"Baro Nasslepin, Elenta and Marepin"

 

The memorial stone at the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp marks the genocide

On August 2, 1944, 4,300 Sinti and Roma were killed in the gas chambers of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp  when SS liquidated the "gypsy family camp." In 2015, the European Parliament declared August 2 as Roma Holocaust Memorial Day for Sinti and Roma. In many countries today there is still very little awareness that Sinti and Roma were victims of systematic genocide. To this day, their descendants have been refused full if any compensation.  In Germany, the genocide was largely ignored for decades.

Margarete Bamberger in a 1943 letter to her sister in Berlin desperately implored relatives to send food parcels. Using the Romani language in the letter she also sent a hidden message: "Special greetings from Baro Nasslepin, Elenta and Marepin" — code for the three horrors, "disease, misery and murder." 

In May 1943, as deportation to Auschwitz and forced sterilization threatened, Oskar Rose wrote the following to the archbishop of Breslau: "If our Catholic Church fails to give us its protection, we shall be exposed to measures that, both morally and legally, make a mockery of all forms of humanity." 

This appeal and many others like it fell on deaf ears. By way of contrast, said Karola Fings of the Research Center on Antigypsyism at the University of Heidelberg, there were examples from occupied territories in Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union, "where Muslim communities protected Roma neighbors, helping them to avoid deportation."

Wherever in Europe the Nazis gained ground, Sinti and Roma were persecuted and many lost their lives,  murdered, in camps, or in mass shootings. In German-occupied Poland, there were the death camps. However, there were also an estimated 180 other locations where massacres are known to have taken place. Elsewhere, "most of the victims were not murdered in camps but wherever the killing happened to take place — on the spot."  In occupied Bohemia and Moravia — today's Czech Republic — Sinti and Roma were detained at the Lety and Hodonin camps before being deported to Auschwitz. In Croatia, Jasenovac "was a particularly horrific camp, where many were beaten to death." 

In Serbia, the head of the German military administration boasted in August 1942 that Serbia was the only country in which both the "Jewish and the Gypsy questions" had been "solved."