LIVE BROADCAST from the European Roma Holocaust Memorial Day commemoration at Auschwitz, where the Nazis murdered up to 4,300 Roma from 2-3 August 1944
Wednesday, 2 August, marks the 79th anniversary of the tragic night when the Nazis murdered those imprisoned in the "Gypsy Family Camp" at Auschwitz-Birkenau from 2 to 3 August 1944. According to recent studies, up to 4,300 Roma were murdered in the gas chambers of the concentration camp, despite their active resistance.
Romani people from all over Europe annually mark 2 August as European Roma Holocaust Memorial Day. This year, as is traditional, it will also be commemorated directly in Oświęcim, Poland at the site of the former Auschwitz Concentration Camp.
In Prague, Czech Republic, people will also gather on Jiřího z Poděbrad Square at 19:00 to commemorate the Romani victims of the Holocaust at an event entitled Leperiben: My nezapomínáme (“We Will Never Forget”). The commemoration involves a staging of the story of Czechoslovak Romani survivors of the Holocaust, the performance of Romani music, and reading the names of the victims aloud.
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Poland’s legislature established 2 August as the Genocide Remembrance Day of the Roma and Sinti in 2011. In 2015, the European Parliament also recognized 2 August as the European Memorial Day of the Holocaust of the Sinti and Roma.
However, there was another day that could have been chosen, as the Nazis attempted to annihilate the Romani people imprisoned in the “Gypsy Family Camp” even earlier in 1944 but were prevented from doing so when the prisoners rebelled. Until recently it was assumed the rebellion happened on 16 May 1944, which is also called Romani Resistance Day, but the most recent study mentioned above found that it actually happened in early April.
Moreover, the study published by the Auschwitz Memorial and Museum reports that Romani prisoners actively defended themselves in August 1944 as well. “Thanks to new research, today we know that the passive resistance at the Romani camp in Birkenau happened not on 16 May, but in early April 1944. Active resistance happened during the destruction of that sector in August, when more than 4,200 Romani people were murdered,” the study states.
During the 17 months during which the “Gypsy Family Camp” existed (from February 1943 to July 1944) there were as many as 23,000 children, men and women imprisoned there. Approximately 21,000 Romani and Sinti prisoners were murdered in the camp.
Other Romani people were murdered in the concentration camps of Bełżec, Chełmno, Majdanka, Sobibór and Treblinka. Others whose numbers are difficult to estimate were shot to death and buried in mass graves in wooded areas.
Nazi Germany’s extermination policy led to the deaths of a conservative estimate of 500,000 Roma and Sinti from all over Europe. Some estimates state as many as 800,000 Roma and Sinti victims, which would equal anywhere between 25 to 50 % of the interwar population of Romani and Sinti people.
