Black and white, grainy photos of families, children, young people laughing, musicians holding their violins; we’ve seen these 1930s photos before. They fill us with dread as we know, with the benefit of hindsight, what happened to most of these happy people when Hitler and his hateful regime came to power.
We know so well that people were rounded up for transportation, selection, starvation and sent to the gas chambers. But the photos I saw at Auschwitz last week were not of Jewish families, rather, Roma and Sinti people (often referred to as Gypsies) facing the same fate, even the same crematoria. And, what struck me, as I attended the start of the commemorations of the 75th anniversary of the liquidation of the ‘Gypsy Family Camp’ at Auschwitz, were the similarities.
Twenty-three thousand men women and children, identified as Roma and Sinti were murdered at Auschwitz alone. The Nazis considered them ‘vermin’ and attempted to remove them from the face of the earth. By the end of their monstrous regime, more than 200,000 Roma and Sinti people had been murdered – although with many undocumented and hidden killings the number may be far higher.
As a Jewish onlooker, the deliberate policy of extermination, the torture, tattoos, round ups, ghettos, selection and the systematic approach felt so similar to the stories often told in my community.
‘The gypsy question,’ stated Dr Adolf Wurth from the Racial Hygiene Research Unit in 1937 ‘is…. a racial question for us today. In the same way as the National Socialist state has solved the Jewish question, it will also have to solve the gypsy question once and for all.’
As I spoke to some of the British young Roma people on the visit with me, I was aware both of how little we hear about this genocide and how today in the UK Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities are discriminated and stereotyped.
Anti-Roma hatred and antisemitism are not the only hatreds in Britain today but the parallels in their recent pasts are frightening. Some differences though struck me as particularly important: firstly there are no known Roma survivors from the camps living in the UK today. We therefore have far less opportunity to hear their experiences, to document and to learn from them than we do from the Holocaust. It also means that there is no real Second Generation who grew up knowing the stories first hand. And that young Roma and Sinti people are probably less aware of this element of their history than Jewish young people.
Secondly, although levels of Holocaust knowledge are shockingly low, at least most people in the UK know a little of this appalling episode, and know that levels of antisemitism are rising today. However, I wonder how little people know about prejudice towards Roma and Sinti people today, let alone where it led in the 1940s.
Gypsy, Roma and Traveller people are some of the most demonised and marginalised people in Europe today. In the UK many grow up facing prejudice and exclusion. Not only are we, as Jews, able to speak out for the Roma but it is the right thing to do. Only by defending all oppressed groups, are we going to address prejudice and to challenge the growing levels of hatred of ‘outsiders’.
It’s time for collective action. In 2020 the theme for Holocaust Memorial Day is Stand Together and standing with the Roma and Sinti community is a great place to start.
Laura Marks OBE is Chair of the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust.
