place with dignity and not forget this tragic event ,” Kajtazi said on April 24 , 2022 .
The umbrella organization of the Roma in Croatia , Kali Sara , reached an agreement with the Alliance of Antifascist Fighters and Antifascists of Croatia regarding the maintenance of all cemeteries in the country where Roma were killed during World War II . Veljko Kajtazi noted that , for decades , the fact that the victims from Marija Gorica were Roma was unknown simply because they had different names .
“ Even today , we still see many Roma changing their first and last names to survive in the communities where they live ; even newborns are sometimes given names from the majority population ,” Kajtazi said .
Ivo Pejaković , former director of the Jasenovac Memorial Museum , emphasized the lack of visibility of the trauma suffered by the Roma population , noting that the official term for their suffering – Samudaripen – is still not well-established outside of expert circles and among the interested public . As he says , years of effort by individual researchers , such as Danijel Vojak , have helped raise the level of available knowledge about the Roma , not only during World War II but also earlier . Nonetheless , despite these efforts , most of the stories of Roma life , especially those involving their suffering , remain untold .
How is it that the mass extermination of Roma and Sinti during World War II has not been significantly recorded and the data remains incomplete ? What are the causes of this ? First and foremost , why did this group have to wait several decades for the recognition of their victimhood ? It is worth recalling that the West German authorities initially refused to acknowledge that the Nazi regime in Germany committed genocide against the Roma . They claimed that the Nazis applied “ the usual criminal policy they used for other criminals .” The view that all Roma are criminals and thieves is centuries old . Official requests for the recognition of Roma and Sinti victims were even dismissed in courts . This continued until the 1960s , when Romani organizations managed to win legal battles in the courts . The then German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt officially acknowledged the suffering of the Roma and Sinti in 1982 .
In the book The Nazi Persecution of the Gypsies , published in 1999 , author Guenter Lewy focuses on the little-known and poorly documented subject of the Nazi persecution of Roma and Sinti during the Third Reich . The book represents a pioneering effort to gather documentary evidence from German and Austrian archives . He emphasizes the fact that Roma and Sinti remained marginalized and without adequate legal and social support after the war , and their persecution was largely overlooked in historical and legal processes . This work provides a thorough understanding of the systematic persecution of Roma and Sinti . The political scientist aimed to redress the historical invisibility of their suffering , stressing the importance of combating prejudice and documenting genocide in order to preserve the memory of the victims .
“ The suffering of the Gypsies was overshadowed by the massive tragedy of the Jewish people ... and not a single Gypsy was called to testify before the various tribunals ,” Lewy wrote . The author argues that Roma were reluctant to speak about their experiences due to cultural norms and trauma , but also out of fear of further discrimination , which made research more challenging . Due to a justified historical distrust of institutions , their persecution has remained less well explored . The persecution of Roma and Sinti has long been neglected in historiography , especially compared to other groups such as Jews .
In the research paper ‘ Roma during the Holocaust ,’ Danijel Vojak writes that the suffering of Roma in the Independent State of Croatia ( NDH ) was tangentially and unsystematically researched in Croatian historiography after 1945 . Historian Narcisa Lengel-Krizman began investigating this subject in the 1980s and published the work The Genocide of the Roma – Jasenovac 1942 in 2003 , with the support of the Jasenovac Memorial Museum . Lengel-Krizman notes the lack of systematic scientific studies on the suffering of Roma . She uses terms such as “ peripherality of research ,” “ forgetting ,” and “ slipping from global attention .”
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Observing Memories Issue 8