Director of Museum of Romani Culture tells personal story about the sad reality of how the Czech schools are ignorant of the Roma victims of the Holocaust

“When the Soviet Army liberated the Auschwitz complex 80 years ago, there were no longer any Romani people there,” Horváthová opened her speech, recalling the massacre of August 1943, when the Nazis murdered all 4,300 remaining prisoners of what was called the “Gypsy Family Camp” at Auschwitz II-Birkenau. “More than 20,000 European Roma and Sinti total lost their lives in the Auschwitz camp complex, including those from [Czechoslovakia]. The stories of those people are still not known much,” she said, adding that 22,000 Roma and Sinti were imprisoned in Auschwitz.

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Horváthová focused on specific stories from her own family. She said that as many as one-quarter of the Holomek family was imprisoned in the concentration camp in Hodonín u Kunštátu and 30 of her relatives perished in Auschwitz.

She mentioned, for instance, her grandfather Tomáš Holomek, the first Romani student at Charles University’s Faculty of Law, who avoided being transported to the camps because he was warned to escape in time. Her other family members did not have such luck.

“Thirty of our relatives did not survive the Holocaust. Most perished in the Auschwitz concentration camp in particular,” she said.

Horváthová also recalled the story of Tomáš Holomek’s father, Pavel. He initially managed to avoid being transported to the camps by bribing officials with gold, which is confirmed by a brief news item preserved in the family archive: “The gypsy Pavel Holomek was released by the criminal [police] directorate in Brno on 19 March 1943 during the registration of gypsies.”

However, Pavel Holomek suspected his freedom was just temporary. “He immediately started hiding in the forest near the Moravian village of Nesovice. In the bitter March winter, he slept in the woods in a feeding trough for animals covered with hay. Dependent as he was on the help of locals, somebody eventually turned him in and he was taken to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp with the August transport of prisoners from the concentration camp in Hodonín u Kunštátu,” Horváthová said, adding that Pavel Holomek perished in the gas chambers when the “Gypsy Family Camp” was liquidated.

Horváthová also warned that there is not enough awareness of the history of the Roma in the Czech schools. She recalled an episode that happened to her own daughter, who returned from a field trip to Auschwitz in tears.

“When her professor was listing the victims of that place, she mentioned the Roma, and he reprimanded her for supposedly fabricating what is an actual fact of history. It is still a sad reality, to this day, that the children in our schools learn nothing about the history of the Roma, even though the Roma have long been an integral part of Czech history and of world history,” the director of the Museum of Romani Culture emphasized.

Other speeches warn not to forget the Holocaust

Czech President Petr Pavel also spoke at the memorial gathering and warned that humanity is unable to learn from history. “Humanity unfortunately has a rather bad reputation when it comes to our ability to learn from history. That is why we commemorate events which should not be forgotten. We do not just commemorate events, though, because during the Second World War the Holocaust did not happen from one day to the next,” Pavel said.

The Czech president pointed out that even though the events leading to the Holocaust have been analyzed very well, people have a tendency to forget such features and phenomena. He also said many people are following the development of the security situation in today’s world or the development of political tendencies with alarm.

The growth of disinformation disseminated primarily through social media, which do not have enough filters in place to prevent the spread of harmful material, leads to an intensification of hate and even to exhortations of violence. An atmosphere of intensifying animosity is spreading in society that can, under certain conditions, erupt into conflict or the repetition of history, the Czech head of state said.

Pavel said that reminding the younger generation of these events could be done more through film, theater and other art forms. “They make it possible for the generations who did not experience these horrors to understand how horrible a situation it is when a certain group of people or an entire ethnicity is dehumanized and ostracized from human society,” he added.

The President of the Czech Senate, Miloš Vystrčil (Civic Democratic Party – ODS) said that while on the one hand it is a success that most of Europe has not experienced war in 80 years, Europe is still being ever more strongly affected by today’s conflicts. “It is existentially important to us that we respond correctly,” he said.

Vystrčil said that to him, the Holocaust means not just the horrible memory of the genocide of millions of Jews, Roma, Sinti and other mass murders, but that it is also an unmistakeable warning sign showing the direction in which humanity must never head and the direction humanity should take so as not to repeat the same old mistakes. Czech Culture Minister Martin Baxa (ODS) also addressed the gathering, saying: “Let’s not be satisfied just with memorials, commemoration ceremonies, great words and feeling moved. Let’s show our honor and our respect to all who were murdered through our efforts to genuinely know about and understand the destructive mechanisms of the 20th century. We support the discovery and the recognition of the specific fates of specific people.”

International Holocaust Remembrance Day marks 27 January 1945, when the Nazi German concentration and extermination camp at Auschwitz in occupied Poland was liberated. From 1940 to 1945, 1.1 million people were murdered in Auschwitz, most of them Jews.