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Day of Remembrance for the Extermination of the Roma
Ceremonies marking the Day of Remembrance for the Exterminaton of the Roma were held on the sixty-sixth anniversary of the liquidation of the Familienzigeunerlager, the so-called family camp for Sinti and Roma in the Auschwitz II-Birkenau camp. The several hundred people in attendance included former prisoners of Auschwitz and other Nazi camps and ghettos, Roma from Poland and abroad, government officials including Minister Elżbieta Radziszewska as the representative of Prime Minister Donald Tusk, representatives of the European Commission, members of the diplomatic corps, the director of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum and members of the staff, and local officials.
“The Nazis brought me here to Auschwitz on March 13, 1943. It was here that they tattooed prisoner number Z-2201 on me, and it was here that I lost my whole family. Of my entire family, I was the only one to emerge alive from this hell,” said Rudolf Steinbach, a former prisoner of Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, in his address to those in attendance. “I never even go to the cemetery,” he continued, “because the graves of my loved ones are not there. That is why I come here to Auschwitz, because just here, in this enormous cemetery, lie the remains of my parents and siblings. Together, we must take care to ensure that what happened here is never forgotten.”
The Director of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, Dr. Piotr M.A. Cywiński, appealed for the memory of the victims to be honored in an individual way. “A great challenge stands before us all. We should not permit this period, this extermination, to continue to be so little known. Remembrance must find a point of reference for our own responsibility today, which is not exclusively an institutional responsibility,” he said.
Romani Rose, the chairman of the Council of German Sinti and Roma, spoke about the fact that democracy is a systematic and living process of learning, and that each member of the Sinti and Roma minority in a given country must be given the opportunity for active participation in the life of society and have the chance to defend his or her rights in a conscious way.
In her remarks, Minister Elżbieta Radziszewska warned that no representatives of any ethnic group in any country or territory should ever again do what was once done in Auschwitz, Birkenau, Majdanek, Bełżec, the Gypsy ghettos and all the other places where people were divided into better and worse.
A day earlier, at the place where there were once crematory pyres near the ruins of crematorium and gas chamber V, where the Germans killed the last Roma prisoners in the camp on August 2, 1944, an unveiling ceremony was held for a granite plaque bearing a message in the Roma language to commemorate the people murdered there. “To the memory of the men, women, and children who were victims of Nazi genocide. Their ashes are here. May they rest in peace,” it reads. Similar granite plaques with inscriptions in Polish, English, Hebrew, and Yiddish are located at symbolic places on the grounds of the former Birkenau camp, near the crematoria and where the corpses of the murdered victims were burned.
In his remarks, Roman Kwiatkowski, President of the Association of Roma in Poland, noted that “for us Roma, this is a symbolic place. It was precisely here that the last surviving Roma prisoners in the so-called Familienzigeunerlager were put to death in the gas chamber. That is why I wish to express my satisfaction that, just here at this site of the tragedy of our people, which is sometimes referred to as the Roma Holocaust, there is permanent remembrance in the form of a plaque.”
Piotr Kadlčik, chairman of the Union of Jewish religious communities in Poland, was also present. He stressed the importance of preserving the Memory of the Victims. “We can talk about intolerance and hatred,” he said, “but today I would like to speak about something different, and perhaps not so much to speak about it as to address an appeal to people like myself, to people born after the Holocaust, to people who know the Holocaust from stories, books, and personal accounts. The memory of those events cannot be allowed to float away on the air, and we represent the last chance to prevent that from happening.”
The Day of Remembrance for the Extermination of the Roma falls on August 2—the anniversary of the liquidation at Auschwitz II-Birkenau Concentration Camp of the so-called Gypsy family camp (Zigeunerfamilienlager). On the night of August 2/3, 1944, the Nazis killed 2,897 Roma children, women, and men in the Birkenau gas chambers. Overall, more than 20,000 Roma perished in Auschwitz out of the total of some 23,000 deported there.
Today, in block 13 on the grounds of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, an exhibition is open to the public in remembrance of the destruction of the Roma. It shows the particular dimension of the Nazi genocide committed against the Roma in occupied Europe. In sector BIIe at the Birkenau site, there is a monument commemorating the Roma victims. Floral tributes were placed there, and tribute paid to the victims.
