Remembering the Roma Holocaust, 80 years later

On 16 May, 1944, as the first full trainloads of Hungarian Jews trundled towards Auschwitz, the SS decided to clear out the area known as the ‘Gypsy family camp’ to make room for the new arrivals. The family camp housed several thousand Roma and Sinti (Roma with German roots) people. Like the Jews, they were classified as racially inferior and enemies of the Third Reich. But while Jewish arrivals were immediately removed from their loved ones, Roma families were often allowed to stay together. Their numbers were much smaller and they refused to be separated.

That day, the Roma and Sinti inmates, well aware of their likely fate, also refused to follow the SS’s orders. In one of the least known but most courageous episodes of the Holocaust, they fought back with their bare hands, pieces of wood, shovels, iron pipes, anything they could find to turn into a makeshift weapon.