Europe Remembers Victims Of Sinti, Roma Genocide

The commemoration of the 78th anniversary of the liquidation of the so-called Gypsy camp at Auschwitz was held on Tuesday at the memorial site in southern Poland.

To commemorate all 220,000-500,000 Sinti and Roma people murdered in Nazi-occupied Europe, including about 23,000 in Auschwitz, the European Parliament in 2015 proclaimed Aug. 2 European Sinti and Roma Holocaust Remembrance Day.

The date commemorates Aug. 2, 1944, when the last 4,300 Sinti and Roma to be murdered by the SS at Auschwitz-Birkenau were sent to death in gas chambers.

"We mourn and hug each other," German Federal Council President Bodo Ramelow said.

"We are here today to look the horror in the face and thereby make it visible. We are here to honor and mourn the victims together. And we are here to keep the memory alive with the survivors and family members who were born later," Ramelow added.

Among the participants were survivor Christian Pfeil and EU Commissioner for Equality Helena Dalli.

"Today, 78 years have passed since the liquidation of our last sisters and brothers imprisoned in the so-called Zigeunerlager in Auschwitz-Birkenau. For over three decades, we have been honoring the memory of the last 4,300 Roma prisoners and inmates murdered in the gas chambers of Auschwitz," said Roman Kwiatkowski, president of the Roma Association in Poland.

"The Roma have survived, but unfortunately ideologies, which in the name of the superiority of one nation over others, do not shy away from terror and crime, have not been forgotten," he said.

Ceremony

The participants of the anniversary gathered in front of the entrance to the former camp and walked together to the Monument to the Holocaust of the Roma and Sinti, where the ceremony began at 11: 30 a.m.

Among the participants of the ceremony were also representatives of Polish authorities of various levels, clergy, and diplomats.

The Germans started the extermination of the Roma as early as 1941. At the beginning of November, they deported about 5,000 Jews from what is now Austria to the ghetto in Lodz. In January 1942, they were all murdered in the extermination camp in Chełmno.

In December 1942, the head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler, ordered the Sinti and Roma from the Reich and the occupied territories to be imprisoned in concentration camps. Three months later, a family camp was set up for them in Auschwitz II-Birkenau.

Between Feb. 26, 1943, and July 21, 1944, nearly 21,000 were deported to the Zigeunerlager. This figure does not include 1,700 Roma from Bialystok, who were sent straight to gas chambers. -