The ‘forgotten genocide’ of the Roma people at the hands of the Nazi regime

Before World War II, Helena Malikova grew up in Uherske Hradiste, a village in Czechoslovakia, where her family lived with other Roma in a settlement of old freight cars behind a sugar factory, near the Morava River.

About 150 families lived in the reconditioned carriages. Malikova and her family had the only brick house.

She was a teenager when the German army invaded in 1939 and forced her and her family into a camp in Hodonin, from where most of them were later sent to Auschwitz, the concentration camp.

Hundreds of thousands of Roma, formerly known disparagingly as Gypsies, were murdered by the Nazis. Malikova was one of the few who survived to tell her story. She was recorded in May 1991 and appears in “Testimonies of Roma and Gypsies,” a new database dedicated to the Romani genocide of World War II.

The database, made public to coincide with the commemoration of the murder of thousands of Roma in Auschwitz on August 2, 1944, seeks to raise public awareness of the suffering of the Roma, also known as Roma and Gypsies, who represent the minority largest ethnic group in Europe. It is operated by the Prague Romani Histories Forum of the Institute of Contemporary History, which is part of the Czech Academy of Sciences.

The Nazis labeled the Roma as “racially inferior.” They were captured, often along with Jews, but their Holocaust has been called “a silenced, forgotten or unnoticed history,” said Angela Kocze, chair of the Romani Studies program at the Central European University in Budapest.

The US Holocaust Memorial Museum estimates that between 250,000 and 500,000 Roma and Gypsies died at the hands of the Nazi regime. Experts said that in the Czech lands that the Nazis occupied and renamed the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, 90 percent of the Roma and Gypsies were killed, reducing their population from about 6,000 to 600.

The museum estimates that between one million and one and a half million Roma lived in pre-war Europe before Nazi persecution, deportations and murders began in 1939. Katerina Capkova, researcher at the Institute of Contemporary History in Prague , started the testimonial database eight years ago, as a project of the Prague Romani History Forum.

Roma were commonly portrayed as uniformly nomadic, poor and unwilling to work, in part due to the effect of Nazi propaganda that dehumanized them, characterizing them as criminals or “asocial,” Capkova said. As a result, people did not consider his arrest, imprisonment and execution as a process of genocide.

German authorities and their collaborators destroyed Romani communities and persecuted them in the same way they attacked Jews, and both often ended up in the same ghettos and concentration camps.

Until the 1980s, the large-scale massacre of Roma during World War II was often referred to as “the forgotten genocide,” said Ari Joskowicz, author of the book “Rain of Ashes: Roma, Jews and the Holocaust.”

The Roma and Gypsy testimonies database currently includes 115 stories told by survivors. Capkova said the goal was to double that figure by next year.

By: Nina Siegal