Prague 8 municipality marking Roma Holocaust Memorial Day by flying Romani flag

The Prague 8 municipal department is marking Roma Holocaust Memorial Day by flying the Romani flag to remember the tragic night of 2 August 1944 and the early morning hours of 3 August 1944, when the Nazis murdered more than 4 000 Romani and Sinti prisoners of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. Local authorities issued a press release about the occasion yesterday. 

“On 2 August 1944 the final two transports of Romani people left Auschwitz-Birkenau. More than 900 men were sent to Buchenwald and 490 women to the concentration camp of Ravensbrück. Children, the elderly, and invalids, in all about 3 000 Romani people whom the Nazis did not believe it would be worthwhile to send elsewhere, were murdered in the gas chambers. The history of what had been called the Gypsy Camp, where Romani people from the Protectorate [of Bohemia and Moravia] were also imprisoned, came to and end,” local authorities cited the author Jiří Padevět in their press release. 

According to the most recent research, as many as 4 200 Romani people are likely to have been murdered at that time. Annually, 2 August is commemorated by Romani people all over Europe as Roma Holocaust Memorial Day.

During the 17 months that the “Gypsy Family Camp” existed (from February 1943 to July 1944), as many as 23 000 children, men and women were imprisoned there. Approximately 21 000 Romani and Sinti prisoners, both male and female, were murdered in the camp itself.

Other Romani prisoners were murdered in concentration camps in Bełżec, Chełmno, Majdanek, Sobibór and Treblinka. Other Romani prisoners were shot dead and buried in mass graves in the forest – their numbers are difficult to estimate.  

The extermination policy of Nazi Germany is estimated to have caused the deaths of as many as half a million Romani and Sinti people from all over Europe. Some estimates say the number was as high as 800 000 victims, which would have been anywhere between one-fourth to one-half of the interwar population of Roma.