Porajmos - Recognition and Remembrance

Recognition and Remembrance

The German government paid war reparations to Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, but not to the Romani. There were "never any consultations at Nuremberg or any other international conference as to whether the Sinti and Roma were entitled like the Jews to reparations.” The Interior Ministry of Wuerttemberg argued that "Gypsies persecuted under the Nazis not for any racial reason but because of an asocial and criminal record." When on trial for his leadership of Einsatzgruppen in the USSR, Otto Ohlendorf cited the massacres of Romanis during the Thirty Years War as a historical precedent.

West Germany recognised the genocide of the Roma in 1982, and since then the Porajmos has been increasingly recognized as a genocide committed simultaneously with the Shoah. The American historian Sybil Milton wrote several articles arguing that the Porajmos deserved recognition as part of the Holocaust. In Switzerland, a committee of experts investigated the policy of the Swiss government during the Porajmos.

Formal recognition and commemoration of the Roma persecution by the Nazis is practically difficult due to the lack of significant collective memory and documentation of the Porajmos among the Roma, a consequence both of their oral traditions and their illiteracy, heightened by widespread poverty and discrimination that forces some Roma out of state schools. One UNESCO report put the illiteracy rate among the Roma in Romania at 30 percent, as opposed to the near universal literacy of the Romanian public as a whole. In a 2011 investigation of the state of the Roma in Europe today, Ben Judah, a Policy Fellow with the European Council on Foreign Relations, traveled to Romania and Transylvania. Nico Fortuna, a sociologist and Roma activist, explained the distinction between Jewish collective memory of the Shoah and the Roma experience:

There is a difference between the Jewish and Roma deportees...The Jews were shocked and can remember the year, date and time it happened. The Roma shrugged it off. They said, 'Of course I was deported. I'm Roma; these things happen to a Roma.' The Roma mentality is different from the Jewish mentality. For example, a Roma came to me and asked, 'Why do you care so much about these deportations? Your family was not deported.' I went, 'I care as a Roma' and the guy said back, 'I do not care because my family were brave, proud Roma that were not deported.'

For the Jews it was a total and everyone knew this - from bankers to pawnbrokers. For the Roma it was selective and not comprehensive. The Roma were only exterminated in a few parts of Europe such as Poland, the Netherlands, Germany and France. In Romania and much of the Balkans, only nomadic Roma and social outcast Roma were deported. This matters and has an impact on the Roma mentality.

Ian Hancock has also observed a reluctance among Roma to acknowledge their victimization by the Third Reich. The Roma "are traditionally not disposed to keeping alive the terrible memories from their history - nostalgia is a luxury for others." The impact of the illiteracy, the lack of social institutions and the rampant discrimination faced by Roma in Europe today have produced a people who, according to Fortuna, lack a "national consciousness...and historical memory of the Holocaust because there is no Roma elite."