August 07, 2022

Commemorating European Roma Holocaust Memorial Day

topic:	Discrimination
located:	Spain, Poland, Czech Republic
editor:	Abby Klinkenberg

It was only in 2015 that the European Parliament declared 2 August as ‘European Roma Holocaust Memorial Day,’ which commemorates the 500,000 members of the Roma community murdered under Nazi rule. Considered Europe’s largest ethnic minority group with an estimated population between 10 and 12 million, the Roma continue to be subject to “racism and denial of rights” across the European continent. Although the European Commission adopted an official EU Roma Strategic Framework in 2020 that aims to address persistent inequity and socioeconomic exclusion, progress is slow.

Perhaps no narrative is more apt to reveal the long-overdue nature of Roma recognition as that of a former industrial pig farm in the Czech Republic. The farm in Lety, South Bohemia, was built on the site of a Nazi-era camp for the Czech Roma population. The camp held 1,309 Roma individuals between 1942 and 1943 when a typhoid epidemic swept through the camp and necessitated its closure. Those who survived were sent to similar concentration camps; over 500 individuals were sent to the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp in Poland.

In the 1970s, the pig farm was erected and only a “modest memorial in a nearby clearing” stood to attest to the horrors witnessed on that land. During annual commemorations by the local Roma community, the stench of manure haunted the scene. Understandably, the land has been bitterly contested for decades. Only in 2018 and “under pressure from the Roma minority and international institutions including the United Nations and the EU” did the Czech government purchase the farm and commit to building a Roma Holocaust memorial on the land. And yet, only in June of this year did the demolition of the farm begin. The first phase of construction of the four-million-dollar memorial is expected to be completed in 2023.

Ensuring that an industrial pig farm is not placed on historically meaningful land is hardly a high bar, but such is the nature of the fight for Roma rights and recognition across Europe. Such victories are few and far between – they also still occur amidst a wider atmosphere of persistent racism, both in the Czech Republic and across the continent. While the Czech Roma community celebrates its hard-fought victory to erect a Roma Holocaust Memorial Museum in Lety, a staggering 86 percent of Czechs under the age of 36 nurse negative perceptions of the Roma people.

Such discrimination is hardly limited to within Czech borders: in Spain, a local mob recently terrorised the Roma residents of the Andalusian town of Peal de Beccero. The antiziganist (anti-Roma) attack, which occurred in mid-July, resulted in the incineration of six homes inhabited by Roma families after members of the Roma community were blamed for the murder of a local bouncer. Reminiscent of the anti-Roma pogroms in the Spanish town of Martos in 1986, “local [Roma] organisations are concerned [that] there will now be a rise in racism and violence against [Roma] people in Andalusia and in all of Spain.” The incident was largely downplayed by mainstream media.

In autumn of this year, the European Parliament will “present a first assessment of the national Roma strategies.” While such phrasing, which suggests the Roma population is a problem to be fixed, is revealing in itself, the EU’s effort to address and combat antiziganism must be understood primarily as a cultural project if it is to succeed. Even if the entirety of EU coffers were to be directed to this cause, change will only ever come as a consequence of genuine recognition and respect at local levels.

As we commemorate the members of the Roma community whose lives were lost in World War II, so too do we commit ourselves to recognising the significant daily relational work that remains to be done in order to end anti-Roma discrimination.

Photo by Caroline Hernandez

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