This “ collective scientific amnesia about the Romani Holocaust ,” as Vojak describes it , is gradually changing within the Croatian scientific community , primarily through the publication of translations of European scientific works , such as the three-volume series The Gypsies during the Second World War , published by Ibis-grafika between 2006 and 2009 . The publication features articles by a number of French , German , Bulgarian , Czech , and other scholars , including Giovanna Boursier , Reimar Gilsenbach , Marie-Christine Hubert , Michelle Kelso , Elena Marushiakova , Vesselin Popov , Ctibor Nečas , Erika Thurner , Michael Zimmermann , Herbert Heuss , Henriette Asseo , Frank Sparing , among others .
Vojak believes that the scale of suffering experienced by the Roma during World War II is comparable to their suffering in terms of the marginalization or suppression of the culture of remembrance ( in this case , the culture of forgetting ) regarding their victims after the war . He notes that Romani victims were not specifically commemorated during the Yugoslav period . It wasn ’ t until 1971 that the first and only memorial dedicated exclusively to the Romani victims of World War II was created
in the village of Uštica . This village was one of the central sites of the mass killing of Roma as part of the Jasenovac concentration camp system during the war . Vojak agrees with scholar Heike Karge , who sought to explain this commemorative practice of the Yugoslav authorities as part of their official cultural policy , in which the ethnicity of the victims , including the Roma , was submerged in the collective ideological discourse of “ victims of fascist terror .” This pattern was prevalent in most European countries .
The attitude of the Croatian authorities toward the commemoration of Romani victims gradually changed as a result of the recognition of Roma as a national minority in the Republic of Croatia ( 2002 ), which led to the strengthening of the political influence of Romani political representatives and their non-governmental organizations , as researcher Vojak notes . Veljko Kajtazi , together with Romani NGOs , initiated the regular commemoration of Romani victims in Uštica in 2012 . August 2 , recognized as the International Day of Remembrance of Romani Victims of the Samudaripen / Holocaust , was chosen as the date of commemoration .
We live in an era of increasing historical
6 . Roma Holocaust Memorial Day , Roma Memorial Center Uštica | Picture by Veljko Kajtazi ( Flickr )
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