Jan Yoors

From US Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Facebook:

These photographs are rare, intimate portraits of Romani life before World War II.

The photos were taken in the 1930s by Jan Yoors, a Belgian non-Romani teenager who befriended and traveled part time with a Lovara Romani family. They depict lively scenes, such as men raising their glasses in a toast and children leading a horse. Soon after these images were captured, life for Roma and Sinti in Europe would become increasingly dangerous.

Roma and Sinti would be targeted by the Nazi regime because they were considered to be “asocial” and “racially inferior.” Throughout the Nazi era, tens of thousands of Roma and Sinti were subjected to forced sterilization and imprisonment. The Nazis and their allies and collaborators murdered between 250,000 and 500,000 Roma and Sinti during World War II.

Though Jan stopped traveling with the Lovara family when he was 18, he maintained a connection to the Romani people. In one of his memoirs, he described how, during the war, he worked with the resistance recruiting Roma to help smuggle food and arms to resistance fighters. He eventually fled to neutral Spain, where he was imprisoned in the Miranda de Ebro camp.

While Jan survived the war, it is believed that a majority of Jan’s Romani friends were killed.