Porajmos Remembrance

Today is Gypsy Holocaust Memorial Day (called "Porajmos" or "Destruction" in the Romani language.) Gypsies (also called Roma and Sinti) were treated at the same level as the Jews under the 1935 Nuremberg Laws by the Germans and sent to different ghettos (Warsaw and Lodz) and then sent to the death camps (Treblinka, Auschwitz and Sobibor) where an estimated 500,000 to 1.5 million Gypsy men, women and children were murdered.

The Gypsies actively resisted the Nazis as best they could. In Auschwitz whole Gypsy families were kept in barracks together (not separated like the majority of the other victims at the death camp.) In May 1944 SS guards tried to liquidate the Gypsy Family Camp in the gas chambers. When ordered to come out, the Gypsies refused, having been warned and arming themselves with crude weapons – iron pipes, shovels, and other tools used for labor. The SS chose not to confront the Gypsies directly and withdrew for several months. After transferring as many as 3,000 Gypsies who were capable of forced labor to Auschwitz I and other concentration camps, the SS moved against the remaining 2,898 inmates on August 2nd. The SS killed nearly all of the remaining inmates — most of them ill, elderly men, women, or children, in the gas chambers of Birkenau. At least 19,000 of the 23,000 Gypsies sent to Auschwitz perished there.

West Germany recognized the Porajmos in 1982 and in 2012 the Memorial to the Sinti and Roma Victims of National Socialism was unveiled in Berlin. In 2011, Poland officially adopted August 2nd as a day of commemoration of the Romani Genocide.

This picture is one I took in Cologne, Germany in 2014. It remembers the 1,000 Gypsies from Cologne that were deported to the ghettos and death camps starting in May 1940.