Decades after Holocaust, Romani community struggles for recognition of its genocide

Every year on August 2, Roma people around the world commemorate the genocide of the Roma with Samudaripen memorial day, marking the moment in 1944 when the Nazis murdered around 3,000 Roma in the gas chambers at the Auschwitz death camp.

For decades, the many Roma killed and persecuted during World War II were largely uncommemorated by many governments across Europe. In recent years, though, the genocide has received the recognition of many European states as non-Roma politicians mark Samudaripen alongside members of the Roma community.

Still, the Nazi persecution of the Roma people is often overshadowed by the suffering of the Jews in the Holocaust, which is memorialized throughout the continent, and the world, with museums, memorial sites and two days of remembrance — one marked on the Gregorian calendar and one on the Hebrew lunar calendar.

“International Holocaust Remembrance Day today is marked by 95 countries out of the 193 member states of the United Nations,” says Roma activist and politician Dragoljub Ackovic, referring to the day associated with the Nazi genocide of the Jews.

“We, the Roma people, are still fighting for widespread dignified memory of [the Samudaripen]. So far, it is marked by only about 30 countries,” he said.

Ackovic, 71, is a former member of Serbia’s National Assembly and the author of “The Samudaripen of Roma in the Independent State of Croatia,” published in English in January.

A recent survey of the 57 states in the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) showed that by no means do all of them commemorate the genocide of the Roma, says Prof. Karola Fings, a German historian who heads the “Encyclopedia of the Nazi Genocide of the Sinti and Roma in Europe” at Heidelberg University. The encyclopedia, which is available online, was launched in March of this year.

“In most cases, the victims among the Roma are also commemorated on International Holocaust Remembrance Day on January 27,” says Fings.

However, unlike with the Holocaust, most non-Roma would be hard-pressed to recall even basic facts regarding the genocide of the Roma. Simple things such as what to call the genocide and the number of Roma killed are still subject to debate, although a mainstream consensus has been reached.

Terminology: Samudaripen, not Holocaust

The first step for Roma in commemorating the genocide that decimated their people has been coming up with a proper name for it — what today is known as the Samudaripen.

For many years, in places such as the former Yugoslavia and Eastern Europe, Roma, along with Jews, were lumped together in WWII commemorations with the vague term “victims of fascist terror.” Meanwhile, in Western Europe, recognition of the genocide of the Roma was not always considered to be caused by the same racial animus as the antisemitism that fueled the Holocaust. Instead, the persecution and murder of the Roma during WWII were said to be due to their “asocial behavior.” Only in 1982 did Germany officially recognize the genocide of the Roma, with other countries following suit.

Before then, in the 1970s, Roma people in Yugoslavia used the Romani term Samudaripen, meaning “mass murder,” to describe the murder of Roma in the death camps of Auschwitz and Jasenovac. Another Romani term popularized in the 1990s by Roma activist and academic Ian Hancock was Porajmos, meaning “devouring.” However, due to the word’s sexual connotations most Roma activists and organizations, including the International Romani Union, have opted for Samudaripen as the more respectful term.

What is not typically used to describe the genocide of Roma is the term Holocaust, which is generally treated as specifically referring to the Jewish Shoah.

“You use the wrong terminology when you say Holocaust. For the Roma people… it’s much more precise to say Samudaripen,” says Danijel Vojak, a historian affiliated with Croatia’s Ivo Pilar Institute of Social Sciences. “For [the word] Holocaust, for me as a scholar, is something that is strongly about the Jewish tragedy before and during WWII.”

Addressing the lack of documentation

Beyond terminology, basic facts such as the number of Roma killed during the Samudaripen are still unclear. Unlike the widely agreed upon number of 6 million Jews murdered in the Holocaust, for Roma there is a wide range of numbers. The US Holocaust Memorial Museum puts the figure of Roma dead between a quarter of a million and a half a million people. However, Roma activists and communal figures suggest the numbers were much higher.

“As a result of this genocide, approximately 2 million Roma were killed, which was about two-thirds of the total Roma population in Europe at the time,” says Normunds Rudevics, president of the International Romani Union, a non-profit that advocates for the rights of Romani people.

Rudevics is not alone in reaching this figure.

“According to archives which have been at my disposal, the estimated total number of Roma goes from 1 million to about 2 million who were killed during [the Samudaripen] in WWII,” says Ackovic.

Part of the problem is a lack of surviving documentation. For starters, according to the International Romani Union’s Rudevics, a majority of Roma people in Europe around the outbreak of WWII lacked identification documents. This made tracking what happened to them incredibly difficult.

“In fact, only just over 100,000 [Roma] victims have been identified by name to date,” says Fings. “This discrepancy is not only due to a lack of research but also to a lack of written records. On the one hand, sources were destroyed shortly before the end of the war, and on the other, many victims were not registered before they were murdered.”

Many of the victims were shot on the spot and buried without a name.

“We cannot give you exact numbers because we don’t have the data,” says Vojak, echoing Fings’s remarks. “Also, a lot of the documents from the Nazis and their allies like [the Croatian] Ustasha and [the regime of Romanian dictator Ion] Antonescu was deliberately destroyed.”

A related issue is the desire of many Roma to avoid being counted in official government censuses and similar surveys both before and after the war.

“For example, in Croatia in the last public census in 2021, only 17,000 people… declared themselves as Roma, but the estimation is that the true number is three times that,” says Vojak. “This was similar to what happened before and during WWII.”

The Hrastina Massacre: A case of mistaken identity

There were also cases of mistaken identity — where Roma were buried and commemorated as Jews or other persecuted groups — such as with the Hrastina Massacre.

Near the village of Hrastina, located in what was then the Independent State of Croatia, a group of German Sinti circus artists were massacred by Croatian fascist Ustasha soldiers days before the end of the war.

The local population was aware of the massacre, and immediately after the war’s conclusion, they exhumed the bodies and buried them on the grounds of a local church. In 1977, in what was then Yugoslavia, it was decided by a number of Holocaust survivors, along with the local population, anti-fascist organizations and the local Jewish community, to build a monument to those killed in the massacre.

Given the deceased’s German-sounding names, the dead were believed to be Jews who had been killed by the SS and were commemorated as such. Only several years ago, through the work of a local historian, was the truth discovered and the memorial was reclaimed as one dedicated to the Sinti victims of the Ustasha.

The belated fight for reparations

The lack of proper documentation of much of the Samudaripen became an issue when the survivors of the death and labor camps sought compensation. If and when victims received compensation depended very much on whether they lived in Western, Eastern or Southern Europe, or in Germany itself.

According to Fings, Germany reached agreements with some countries regarding reparations — but how the money was distributed depended on the recipient states themselves, which determined whether they would give the money to individuals or not.

Additionally, survivors’ fortunes depended on how specific countries viewed the genocide of the Roma and whether they saw it as racial persecution or not.

“In general, one can say that when it comes to Sinti and Roma, only since the 1980s has there been a small amount of funding for survivors,” says Fings.

Unlike the Jewish community, the Roma community lacks a centralized body such as the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany that represents the claims of all Roma against Germany and former allied fascist states.

Building a culture of remembrance

Another, perhaps more important, challenge beyond reparations is the struggle by Roma activists to build a culture of remembrance around the Samuradipen.

“Until today, the Roma genocide has not been sufficiently included in school curricula, no widely distributed documentaries or feature films have been made on the subject, and no in-depth research has been commissioned and carried out in this area,” says Rudevics.

The Roma people also lost much of a generation of people who would have been responsible for orally transmitting their cultural knowledge to later generations, he adds.

“A whole generation of information carriers was destroyed during the Roma genocide,” says Rudevics. “This created a gap in the transmission of Romani culture and traditions, making it very difficult to recover and preserve this valuable heritage until today.”

A culture of remembrance is important not only to honor those who perished but also to help survivors process the events and their impact on themselves and their families.

Denial and minimalization of the Samudaripen, along with the scarcity of research on it, have led to a continuation of the trauma and left no room for healing, says Mirjam Karoly, a political scientist and advocate for Roma rights in Austria.

“Many psychological or health-related impacts were dealt with only within families, if at all,” says Karoly. “From the survivors and second generation, many died without any psychological support and appropriate treatment… There are only a few Romani people from the second and third generation who openly speak about it.”

Anti-Roma racism today

Today, anti-Roma discrimination is still widespread in European societies, according to all of the experts interviewed for this article.

“We have seen this recently in the economic crises back in 2008 and 2009 with an increase in anti-Roma hate speech and the mobilization against Roma — especially before elections, and more recently during the pandemic when in particular impoverished Romani communities were scapegoated for spreading the virus or were targeted with inappropriate measures,” says Karoly.

“Despite the tragic history of persecution and the Nazi genocide of Roma in Europe, anti-Roma racism has not been politically denounced in postwar societies nurturing to further stigmatization of Roma and antigypsyist practices,” she says.

Not all is bleak, though. The first step in confronting anti-Roma racism is defining it. Through the efforts of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), a definition for antigypsyism — just as for antisemitism — has been developed.

According to Stephane Laederich, the executive director of the Roma Foundation in Zürich, Switzerland, and also the chair of the IHRA’s Committee on the Genocide of the Roma, the definition has been adopted by quite a few countries including Germany, Czechia, Slovakia, Croatia, Israel, and more.

However, what he finds more important is that this adoption has also occurred at the institutional level. For example, Deutsche Bahn, Germany’s national railway operator, adopted it, as did the Croatian Football Federation.

“This more grassroots approach to adoption is key to actually making it effective,” says Laederich.