FOR REMEMBRANCE OF THE ROMA GENOCIDE

International Commemoration…
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up across Europe, some for transport, others for forced labour,
and still others for mass murder. Along with the concentration
camps that imprisoned millions, ghettoes were set up in major
cities, set apart by brick walls, barbed wire and armed guards,
housing Jews, Roma and Sinti, and others. In occupied Poland,
the Czech Republic and beyond, German troops (Wehrmacht) and
police murdered countless Roma and Sinti, who were buried in
mass graves in the countryside. 4 Along with official and unofficial
pogroms throughout Europe, mobile death squads – Einsatzgruppen
– were deployed across the countryside as the Nazis pushed
eastward into the Soviet Union. The numbers of Roma and Sinti
who perished in the camps is only part of the story – the excavation
of mass graves – most unmarked – and the identification of
those buried in them is still being carried out in the eastern part
of Europe in the present day. There is much work to be done to
document Romani experiences of the Holocaust, and still much
more to determine an accurate estimate of the numbers who were
murdered, both inside the camps and by mobile killing squads,
pogroms and other forms of violence. In the seventy years since
the end of World War II, we still have no accurate count of the
Romani and Sinti lives lost during the Holocaust, especially in the
areas in the East, where the Romani population was greater and,
we can assume, the number of those murdered rose accordingly.
I believe that is crucial for us to hold memorial ceremonies and
set aside spaces and monuments to those who were murdered, to
those who lost family, loved ones and community, to those who
returned from the camps or hiding only to find their cultures
and life worlds decimated; to those who survived genocide. As
we remember the dead and commemorate the survivors, we also
4 Gerhard Baumgartner, “Concentration Camps,” for Project Education of
Roma Children in Europe, Council of Europe, https://www.un.org/en/
holocaustremembrance/docs/Roma%20concentration-camps%20OSCE%20.
pdfhttps://www.un.org/en/holocaustremembrance/docs/Roma%20concentration-camps%20OSCE%20.pdf
(access: 13/05/2015).