Ethical rules
We considered it very important to address data protection issues in greater depth than in other projects on historical topics. This is primarily due to the continuing daily discrimination against Roma and Sinti in the Czech and Slovak Republics and elsewhere in the world. We also discussed the topic of personal data protection intensively with leading experts in personal data protection and copyright law. For these reasons, we have decided not to list some of the information from the testimonies. The information we have chosen not to record includes primarily the full date of birth of the witnesses, although this information is included in some publications. The same applies to the concentration camp identification number (most often from Auschwitz). We do not provide a post-war address in the database, or only when it is clear that the survivor has since moved again. Nor do we list the names of children except for the names of children whose death (usually during the war or as a result of wartime hardship) was mentioned by a witness.
Centuries of discriminatory terminology used by the state administration towards Roma and Sinti also raises the question of how to deal with the derogatory term c*kán (g*psy). From the very beginning, this term has been associated with negative characteristics of these people. In order to distance ourselves from it and highlight its problematic nature, we have decided to avoid this word and other derivatives of it in the database. However, if the term is used by the witnesses themselves, or in places where reference is made to the policies of the time towards Roma and Sinti, we insert an asterisk after the first letter. We owe our inspiration for this solution to Magdalena (Magda) Matache from Harvard University. We leave this word without an asterisk only in the case of the Romani organization Svaz Cikánů-Romů (Union of Gypsies-Roma), even though it is typical for many witnesses to omit the problematic word from its name when mentioning this organization. The second exception is when the word appears in the title of a publication or play, as in the case of Elena Lacková’s significant play Hořící cikánský tábor (The Burning Gypsy Camp), which she wrote shortly after World War II.
When accessing the database, at each page of the testimony users are prompted to inform us of any information that should either be corrected or that the family does not wish to be published (see also Contact). It is extremely important for us to accommodate such responses.
