Bogdan Chiriac

Gerda Henkel Research Fellow (10/2025 – 03/2026)

Petitioning Against Injustice. Roma Resistance in Transnistria During the Holocaust

This project explores the various types of petitions submitted by Roma deportees in response to state-sponsored violence and persecution in Romania between 1942 and 1944. In doing so, it aims to bring into focus the agency of ordinary Roma men and women by moving away from the traditional historical narrative, which relegated them to the role of passive victims of persecution, and their petitions to brave, yet futile attempts to sway the same authoritarian Antonescu regime that initiated their deportation in 1942.

Instead, Roma petitioners are considered as active agents subjected to persecution, but not completely disenfranchised, who used these entreaties to seek some form of assistance or recourse, as well as to protest against what they perceived as acts of injustice. Drawing on archival sources and testimonies of Holocaust survivors, this project will situate these petitions within the larger concept of wartime petition writing and reassess their value as a medium used by persecuted minority groups to express their grievances and denounce abuses, in full awareness of the risks entailed in challenging state policies in non-democratic regimes during World War II.

Bogdan Chiriac is an independent researcher from Romania working in the field of modern and contemporary Romanian history. He received his B.A. in History (2005) from Alexandru Ioan Cuza University in Iași. He completed his postgraduate studies at the Central European University in Budapest, where he obtained his MA in Nationalism Studies (2008) and his PhD in Comparative History (2017). He has been involved in several research projects focusing on Holocaust studies, the trials of major war criminals in postwar Romania, and the history of Roma in Romania.

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