Memoria [EN] No. 10 / July 2018 | Page 14

The reconstruction of events by Danuta Czech presented above was later generally approved and often used by the authors of various commemorative texts as well as quoted while honoring subsequent anniversaries of the liquidation of the Roma camp.

Today, it is difficult to state why no one has so far paid attention to a number of inconsistencies in the argumentation by Czech as well as to visible discrepancies in the accounts by witnesses as well as in other sources to which she referred. According to the numbers presented by Czech in the Calendar, in the month of May there were about 6,500 Roma in the BIIe camp; more than two months later, at the turn of July and August 1944, only 4,303 remained alive (both in the Auschwitz main camp and Birkenau). It should be assumed that at that time, over two thousand Roma disappeared from the SS registers in an inexplicable way. Such an important decrease in the number of prisoners of the Roma camp at that time is not confirmed by any preserved sources.

For reasons which are difficult to guess, Danuta Czech did not use the collection of daily reports on the number of female prisoners in the Roma camp, preserved for the period from July 17 to 31 1944, in her study. They show that at that time, this number was subject to minor changes and was much higher, oscillating around c. 3,400.

These documents are essential as the data which they include challenge practically the entire argumentation of the author of Calendar.