Romani Resistance Day

Today is Romani  Resistance Day. On this day May 16, 1944, several thousand Roma and Sinti barricaded themselves in their baricades in Auschwitz-Birkenau and resisted their planned extermination.They had received information that the National Socialists planned to dismantle the so-called “Gypsy camp”(zigeunlager) and  were planning on eliminating them all, to make space for the next batch of prisoners, much more fit for labour than those who spent months in the harsh conditions of the camp. They knew exactly what was going to happen to them, seeing it so many times before, having their camp next to the crematory, and rather than silently let themselves be lead  to the gas chambers, fought back.

In the late 1930s, the first deportations of Roma to concentration camps  had begun. While the yellow star worn by the Jewish victims of the Holocaust is best known, the Roma had their own symbols, brown or black triangles, symbolising their ethnicity and their inherent ‘anti-social’ status.
By May 1944, the Nazis had  started to plan the “Final Solution” for the “Gypsy Family Camp” in Auschwitz. The initial date for the liquidation of the “Gypsy camp” was planned for the 16^th of May. The prisoners of the camp were ordered to stay in the barracks and surrounded by 60 SS men. When the SS men tried to force the prisoners out of the barracks they faced a rebellion of Roma men, women and children, armed with nothing more but sticks, tools and stones, and eventually the SS had to withdraw. The resistance of Roma prisoners gave them only a few additional months of life. The Roma revolt against the Nazis is the only recorded uprising in Auschwitz

The Roma Resistance Day is intended to commemorate this uprising, because the Sinti and Roma community's history of  anti-fascist resistance, to Nazi persecution are hardly known and  largely  missing, not only from history books, but also from the Roma movement’s own account of key events. In contrast, Jewish resistance to Nazi rule has become part of the broader discourse though research, literature, and popular culture. 

At least in November 2006, at the council and commemoration held in the former concentration camp in Neuengamme that  was established in  1938, in the Bergedorf district of Hamburg,in Northwest Germany. it was decided for the day to be commemorated as “Roma Resistance Day” a move that hopefully will make this incredible story of bravery and defiance in the face of hopelessness more widely known, adding not only to the history of the indignities the Romani suffered during World War II, but to the grander history of the Holocaust and of tyranny. 

Despite the great bravery of the prisoners, the story of the resistance on May 16, 1944 came to a tragic end: After the uprising, in order to weaken and reduce the size of the group and to to insure that such a flagrant defiance of the camp order cannot happen again: around one thousand young, able-to-work Roma were transferred to Buchenwald, another thousand was transferred in July to other camps, while women were sent to Rawensbrück, leaving but half of the original 6,000 people in the Zigeunerlager, mostly old, weak,  sick and children. Once again they attempted to resist, but this time they didn’t even have a fighting chance.

On orders from SS leader Heinrich Himmler, a ban on leaving the barracks was imposed on the evening of August 2 in the “Gypsy Camp”. Despite resistance by the Roma, 2,897 men, women, and children were loaded on trucks, taken to gas chamber V, and exterminated. Their bodies were burned in pits next to the crematorium. After the liberation of Auschwitz concentration camp in 1945 only 4 Roma remained alive. 

In total, around 500,000 Roma and Sinti were killed during the Holocaust No official figures exactly exist, but it is estimated that between 220,000 and 500,000 Romani and Sinti,from Central Europe were killed during the war, the Nazis and their allies killed about 25 percent of Europe's entire Roma (a.k.a. Gypsy) population, accounting for half their total population at  the time. 

This genocide, known in the Romani language, as Porajimas which can translate as “destruction.” It's remembered as the worst event in their peoples' history. Other Romani people in the Balkans prefer to use the term 'samudaripen,' translating as “mass killing,” but there's still no general consensus in the community regarding how to call this tragedy, sometimes even borrowing the word 'holokausto.'

Auschwitz remains a powerful symbolic point of reference for European Roma , as it does, of course for global memory of the Holocaust. But even before this horrific moment in history the Roma were vilified, and maligned across Europe, an ethnic group originating in the northern Indian subcontinent before making their way to Europe most likely in the 14th century, the Roma had always been a migratory people who often faced local persecution wherever they ended up. And in the subsequent years since the Holocaust, their pain and suffering has been forgotten and diluted, wiped from the pages of history books while the same myths that were used to put them in camps in the first place persist into the 21st century. Widely accepted “facts” about Roma criminality and anti-social behaviour are today central to any conversation about the Roma community, despite a broad lack of understanding for the realities involved. The genocide of the Roma and the Sinti by the Nazis remains for many the "Forgotten Holocaust "
Surely  it is  time we should reject the notion that only the group with the highest number of victims deserves acknowledgement for their suffering.What matters most, in any case, is not the anomalies or the differences in the numbers, but the fact that both Jews and Gypsies were deemed “parasitic alien races” and targeted for racial extermination.It is certainly time for full recognition of the Roma and Sinti victims of the Nazis. 
We should not forget either,  that those who passed through the gates of Auschwitz were only a fraction of the hundreds of thousands of Romani victims of the genocidal policies of the Nazis and their allies. In occupied Poland, Serbia and the Soviet Union, they were hunted down by the same Wehrmacht units and death squads that massacred Jews. In Romania, some 25,000 were deported to “colonies” east of the Dniester river (Transnistria); nearly half of them did not survive the brutal conditions there.

After World War II, German society even denied for decades they had been persecuted and it took until 1979 for the German government to commence reparations and until 2011 for the killings to receive an official day of remembrance.. 

In 2015, the European Parliament declared August 2nd European Holocaust Remembrance Day for the murdered Roma and Sinti.  Let  us  today  honour  and  commemorates this courageous revolt as well as the suffering of Romani, Sinti, and Travelling peoples during the Holocaust and  stand in solidarity with the Roma community who continue to face prejudice and discrimination worldwide and  the  need to  fight  ahainst  hatred  and  persecution.

Even today, anti-Romani structural and legal racism is not just a relic of the past. Romani people all over Europe are fighting to gain or maintain their civil rights in the wake of state-sanctioned violence and ethno-nationalist regimes that use Romani people as scapegoats for economic decline and immigration issues.

We should  never  forget. We owe this to each and every victim, so that their memory will live on and so future generations can learn what hatred, stereotypes, ostracizing and isolation can do if left unchecked and unchallenged.