The Nazi policy of extermination of Roma and Sinti is often referred to as “silent” or “insufficiently explored” genocide. Not the least role in the emergence of such a formulation was played by the lack in the Roma environment of a written tradition of remembering the tragedy of World War II. Researchers are literally accumulating information about this terrible page of the past, 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 Nazi occupation.
The degree of awareness of Ukrainian society about the history of the Roma genocide can be judged even from the wording of certain legislative acts. For example, on October 8, 2004, our country at the state level honors the memory of the victims of the Roma people, which was enshrined in the Resolution of the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine “On the celebration of the International Day of Remembrance of the Roma Genocide [1]". Unfortunately, parliamentarians ignored the existence of a well-established and common understanding of the Holocaust (as it were in capital letters) as a definition of the Nazi genocide of Jews during World War II.
Despite the terminological incident, the academic community agrees that the Roma and Sinti were the second, after the Jews, group of people that, according to the misanthropic ideology of Nazism, was subject to total destruction. In other words, Jews, Roma, and Sinti were doomed by the Nazis to death only because of their origins.
Roma were used in forced labor, deported to concentration camps, and massacred. On the night of August 2-3, 1944, about 3,000 Roma, including children and the elderly, were killed in gas chambers in the Nazi Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp. It is this day, or rather the night that was marked in Nazi reports as the “liquidation of the Birkenau Gypsy Camp” since 1996, as the International Day of Remembrance of the Roma Genocide.
The scale of Auschwitz-Birkenau's horrific statistics is staggering: of the 23,000 Roma deported from 14 European countries, more than 20,000 died in the camp. During World War II, the Nazis and their supporters killed more than 90% of the Roma population in Austria, Germany and Estonia. As a result of punitive actions of the German occupation authorities, about 20,000 Roma were killed in Ukraine. According to various estimates, up to 500,000 people, or more than 25% of Europe's pre-war Roma population, fell victim to the Roma genocide during World War II.
On January 29, 2018, Museum “Jewish Memory and Holocaust in Ukraine” held the opening of the exhibition “The Tragedy of the Roma People in Ukraine and Moldova”. This is the first in Ukraine and one of the first in Central and Eastern Europe permanent museum exhibition dedicated to the genocide of Roma during World War II.
We offer you to watch the Maryna Strilchuk, Museum “Jewish Memory and Holocaust in Ukraine” researcher online lesson on “Forgotten Genocide: the tragedy of the Roma during the World War II”.
Dilfuza Hlushchenko, Yehor Vradii