Roma Holocaust commemorated in Maribor
Maribor, 2 August - Roma Holocaust Memorial Day will also be honoured on Wednesday in Slovenia, in particular in Maribor with a commemoration entitled The Night When the Violins Fell Silent.
Oswiecim, Poland
Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, now an in-site museum.
Photo: Xinhua/STA
File photo
A total of 71 Roma from Slovenia were among the 21,000 estimated to have been murdered in Auschwitz-Birkenau, the Nazi concentration camp to which Roma from 14 European countries were transported during World War II. Six more Roma from Slovenia were killed in other concentration camps.
During the war, mass killings of Roma also took place in the former Yugoslavia, including in the Croatian concentration camp Jasenovac.
In what is now Slovenia, Roma and Sinti were sent to concentration camps during the war by the Italian occupation authorities, as well as by the Germans. The Hungarian occupier also sent them to forced labour, while killings were also executed by the Partisan anti-Nazi guerilla movement.
As it declared 17 May National Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Communist Violence in 2022, the previous government said the day marked the 1942 murder of 49 Roma people and four Slovenians by a Partisan unit in the Iška Gorge south of Ljubljana, among them 24 children.
Porajmos, as the Roma Holocaust is also known as, is remembered around the world on 2 August, the day in 1944 when over 3,000 Roma people were killed in Auschwitz-Birkenau.
The main ceremony in Slovenia is being organised in Maribor by the Centre of Jewish Cultural Heritage Synagogue Maribor and the Epeka Association. The event will also feature a concert by Der Senster Gob, a gypsy and klezmer band from Prague.
According to recent estimates, around half a million Roma were executed by the Nazis between 1939 and 1945, while some even put the number at 1.5 million. As an ethnic group, the Roma were the second largest victim of the Nazi regime after the Jews.