Władysław Kwiatkowski, director of the Center for Roma History and Culture, said Feb. 26 marked the start of one of the most tragic chapters in Roma history.
“We often look at it through numbers, but behind those wagons […] there were specific people: families who had their plans, dreams; who simply wanted to live. And it is about them that we want to talk today,” he said during a ceremony at the so-called Judenrampe, the rail unloading area between the former Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II-Birkenau camps.
Kwiatkowski said the mission of the commemoration was to honor the moment Roma and Sinti ancestors were transported to the camp, adding that the Roma Holocaust claimed nearly 500,000 victims.
“And often we talk about an unknown Holocaust, whose victims were Sinti and Roma […] We hope that through our actions, the Roma Holocaust will take root in social awareness,” he said.
Auschwitz Museum deputy director Andrzej Kacorzyk said the institution was active in education about Roma victims.
“It is important to emphasize the uniqueness of the extermination of Roma and a similar approach to how Jews suffered and died. Auschwitz is unique on the map of the Extermination. Here, different memories meet, but thanks to the memory of Roma you can understand much more,” he said.
Kacorzyk said around 11,000 children were sent to the Zigeunerlager, where SS doctor Josef Mengele carried out pseudomedical experiments.
Representatives of local institutions and diplomats lit candles at the Judenrampe siding and at the memorial in the former Zigeunerlager, organizers said.
The first transport of Roma and Sinti from Germany arrived at Judenrampe on Feb. 26, 1943, initiating the camp section at Birkenau. Over the next 17 months, about 23,000 Roma and Sinti were deported there, with nearly 21,000 registered as prisoners, including elderly people, women and children, the organizers said.
They said hunger, overcrowding and epidemics, including typhus and starvation-related diarrhea, drove a high death toll, with children particularly affected. On the night of Aug. 2-3, 1944, about 4,300 of the last Roma and Sinti were murdered in a gas chamber, and the section was liquidated.
Organizers said 21,000 prisoners of the Zigeunerlager were killed at Auschwitz, and that 2 August is observed as a day of remembrance for the genocide of Roma and Sinti.
More than 1.1 million people—mostly Jews, along with non-Jewish Poles, Roma and Sinti, Soviet prisoners of war and people of other nationalities—were murdered at Auschwitz during World War II.
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Source: PAP