by Pamela Moye

On July 31, 1941, Reinhard Heydrich, chief architect of the Nazi Party’s “Final Solution,” gave the order to “kill all Jews, Gypsies, and mental patients.” On December 16th of that same year, Himmler issued the directive that all Roma in Europe be deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau. At a Nazi party meeting on Sept. 14, 1942, it was announced that “Jews and Gypsies must be unconditionally exterminated.” Both groups were deemed racially impure and socially dangerous and were thus given the same treatment by the Nuremberg Law for the Protection of German Blood and Honor. Ironically and shamefully, history has not seen fit to shine the same light on the genocide of the Roma as that of the Jews.

This is no more apparent than in the Czech Republic. The Northern Bohemian town of Terezín is acknowledged with solemnity as the site of a concentration camp which housed almost 150,000 Jews, mostly Czech. But what of the camp in Southern Bohemia, near Tabor, now a commercial pig farm at Lety u Písku? There, no memorial, and few memories. The same for the camp at Hodonín pod Kunšátem in Moravia, now the site of a hotel. Media and human rights groups accuse the Czech government of collective amnesia, among other things, for what seems to be deliberate shortsightedness in regards to the two camps, which are said to be responsible for enabling the eradication of over half the Czechoslovakian Roma population.

Porrajmos, the Romani word used to refer to the Holocaust, means devouring. The Roma of World War II Europe saw the the authorities as a force seeking to consume them and lay them to waste. The Jews and the Roma both have histories plagued by prejudice, and, for a moment in time, they shared the horrendous experience that has come to be recognized as the greatest crime against humanity. While the Jewish Holocaust is held as one of history’s most poignant lessons, the Romani genocide has thus far narrowly avoided becoming a footnote in the text of history - a people with a past in danger of being devoured by the continued ignorance of racism.

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