“The Night of 2 August 1944”: Witness Testimony Documentary Premieres on ERIAC’s YouTube Channel

On the occasion of August 2 – European Roma Holocaust Memorial Day, the European Roma Institute for Arts and Culture (ERIAC) is pleased to host the release of the documentary The Night of 2 August 1944 on its YouTube channel.

The Night of 2 August 1944 is a documentary built around four filmed conversations with some of the last French Shoah survivors, aged between 96 and 101: Frania Eisenbach Haverland, Ginette Kolinka, Cécile Rajngewic Zoly and Esther Senot. The four interviewees were in Birkenau during the night of 2 August 1944 and recall what they witnessed during the liquidation of the so-called Zigeunerlager.

During these intimate interviews, the witnesses recount their experiences of deportation and survival before reflecting on a subject that has rarely been documented: their memories of Roma and Travellers they encountered in the Nazi camps.The meetings were made possible by the correspondence of 18-year-old Noodels Demestre, whose great-grandparents were deported because they were Roma. His letters opened the way to encounters that offered a unique opportunity to record these testimonies.

Filmed in the tradition of oral-history documentaries, the film relies entirely on the witnesses’s voices, without archival footage or historical commentary. Eighty two years later, those testimonies are a rare dialogue between Jewish and Roma memories of persecution.

Based on an original idea by Noodels Demestre, the film is directed by Lise Foisneau with the participation of Valentin Merlin, Ritchy Thibault, and Ludovic Versace, and the support of ERIAC and EVZ Foundation.

This initiative is part of ERIAC’s ongoing work to preserve the memory of the Roma Holocaust and to improve the public understanding of its history and legacy. By making The Night of 2 August 1944 available to wider audiences, ERIAC hopes to contribute to the transmission of these rare testimonies and to keep alive the memory of the Roma victims of Nazi persecution.