Videos

Johann “Rukeli” Trollmann (1907-1944) was a German Sinti boxer. He won the German light heavyweight title, only to have it stripped by the Nazis due to his heritage and "un-German" style. He endured forced sterilization, forced labour, and eventually died in a concentration camp, reportedly beaten to death by a kapo he had once defeated in a boxing match.

As every year on 23 August, the European Day of Remembrance for Victims of Totalitarian Regimes, the ENRS recalls those persecuted in the name of totalitarian and authoritarian ideologies.

Elina Machálkova (1926 – 2017) was born into a Czech Roma family, faced persecution under Nazi occupation. She was forced to leave school and work in a factory, she narrowly escaped deportation. After the war, she co-founded the first museum in Europe focusing on the history and culture of the Roma and published a book on her family's history, dedicated to preserving Roma culture and history.

As every year on 23 August, the European Day of Remembrance for Victims of Totalitarian Regimes, the ENRS recalls those persecuted in the name of totalitarian and authoritarian ideologies.

Boris Romanchenko (1926 – 2022) was a Ukrainian activist and survivor who endured the Buchenwald, Dora, and Bergen-Belsen concentration camps. He was killed by Russian airstrikes during the Battle of Kharkiv, a tragic event that took place in the context of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

As every year on 23 August, the European Day of Remembrance for Victims of Totalitarian Regimes, the ENRS recalls those persecuted in the name of totalitarian and authoritarian ideologies.

written by Prof. Wojciech Roszkowski, edited by Prof. Peer Vries and Dr Nathan Marcus

Ieva Lase was a Latvian translator, member of the national resistance movement, dissident and political prisoner.

Doina Maria Cornea was a professor of French language, linguist, translator, human rights activist, and one of the most emblematic figures of the antitotalitarian opposition in Romania.

Władysław Bartoszewski was a Polish historian, journalist, writer, politician, former Auschwitz concentration camp prisoner, the Second World War Resistance fighter, participant in the Warsaw Uprising, political prisoner during the communist era, Righteous among the Nations of the World.

Jaan Kross was an acclaimed Estonian writer and a several-time Nobel Prize in Literature nominee. He suffered persecution and imprisonment by both Nazi German and Soviet totalitarian regimes but survived and wrote a number of books that became symbols of moral opposition to the oppression. He is considered a model of perseverance and the conscience of the Estonian people.

Milada Horákova was a Czech politician and a member of the clandestine resistance movement during the Second World War. Sha was a victim of a judicial murder committed by the communist party on the basis of fabricated charges of plotting an treason. Despite calls for clemency from such people as Winston Churchill and Albert Einstein, the Czechoslovak president Klement Gottwald confirmed her sentence. On the morning of 27 June 1950, Milada Horáková was executed by hanging. During the 1968 Prague Spring her rehabilitation process started, completed one year after the Velvet Revolution of 1989.

Every year on 23 August, the European Day of Remembrance for Victims of Totalitarian Regimes, the ENRS recalls those persecuted in the name of totalitarian and authoritarian ideologies.

Kazimierz Moczarski, lawyer, journalist, Home Army soldier and author of the famous "Conversations with an Executioner". Imprisoned, tortured and persecuted by the communist regime of the People's Republic of Poland.

As every year on 23 August, the European Day of Remembrance for Victims of Totalitarian Regimes, the ENRS recalls those persecuted in the name of totalitarian and authoritarian ideologies.

Juliana Zarchi was born in Lithuania in 1938 into a family with parents of different nationalities. Her father, Lithuanian of Jewish origin and her mother was German. Lithuania was soon annexed by the Soviet Union, and then, when the Third Reich turned on its former ally and attacked USSR in 1941, the country was occupied by the Nazis. As a half-Jew, barely at the age of three, Juliana was sent to the Kaunas ghetto and forced to stay there for several months. As the Soviet army re-entered Lithuania, mother and daughter hoped they would no longer have to fear for their lives. Instead, they were both deported to Tajikistan in Central Asia as part of a purge of ethnic Germans. They were stigmatized by the locals as ‘Fascists’ and forced to live and work in dire conditions.

Four groups of students from different European countries. Four artists. History of the Ravensbruck Concentration Camp.
See what happened next.

Sound in the Silence is an intercultural and international remembrance initiative coordinated by the European Network Remembrance and Solidarity in cooperation with MOTTE. This year's edition partners included as well: the Ravensbruck Memorial Site and Ustav Pamati Naroda.

Director: Daniel Dluhy
Director's Assistant: Juliana Gubisova
Sound recordist and mixer: Samo Skubla

Péter Mansfeld was the youngest victim of repression after the 1956 revolution in Hungary. He was hanged at barely the age of 18.

Mala Zimetbaum and Edek Galiński's is a unique love story. After an unsuccessful attempt at escape, both perished in the Nazi German concentration camp Auschwitz-Birkenau.

On 23 August, on the anniversary of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the European Day of Remembrance for Victims of Totalitarian Regimes is observed. It was on that day in 1939 that an agreement between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union opened a road towards the tragedy of the second world war and its consequences: concentration camps, gulags, Holocaust, crematoria, labour camps, and many years of the cold war and further criminal regimes.