FOR REMEMBRANCE OF THE ROMA GENOCIDE

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Sławomir Kapralski
frames 1 . The intensity of persecution did not have a stable pattern
and in different periods of time different categories of the
Roma were targeted with different strength 2 .
This partially explains why the comprehensive picture of the
Roma suffering starts to emerge only recently. It requires a strenuous
intellectual effort to understand that the persecution of the
Roma had a single meaning, otherwise concealed behind divergent
mechanisms and practices of implementation. The specific nature of
the Roma Genocide made it difficult for threatened Roma people to
work out efficient strategies of survival in the time of the Nazi rule,
as well as to elaborate a consistent and commonly shared memory
of that time afterward. Such common memory could not emerge
spontaneously because of the different experiences of particular
Roma groups and lack of a unitary political organization.
Although the Nazis’ conception of “Gypsies” was built upon
a racist ideology, on the level of concrete decisions and legal acts
the racial thought had been concealed behind labels such as “asocial,”
“work-shy,” or “socially unadjusted people.” The difference drawn
by racial scientists and some Nazi officials between “racially pure
Gypsies” and “Gypsies of mixed origin”, along with shifting policies
toward those groups, further contributed to the postwar misconceptions
and silence regarding the nature of the crimes committed
against the Roma. Finally, the fate of the Roma has not been sufficiently
documented by the perpetrators and we do not have rich
archival materials that would reveal the full scale of the genocide.
The crimes committed against the Roma by National Socialists
and their allies have not been brought to the attention of the
world immediately after the Second World War and have not been
condemned in a way similar to the crimes against Jews. When historical
discourse that placed the Holocaust in the center of human
1 Michael Stewart, “How Does Genocide Happen?”, in R. Astuti, J. Parry,
C. Stafford, eds., Questions of Anthropology (Oxford: Berg, 2007).
2 Michael Zimmermann, “The Wehrmacht and the National Socialist Persecution
of the Gypsies”, Romani Studies, vol. 11, no 2 (2001).