One Blood, One Flame - The Oral Histories of the Yugoslav Gypsies before, During and After WWII, Part 1

Polansky's first oral history project with Roma (Gypsies) started in 1993 in the Czech Republic. While researching Czech emigration to America after the 1848 revolution, he heard about thousands of documents in the same archive regarding a WWII Gypsy "death camp." When he asked the archive director to see the documents, he was told they couldn't be opened for 50 years. After much pestering he was finally allowed to see the documents in January 1994. Intrigued by reports there were no survivors, he was able to find more than 100 Roma and Sinti survivors in the village of Lety. Many survivors claimed Lety was worse than their later experience at Auschwitz. None of them would allow themselves to be filmed; they only allowed him to type their testimonies directly into his laptop. Fifty years after the war, the survivors were still afraid to speak on camera about their experiences.