EDUCATION FOR REMEMBRANCE OF THE ROMA GENOCIDE

Roma Holocaust: The End of Silence 43
history was eventually established, the Roma were at first excluded
from the category of victims. This situation has changed only later,
together with deconstruction of the thesis that the Holocaust was
uniquely Jewish and its new presentation as a part of a historical
continuum of genocidal persecution of various groups 3 . In many
countries the very same people who participated in the administration
of the Roma Genocide have been handling the matters of
Roma survivors after the war, often perpetuating racist stereotypes
and – with the support of public opinion – denying the Roma their
basic rights 4 . This often caused fear among the Roma, associated
with the feeling that anti-Roma violence can break out again at any
time. Additionally, in the post-war Western Germany, the silence
regarding the Roma Genocide can be attributed to the persistence
of the “Nazi-like” narrative, according to which the persecution of
the Roma had not been racial and could be justified by the alleged
“criminal lifestyle” of the persecuted 5 .
Roma communities emerged from the Holocaust with severe
wounds that threatened their physical, social, and cultural existence
and had detrimental impact on the lives of the individuals.
The death of approximately half a million people 6 fundamentally
damaged the social tissue of Roma life. In terms of social memory
it should be mentioned that a large group of Roma victims con-
3 Dan Stone, “The Historiography of Genocide: Beyond “Uniqueness” and
Ethnic Competition”, Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and Practice,
vol. 8, no. 1 (2004).
4 Günter Saathoff, “Preface”, in J. von dem Knesebeck, The Roma Struggle for
Compensation in Post-War Germany (Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire
Press, 2011), p. ix.
5 Gilad Margalit, “The Representation of the Nazi Persecution of the Gypsies
in German Discourse after 1945”, German History, vol. 17, no. 2 (1999).
6 According to Donald Kenrick this is a “symbolic figure” based on estimation.
Due to the lack of archival material, which is related to the specificity
of the Nazi genocide of the Roma, the exact number of the Roma victims of
the Nazi persecution will probably never be known (Donald Kenrick, “The
Genocide of the Gypsies: What We Now Know and What We Still Don’t
Know”, The Holocaust in History and Memory, vol. 3 (2000).