brzezinka, poland | Gypsies from across Europe met at the former Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp to remember hundreds of thousands of their ancestors killed by the Nazis and to call for wider recognition of the “Gypsy Holocaust.’
The Monday, Aug. 2, ceremony was held exactly 60 years after the night the Nazis gassed the final 2,900 Gypsies being held in the camp.
“Auschwitz-Birkenau is a symbol of the genocide perpetrated on our people,’ said Roman Kwiatkowski, the top Gypsy representative in Poland.
“These crimes should be properly commemorated. We fear again that the Roma Holocaust will be forgotten.’
Roma and Sinti are names by which Gypsies in Europe are also known. An estimated 7 million to 9 million now live on the Continent, mostly in Central and Eastern Europe.
They still face discrimination, especially in Eastern Europe, speakers warned .
Up to half a million European Gypsies are believed to have perished at the Nazis’ hands during World War II along with 6 million Jews, although the exact number is not known. Others were sterilized or subjected to grisly pseudo-medical experiments.
Hugo Hoellenreiner, a German who survived the camp along with his parents, recalled the daily horror that included visits by camp doctor Josef Mengele — the Auschwitz “Angel of Death’ who used inmates for his so-called medical experiments.
“Even today, I cannot understand why they did it to us,’ he said in a moving speech. “I can never forgive or forget what happened to us.’
The anniversary was marked Monday with solemn speeches and mournful music amid the ruins of dozens of prisoner barracks on a vast grassy area, still ringed by concrete fence posts, watchtowers and the birch trees that gave the place its name.
The Nazis considered Gypsies racially inferior and “anti-social.’ Many were deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where the Nazi SS set up a special camp section for them.
The Nazis liquidated the Gypsy camp on Aug. 2, 1944, and killed most of the remaining inmates, including many women, children and elderly, in the gas chambers. Others were sent to German factories for forced labor.
In Budapest, Prime Minister Peter Medgyessy joined Gypsy leaders in lighting a candle beside a simple cross where their organizations want to build the capital’s first memorial to victims of the “Gypsy Holocaust.’
The Nazis “could not stand the fact that we are all different and all have our own culture, whether Gypsy, Jewish or Hungarian,’ Medgyessy said. “We want to build a world of equality where people respect differences.’