Hundreds gather at Auschwitz to remember Gypsy Holocaust victims

Several hundred people gathered at Auschwitz-Birkenau on August 2 to remember the Roma, or Gypsy, victims of the Holocaust 63 years after the last of them were gassed in the camp.

A letter from Interior Minister Janusz Kaczmarek read out to the crowd stressed the importance of remembering the suffering inflicted by Nazi Germany on the Gypsies, the PAP news agency reported.

“We must remember the Holocaust of the Roma,” Kaczmarek said. “It is the concern of the Polish government that this memory not disappear, and that the next generation of residents of this republic know how tragic was the fate of our Roma citizens.”

PAP said the hundreds gathered included Roma from Poland and abroad, survivors of the camp and a deputy speaker of the Polish senate, Maciej Plazynski.

The Nazis liquidated the Gypsy family camp – the so-called Zigeunerfamilienlager – at the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex on August 2, 1944, sending most of the last 2,900 of them to the gas chambers, including many women, children and elderly people. Others were sent to German factories as forced laborers.