Rare Roma Holocaust Documentation Center to Open in Hungary · Global Voices
Danica Radisic

Sinti and Roma people about to be deported by the Nazis, taken in the German town of Asperg, May 22, 1940; photograph courtesy of German Federal Archives, used under Creative Commons 3.0 license.
A Roma Holocaust center is planned to be opened in the southern Hungarian city of Pecs by the end of 2014. The documentation center is the joint effort of the local municipality of Pecs and the Hungarian Roma minority, and will also collaborate with the Pecs University in teaching students about this often forgotten part of European 20th century history.
The Roma Holocaust, also known as Porajmos in Romani, was an attempt by Nazi Germany to exterminate the Romani people in Europe. Approximately between 1933 and 1945, Roma citizens from many European countries were persecuted, imprisoned, stripped of their nationality, often transported to other Nazi-occupied or Nazi-collaborator countries, where many were killed. The numbers have mostly been downplayed by Nazi collaborators, but the estimated number of Roma killed during that period in Europe is between 220 thousand and 1.5 million.
West Germany recognized the Roma Holocaust in 1982, but formal recognition and marking of this Holocaust have generally proven to be difficult due to lack of recorded collective memory and documentation of the Porajmos among the Roma, a consequence both of their oral traditions and illiteracy, heightened by widespread poverty and discrimination in this day and age, all of which makes the opening of this center in Pecs paramount in commemorating this tragic portion of Romani and European history.