At International Holocaust Remembrance Day, Roma remain ‘underreported’ victims
20/01/2015
- Misunderstood and still persecuted, the Roma people (also known as
Romani or Gypsies) remain what some experts consider a relatively
underreported ethnicity ahead of this year’s International Holocaust
Remembrance Day on Jan. 27, which will mark the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp.
Drawing
support from many non-Nazi Germans who harbored social prejudice
towards Roma, the Nazis judged Roma to be “racially inferior.” The
fate of Roma in some ways paralleled that of the Jews. Under the Nazi
regime, German authorities subjected Roma to arbitrary internment,
forced labor, and mass murder. German authorities murdered tens of
thousands of Roma in the German-occupied territories of the Soviet Union
and Serbia, and killed thousands more in the concentration camps at
Aushwitz-Birkenau, Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka.
“The
Roma are a small minority, and due to long-term persecution in the
various societies Roma have lived, they have, as a group, tended to be
reluctant to advertise their ethnic background,” Peter Black, a senior historian at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM), told JNS.org. “The
Roma have, for the past two or three centuries, been the victims of
negative and violence-inciting stereotypes about them and their
behavior.”
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