The Database of Roma Victims of the Holocaust [Databáze romských obětí holocaustu, DROH] was a project run by the Terezín Initiative Institute (TII) in Prague during the years 2016–2020 in cooperation with the Museum of Romani Culture in Brno and the Documentation Centre of Austrian Resistance (DÖW). The database was published under the title ‘Database of victims of the National Socialist persecution of ‘Gypsies’ in May 2020 at holocaust.cz. It has been integrated into the ‘Database of victims of the Shoah’ run by TII since 2008. It contains biographical information on about 1,300 people interned the ‘Zigeunerlager’ Lety near Pisek. The details of those 329 people who did not survive their internment at Lety are publicly accessible online. All other data can be requested from TII for legitimate research purposes.
The information provided is based on the publications of historian Ctibor Nečas (1933–2017), re-examined, verified, corrected, and complemented with data from the main archival sources for the camp, held in the State Regional Archives in Třeboň, and additional materials from the State Regional Archives in Prague.
The idea for creating this database dates back at least to 1999, when Miroslav Kárný (1919–2001), founder of the TII, suggested deploying the knowledge and methods on how to create such databases as well as the infrastructure of the then newly created electronic database of victims of the Shoah from Czech Republic to enable a more dignified commemoration of the victims of the genocide of Roma and Sinti and to support further research on the topic. Alongside the knowledge and experience with this kind of database that TII itself had built up, further cooperation with the Central Council of German Sinti and Roma in Heidelberg, the Fritz Bauer Institute in Frankfurt am Main, the concentration camp memorials Dachau and Flossenbürg and the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology at the Pedagogical University of Krakow also contributed to the successful publication of the database, which in 2024 was still the only one of its kind in Europe.
