Małgorzata Kidawa-Błońska

Commemoration speech on the occasion of 2 August 2024, Holocaust Memorial Day for Sinti and Roma

Dear honored Survivors, Witnesses of the Holocaust! 

Excellencies, Distinguished Guests, Ladies and Gentlemen! 

We meet today to commemorate the more than half a million Roma and Sinti who became victims of the genocidal ideology of German National Socialism during the period of World War II.  

Exactly eighty years ago, on the night of August 2 to 3, 1944, thousands of women, children and men were herded into gas chambers and murdered right here in Auschwitz.  

The site of the “Gypsy family camp” has become the largest cemetery for Roma and Sinti in Europe. 

What the name “Gypsy family camp” meant, as cynically used by the criminals who created this hell on earth, we know from the testimony of survivors. 

Auschwitz-Birkenau prisoner Elza Baker, born in Hamburg in 1935, survived her time in the camp thanks to the care of another Roma woman, Wanda Fischer.  

Here, she saw things that no child, no human being, should ever see.  

And she experienced suffering that no one should have to experience. As a child, she saw crimes committed against prisoners and human bodies hung on wires. And when asked about the greatest gift, the most favor she received from her guardian, she simply answered: “When the Germans led people to the executions, Wanda would put her hand over my eyes so I wouldn’t have to watch it.” 

Sinti and Roma were persecuted by the Nazis in Germany and in all occupied European countries since the beginning of the war. And even before that, ever since the lunatic Nazi “race theory” was ever conceived.  

Eighty percent of Sinti and Roma living in Germany, almost all of the Roma living in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, and more than a third of the Roma living in Poland were murdered throughout the war. 

Thousands of Roma living in Poland, Belarus, Ukraine or Russia did not even make it to Auschwitz, as they were murdered in mass executions carried out by German police, Wehrmacht and SS units. 

It was at Auschwitz, however, that the final act of this tragedy was to be played out. It was here that an entire people was to be killed, its culture was to be slaughtered and the memory of the Roma and Sinti was to perish forever.

And yet at the end, the Nazis failed to fulfill their insane, criminal plan. Proof of their defeat is your presence here. The presence of Roma and Sinti survivors of the Holocaust, the presence of their children and grandchildren, the presence of successive Roma generations who proudly cultivate the beautiful tradition and culture of the European Roma.  

At Auschwitz, the Nazis wanted to seize and annihilate the nation of Eternal Wanderers once and for all. You, however, are still continuing your proud journey through the history of Europe and the World. 

The question we must ask ourselves on this day, in this place, is not just whether we remember. Do we remember the tragedy of the European Roma, and do we remember what caused it?  

To that question we all present here know the answer. 

Far more important is the question if we are able, through our remembrance, to prevent such a tragedy from ever happening again? 

The answer to this question is not at all easy. Especially today, when there is war in Europe again. When civilians, women and children are again being killed in Ukraine, where eighty years ago Nazi death squads murdered Jews and Roma.  

If, eighty years ago, the German Nazis were able to attempt to exterminate entire nations in Europe, if they managed to carry out this insane plan almost to the end, it was only made possible by the fact that Europe lacked an “instinct for solidarity” – of immediate collective response to internationally imposed aggression, violence and violation of human rights. 

Too many people in too many countries have been telling themselves for too long that the crimes of National Socialism do not concern them. That they would survive, so they need not worry about the fate of their fellow human beings. The history of World War II has shown how deluded these expectations were. 

Such thinking eighty years ago permitted Hitler to conquer almost all of Europe, to wipe out almost the entire population of Roma and Sinti, as well as almost entire Jewish people.  

This kind of thinking, the lack of solidarity of the democratic world, is what the new tyrants are counting on today when they start wars and kill people. 

If we do indeed remember the Holocaust, our response in defending freedom must be unyielding.  If our remembrance is to be of any use, we must show hands-on solidarity today with all nations that are victims of war, hatred and the ideology of the powerful madness.  

After what happened at Auschwitz, we came to believe in Europe that the slogan “Never Again!” would forever become a guideline for all countries and their politicians.  

Today, after Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, we experience again that nothing is granted once and for all. Neither peace, nor democracy, nor trust, nor even memory. This is bitter knowledge, but it is also knowledge that forces action. 

I believe that at current times, the solidarity of the free world towards nations falling victim to aggression will not be too late. And that it will allow us to avoid a recurrence of the tragedy that befell the Roma and Sinti people eighty years ago.  

It is their story that tells us that the defense of freedom and peace is an eternal journey.