Both a Romani singer and a Romani speaker will be heard for the first time in history during the International Holocaust Remembrance Day ceremony at the UN in New York this Friday
On Friday, 26 January 2024 a ceremonial gathering marking International Holocaust Remembrance Day (27 January) will be held at the headquarters of the United Nations in New York City. 27 January 1945 is the day on which the Auschwitz-Birkenau Concentration and Extermination Camp was liberated.
The subject of this year’s commemoration is recognition of the extraordinary courage of Holocaust survivors and victims who stood up to Nazi terror. The ceremony will feature a representative of the Roma, Christian Pfeil, a German Sinto, and will be broadcast live online.
The speakers at the ceremony will include UN Secretary-General António Guterres and the descendants of Holocaust survivors as well as survivors themselves. This year, for the first time in history, there will also be a Romani speaker at the UN commemoration and a Romani song will be performed by Petra Gelbart, the activist, ethnomusicologist, musician and vice-chair of the Czechoslovak Romani Union who advocates for the culture and history of the Roma.
Gelbart will sing the Romani song “Aušvicate hi kher báro” (“Auschwitz has a great big building…”) which she learned from her grandparents and great-aunt together with other traditional verses. “I am glad that a member of the younger generation will also be playing, my son, Patrik, who will accompany me. I don’t consider this song to be a performance number, but a testimony, so I prefer no accompaniment or a minimalistic, simple one,” she told news server Romea.cz.
The creation of time for a Romani musician and a Romani speaker on the program of the United Nations gathering is, according to Gelbart, the outcome of a long fight against the previous discrimination and ignoring of Roma and Sinti by the UN. “Since 2009 we have been asking for five minutes for a Romani speaker or musician during a program that lasts at least an hour and a half. They used to say that there was no time for us even though they used to regularly invite high school students from various ethnic groups to actively participate in the ceremony whose ancestors had no connection to the Holocaust. That was the clear, inexcusable, politically-motivated discrimination of the Roma and Sinti. After we protested, sometimes in writing and one protest held in person, but in silence, they began to invite a Romani speaker roughly once every three years. The first was Andrzej Mirga,” Gelbart recounted the long journey of Romani survivors’ representatives to being included at the United Nations ceremony.
This year Romani people will be represented at the gathering by Christian Pfeil, a German Sinto who survived a childhood in the ghetto of Lublin, occupied Poland, and faced neo-Nazi attacks on his business as an adult. Pfeil is from Trier in today’s Rhineland-Palatinate state in Germany, where he still lives today.
Pfeil was born in 1944 in the ghetto in Lublin when it was under Germany’s General Government in occupied Poland. His parents and older siblings had been deported there in May of 1940.
His family was forced by the police and the SS to perform forced labor in inhuman conditions there. Pfeil and his closest relatives miraculously survived that suffering.
Many other members of their family were murdered, however. His great-uncle’s four children were deported to the Auschwitz-Birkenau Concentration and Extermination Camp in May 1943.
After the liberation, Pfeil’s family returned to their native Trier. Christian Pfeil built a successful living there as a restaurateur, but he repeatedly faced racist, right-wing extremist attacks targeting him or restaurants run by him.
Pfeil has been involved for years in strengthening local memory of this history in his native Trier and contributing to setting up a memorial to the Sinti and Roma deported from Trier, which was ceremonially opened in 2012. He previously represented the Documentation and Cultural Center of the German Sinti and Roma on the International Auschwitz Committee and, as the voice of the survivors, gave the central speech during the remembrance event held for Roma Holocaust Memorial Day at the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial on 2 August 2022.
This year the UN wants to honor the bravery of all who resisted the Nazis despite enormous risks. The UN plans to honor the legacy of their remarkable history and stories.
To honor the memory of all survivors and victims, the UN also says it wants to strengthen its efforts to combat antisemitism, Holocaust denial and racism.
