Remembering the Roma Holocaust
I made this page for Obdicut because I knew it would interest him due to his lovely wife’s heritage, but in light of the recent events in Norway and all the other suffering & death caused around the world by hatred, it’s really a reminder for all decent people everywhere.
“All that’s necessary for the forces of evil to win in the world is for enough good men to do nothing.” —Edmund Burke
Update August 3, 2011: Please be sure to also read 000G’s chilling and highly relevant page, Hungary to introduce Forced Labor, Labor Camps. It’s a reminder of how blessed I am to have been born in the USA.
External ImageA makeshift vigil at the Holocaust Memorial in Budapest to honor the victims of recent neo-Nazis attacks targeting Roma settlements in Hungary. Photograph: Open Society Foundations/Bernard Rorke.
In Budapest today, a group of citizens gathered at the Holocaust memorial on the banks of the Danube in a silent and solemn commemoration for the estimated half-million Roma who perished in the Baro Porrajmos (“Great Devouring”) at the hands of the Nazis and their collaborators.
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Flowers were also laid and candles lit at the memorial to honor the memory of men, women, and children murdered just two years ago by neo-Nazis in the wave of gun and bomb attacks targeting Roma settlements in Hungary. The killings took place against a backdrop of prejudiced media reporting, widespread anti-Gypsyism, and far-right paramilitarism fomented by the extremist party Jobbik and its uniformed squadristi. Similarly, the Czech Republic has witnessed neo-fascist attacks on Roma communities. OSCE Ambassador Janez Lenarčič recently expressed concern at the surge in extremist intimidation of Roma communities and “manifestations of intolerance, including anti-Roma rhetoric from public figures at the national and local level.”
A prescient warning by Czech president Vaclav Havel back in 1995, at the unveiling of a monument in memory of the Roma victims of the Holocaust in Lety, resonates with even more urgency today. Havel warned of the dangers in not facing up to every manifestation of racist evil:
Even today, we sometimes hear people calling “Gypsies to the gas chambers.” Even today, we can observe indifference to these calls, quiet support for those who are yelling them, cowardly spectators, the renewal of divisions between people according to their ethnic origin. All of this must be faced up to again and again, because it is the tried-and-true territory of racism.
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