The Porajmos

The focus in our class so far has been almost entirely on the Holocaust of the Jews, which while the most dramatic and focused of the Nazi war crimes, was far from the only extermination efforts perpetrated by the Third Reich. The Porajmos (which means devouring in Roma) destroyed almost the entirity of the Roma (commonly known as Gypsy) population in Eastern Europe. Estimates of Roma victims range as high as 1,500,000, although accurate figures have never been compiled, on account of the lack of attention to detail in the Nazi's haphazard extermination efforts.

The Nazi's acknowledged the Roma as a related people, but claimed that they were a racially impure and lower class group of Aryans, contaminated by millennia of wanderings through Eurasia. At first efforts were made to distinguish between those Roma who were racially impure and those who were homogenous, however as the Second World War dragged on and and Nazi action became increasing erratic and desperate, all "Gypsies" in occupied territory were simply rounded up and sent to the Extermination camps. Roma were disproportionately the victims of horrific Nazi medical experimentation. Here is one particularly horrifying eyewitness account.

"I remember one set of twins in particular: Guido and Ina, aged about four. One day, Mengele took them away. When they returned, they were in a terrible state: they had been sewn together, back to back, like Siamese Twins. Their wounds were infected and oozing pus. They screamed day and night. Then their parents– I remember the mother's name was Stella– managed to get some morphine and they killed the children in order to end their suffering."

Perhaps the worst thing about the Porajmos is how forgotten it is. Although Roma still have not recovered from this act of genocide, I had not even heard of the Porajmos until I came upon it by chance while researching the Holocaust on the internet several days ago. What does it say about our society if we can forget so easily?