empathy and interest, and whether the historical and political context facilitates or hinders the testimony’s impact.

The Roma constitute a very small minority in Norway, which can make it difficult for their experiences to gain public attention and recognition. In addition, the long-standing exclusionary Norwegian policies directed at the Roma and their physical exclusion from Norway for more than three decades may have reinforced the majority population’s perception of the Roma minority as unnational, “un-Norwegian” or less relevant. My analysis suggests that the mnemonic marginalization of the Roma is linked to their broader social stigmatization and marginalization in Norwegian society. The findings suggest a discursive connection between strict and antagonistic Norwegian policy of assimilation and exclusion, the Nazis’ racist persecution and extermination, and contemporary stigmatization and alienation of Roma as “the dangerous others”. While the Roma are keen to assert and explain their Norwegianness, the Norwegian majority continues to define them as “the dangerous other,” with surveys indicating that one-third of the population would not wish to have them as friends or neighbours. The majority society’s conceptions of Norwegianness, and the close link between the Norwegian master narrative of the Home Front and identity constructions of what it means to be “a good Norwegian”, shape how “the foreign” is constructed, thereby marginalizing Roma both as individuals and as members of a Norwegian collective memory.

Persistent prejudice and racial stereotypes result in Roma victims being perceived as “blameworthy victims”, accord lower credibility as victims and eyewitnesses and meet “testimonial injustice” (Fricker 2007, p. 20). Williams and Campbell (2025, pp. 13–14) argue that Roma victims as “blameworthy victims” therefore lose out in the “hierarchy of attention”. I contend that this concept should be supplemented with a “hierarchy of empathy,” as the attention a victim receives largely depends on the degree of empathy they elicit. Although Norwegian Roma have received an official apology and have been included in the memorial room and exhibitions at the HL Centre, that is, they have become part of Norway’s cultural memory, this has (so far) not affected the majority society’s attitudes toward them. Roma are not met with the same empathy as other victims of WWII, and thus do not receive equivalent attention or symbolic significance.

My analysis suggests that memory-politics cannot not be isolated from broader identity discussions and social processes, and that mnemonic perceptions are dependent on, and interact with, other social and cultural frames/framing. Memory culture and memory politics since WWII have aimed at promoting the moral lesson of Never again, i.e., war and genocide prevention, and the inherent dignity of every person regardless of nationality, ethnicity, or status, as stated in the UN Declaration on Human Rights. However, the official Norwegian understanding of WWII as a moral lesson of Never again has failed to include the Roma, as they are not met with the same empathy as other victim groups. My analysis underscores the importance of confronting stereotypes and fostering emphatic mnemonic counter-narratives in representations of minority groups. Without this critical effort, portrayals risk reproducing the very stereotypes they seek to challenge. Official apologies, musealisations, and representations in textbooks and memorials remain purely symbolic measures if they fail to promote counter-narratives and life-stories that are able to confront existing stigmatization and discrimination. A central cause of the mnemonic marginalization of Roma narratives lies in Norway’s highly homogenizing and exclusionary memory culture—a mirror of the broader exclusionary discourse of national identity in Norwegian society. Eighty years after the end of World War II, the Roma in Norway are still perceived as “the dangerous others.”