Who Remembers the Roma Holocaust?

Yesterday, August 2, wasn’t just the eve of Tisha B’av, the day which Jews mourn the destruction of the two Temples. It was also the annual commemoration of the Samudaripen, the Roma Holocaust during World War II.

Yet, while this newspaper, the Times of Israel,  and many others will have articles dedicated to or mentioning Tisha B’Av and most Western media outlets commemorate the six million Jews who perished on International Holocaust Remembrance Day on January 27, practically none mentioned the Samudaripen yesterday. Anywhere from 250,000 to 2 million Roma disappeared, tortured, persecuted and murdered and it hardly warranted a murmur.

Simple Google searches for “Roma Holocaust” and “Samudaripen” turned up three honorable mentions belonging to France 24, the BBC and Xinhua, the official news agency of the People’s Republic of China. Otherwise, the results were quite thin.

What is a genocide?

And it’s not a question of numbers, the Srebrenica massacre during which over 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys were killed has been determined by the pillars of the world order to be a genocide. An act that cannot be explained as merely a war crime, of which it undoubtedly was, but as an event to be commemorated every year on July 11 as a genocide as decided last year by 84 UN member states of the General Assembly.

Meanwhile, the first organized mass killing that inspired human rights lawyer Raphael Lemkin to study the occurrences of genocide before he had even coined the word to describe the phenomenon, that of the Armenians between 1915 and 1923, still goes unrecognized by most world governments, including Israel’s. This, even though the death toll among Armenians exceeded 1 million.

So what does it take for people and governments to recognize those brutally murdered as part of a political program for ethnic cleansing?

A hierarchy of victimhood

Perhaps the uncomfortable truth is that there exists a hierarchy of victims. Some who count and are counted. Others who are invisible and recede into amorphous tides of history, remembered by historians and scientific specialists of a specific group or era but otherwise forgotten by all.

The hierarchy of victimhood, however, isn’t determined by woke nonsense on intersectionality but on the political usefulness and expediency the victim groups present to powers of the present order to maintain their values and achieve their goals.

And on this plane, the Roma (once derogatorily referred to as Gypsies) hold nothing of value to the powers that be in the institutions of government, civil society, media and academia. The Roma have never held political power or influence. They do not fund professorial chairs. Nothing about them reinforces the values of established governments in Eastern or Western Europe, except perhaps as generic victims of fascism. Perhaps unsurprisingly, one of the few funders of Romani cultural expression today is the German federal government – and this only in recent years. Germany itself did not recognize the Roma genocide occured until 1982.

Not just a sideshow

For most people, the Roma still blend into the background of the primarily Jewish Holocaust, along with anti-fascists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals and a whole motley assortment of persecution victims.

In at least one case, the Hrastina Massacre in Croatia, Roma war dead were even commemorated as Jewish Holocaust victims. And while that may have been unfortunate but well-intentioned local cultural amnesia, the exclusion of a Roma representative from the board overseeing the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum for many years was not. Elie Wiesel was allegedly to blame for that most conscious of choices.

Roma activists and artists are increasingly speaking up, to have their voices heard and the painful memories of their people recorded, noticed and even commemorated. Perhaps it is incumbent upon the Jewish community and Jewish community institutions to assist the efforts of our brothers and sisters in suffering? Making the world aware that it wasn’t just Jews who suffered during the Holocaust doesn’t cheapen our own suffering. Besides, it’s the right thing to do, both historically and ethically.