by MARGARETA MATACHE and JACQUELINE BHABHA
IMAGE/TernYpe, the International Roma Youth Network
A growing movement among Roma activists looks to celebrate their ancestors’ resistance to persecution — and to pick up where they left off.
On May 16, 1944, the Nazis scheduled the extermination of the Roma in the Auschwitz II-Birkenau’s Zigeunerlager. But the transfer of the Roma to the gas chamber met with vigorous resistance. Approximately 6,000, Roma alerted to the Nazis’ extermination plans, barricaded themselves in the Zigeunerlager buildings and prepared to fight back against the German SS. The guards withdrew in the face of this uprising.
This event is now commemorated annually on May 16 as Romani Resistance Day.
These accounts of resistance are largely missing, however, from the history of Roma persecution — not only from history books, but also from the Roma movement’s own account of key events. In contrast, Jewish resistance to Nazi rule has become part of the broader discourse though research, literature, and popular culture.
Only a few modest initiatives are dedicated to raising awareness of Roma resistance. Over the last five years, several groups of Romani activists have started to cultivate a language of “pride” and to organize a youth movement drawing inspiration from the historical Romani resistance to the planned extermination in Auschwitz.
These actions build on the need for a broader debate on reparations for historical injustices. Following the example of other movements pressing for reparations, the Romani movement is acknowledging the ongoing legacy and moral debts arising out of both past and ongoing racist violence.
Roma activists are looking to other movements for inspiration. Reparations occupy a central place in the contemporary discussion of U.S. racial inequality and the continuing impact of slavery and Jim Crow laws on American society. Native American communities are also engaged in a consideration of reparation claims and strategies for advancing them. Also, 14 Caribbean states are seeking reparations from the UK, France, and the Netherlands regarding the losses caused by centuries of slavery.
Precedents exist for enforcing such claims. New Zealand has given Maori tribes compensation for injustices caused during the colonial period dating back to 1840. The British government has compensated 5,228 elderly victims of colonial torture during the Mau Mau uprising in the 1950s in Kenya. North Carolina passed legislation to compensate victims of forced sterilization from 1929 to 1970.
Roma and the Holocaust
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