SS guards murdered over 3,000 Roma inmates at the Auschwitz concentration camp, including an unknown number of Hungarian Roma, on the night of Aug. 2 leading into Aug. 3, 1944. The tragic mass murder was marked in Budapest with a commemoration ceremony this year.
“The Hungarian government considers its mission to spread knowledge of the Roma Holocaust, bury the trenches that separate various groups of society and build bridges between them,” the state minister for civic and social affairs, Vince Szalay-Bobrovniczky, said at the Budapest commemoration.
“Both at home and on the international arena, the government is consequent in its support of national minorities and considers its duty to draw attention to the situation of the Roma in the European Union.”
“The victims were ordinary Roma people: mothers, fathers and children,” János Agócs, president of the National Roma Self-government (ORÖ), said at the commemoration.
“It is a testament to their resilience, that among the victims of the Holocaust, the Roma were the only ones whose families the murderers could not separate.”
The memorial was also attended by one of the Hungarian survivors of that infamous night, Éva Fahidi.
“This was the end of a process which began with verbal aggression and ended in the gas chamber,” she said.
Estimates for the total number of Roma murdered in the Holocaust in Europe range from 130,000 to 285,000 while local historians put the number of Hungarian Roma victims between 1,000 to 5,000. To this day, it remains the least documented aspect of the Holocaust.
Title image: János Agócs (R), President of the National Roma Self-government (ORÖ) lays a wreath at the Roma Holocaust memorial in Budapest on August 2, 2020. On the night from August 2 to August 3 SS soldiers killed more than 3,000 Roma in the Auschwitz concentration camp. The day was declared Roma Holocaust Memorial Day in in 1972. (MTI/Zoltán Balogh)
