On August 2, the victims of the Nazi genocide of the Roma people are commemorated annually at the international level. In Ukraine, this day is commemorated at the state level in accordance with Resolution No. 2085 of the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine of October 8, 2004 “On the observance of International Roma Holocaust Day.”
The Nazis killed the Roma deliberately and brutally. The extermination was carried out by special punitive detachments - Einsatzgruppen. Their commanders could personally make decisions about the execution of the population. The first mass murders of the Roma began in the fall of 1941. In the Mykolaiv region in September 1941, the personnel of the Einsatzgruppen liquidated over a hundred Roma, including women and children. In February 1942, in Artemivsk (now Bakhmut), the Sonderkommando shot twenty Roma families in a former gypsum mine. Hundreds of Roma were exterminated in Kyiv, Malyn, Vasylkiv, Obukhiv, Mariupol, Kirovohrad (now Kropyvnytskyi), Novgorod-Siverskyi, Kryvyi Rih, Mykolaiv, Kherson, various towns in the Rivne region, etc.
Residents, just like Jews, saved Roma from executions. But their rescue had its own peculiarity. First, residents warned Roma about the approaching roundups. Often, representatives of the local administration issued fictitious certificates of ethnic origin to Roma.
The Nazi regime used Roma in forced labor, deported them to concentration camps, and exterminated them en masse. On the night of August 2-3, 1944, about 3,000 representatives of the Roma population of Europe, including children and the elderly, were killed in gas chambers at the Nazi death camp Auschwitz-Birkenau. This date was marked in Nazi reports as the “liquidation of the Birkenau Gypsy camp.”
The scale of the terrible statistics of the Auschwitz camp is impressive: out of 23 thousand Roma deported from 14 European countries, about 20 thousand died here. During World War II, the Nazis and their supporters destroyed more than 90% of the Roma population of Austria, Germany, and Estonia. As a result of the punitive actions of the German occupation authorities, about 20 thousand Roma were killed in Ukraine. According to various estimates, up to 500 thousand people, or more than 25% of the pre-war Roma population of Europe, became victims of the Nazi genocide.
The Nazi policy of total extermination of Roma and Sinti is often referred to as a “silent” or “little-known” genocide. Not the least role in the emergence of such a formulation was played by the lack of a written tradition of remembering this tragedy in the Roma community. Researchers are literally accumulating information about this terrible page of the past, bit by bit, drawing information from the documentation of the perpetrators of this terrible crime, or from isolated memories of contemporaries of the destruction of Roma communities during the years of Nazi occupation. Despite objective difficulties, scholars agree that it was the Roma and Sinti who were the second group of people, after Jews, that, according to the misanthropic ideology of Nazism, was subject to total extermination. Jews, Roma and Sinti were condemned to death by the Nazis solely because of their origin.
The genocide of the Roma in Germany was only discussed in the early 1980s. of the last century. For comparison: the genocide of the Jews was recognized immediately after the fall of the Nazi regime. And only in 1996, leaders of Roma organizations from 10 European countries and the USA at the conference “Genocide – Memory – Hope” established August 2 as the International Day of Remembrance of the Victims of the Nazi Genocide of the Roma.
On January 29, 2018, one of the first permanent exhibitions in Central and Eastern Europe, “The Tragedy of the Roma People in Ukraine and Moldova,” was opened at the Museum “Jewish Memory and Holocaust in Ukraine.”
But, unfortunately, the tragic pages of the past are being repeated today in our country. Since the beginning of the full-scale war, Roma, on an equal footing with all citizens of Ukraine, of different ethnic origins, have been resisting the Russian aggressor, participating in the resistance movement, serving in the ranks of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, engaging in volunteer activities, providing humanitarian aid to citizens and military personnel, etc. Together, we are all bringing Ukraine's victory closer.
Daria Yesina