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Roma and Sinti Genocide Remembrance Day

Several hundred people attended observances marking Roma and Sinti Genocide Remembrance Day on the grounds of the former German Nazi Concentration and Extermination Camp Auschwitz II-Birkenau. The ceremony was held to mark the sixty-seventh anniversary of the liquidation of the so-called “Gypsy Family Camp” (Zigeunerfamilienlager). The Nazis murdered almost three thousand men women and children in the Birkenau gas chambers on the night of August 2/3, 1944.

The participants in the commemoration included former prisoners of Nazi camps and ghettos, representatives of nineteen Roma organizations, government officials including Minister Elżbieta Radziszewska representing Polish Council of Ministers President Donald Tusk and Deputy Minister of Culture Piotr Żuchowski, directors and staff of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, and local government officials.

Hermann Höllenreiner of Germany was nine years old in March 1943 when the German Nazis deported him to Auschwitz, where he encountered the abuse and hunger that were ever-present in the death camp and became a victim of Josef Mengele’s medical experiments. “The fact that we survived that cruelty and can stand here today is something we owe to the soldiers of the Allied forces. Many young people from Russia, America, England, France, and other countries lost their lives in combat during the liberation of the concentration camps. It is just those soldiers that I want to thank and pay tribute to from this place,” he wrote in a letter to the participants in the observances. He also appealed for the erection in Berlin of a monument commemorating the extermination of the Roma. “I am 79 years old and I want to be there in person for the unveiling of this monument. As a person who survived the Holocaust, I have a right to this. We have been asking for this for eighteen years.”

In the view of Romani Rose, chairman of the Central Council of German Sinti and Roma, the time has come for “governments and state organs to treat the Sinti and Roma as equal partners in the political dialogue and to cooperate with us in working out a concrete, lasting solution.” He stressed that they are endangered in Europe by a “racist policy of isolation that extends to a growing number of countries.”

Roman Kwiatkowski, the chairman of the Association of Roma in Poland, which organized the ceremony, drew attention to the progressive marginalization of Roma and Sinti in many countries, even though he noted with satisfaction at the same time the acceptance by the European Union of a strategy of action in support of Roma circles.

Referring to the proclamation by the Sejm of the Polish Republic a few days earlier of August 2 as Roma and Sinti Genocide Remembrance Day, the prime minister’s plenipotentiary for equal treatment, Ewa Radziszewska, said that, “wanting to build a better future we must always remember this day. Bowing our heads over all those who gave their lives here, let us remember that we should do everything to make sure that the words ‘never again’ are both living words and living action.”

The President of the Polish Republic, Bronisław Komorowski, extended his official patronage over the ceremony.