Municipality of Prague 8 flies Romani flag to mark Roma Holocaust Memorial Day

Several municipalities in the Czech Republic are flying the Romani flag on their town halls to commemorate Roma Holocaust Memorial Day today. The Municipal Department of Prague 8 is one.

"This commemorates the tragic night of 2 August 1944 and the early morning hours of 3 August 1944, when the Germans murdered more than 3,000 Roma and Sinti at the Auschwitz-Birkenau Concentration Camp," said Mayor of Prague 8 Ondřej Gros (Civic Democratic Party - ODS). The latest scholarship has revealed that despite the Romani prisoners' active resistance, the concentration camp's gas chambers were used to murder as many as 4,300 Romani people in that brief time span.

The Polish Parliament first established 2 August as that country's official Annihilation of the Roma and Sinti Memorial Day in 2011. In 2015, the European Parliament recognized 2 August as the European Memorial Day of the Holocaust of the Sinti and Roma.

During the 17 months of the existence of what was called the "Gypsy Family Camp" at Auschwitz-Birkenau (from February 1943 to July 1944), 23,000 children, men and women were imprisoned there. Approximately 21,000 prisoners of Roma and Sinti origin died in the camp. 

Other imprisoned Roma were murdered in the concentration camps of Bełżec, Chełmno, Majdanka, Sobibór and Treblinka. Still others, the number of whom it is difficult to estimate, were shot to death and buried in mass graves in the forest.

The extermination policy of Nazi Germany led to the deaths of an estimated half a million Roma and Sinti from all over Europe. Some estimates put the number as high as 800,000 victims, or anywhere between one-quarter and one-half of the prewar population of Roma.