AUGUST 2 is Roma Holocaust Memorial Day. It commemorates the events of 1944 when the Nazis began the liquidation of the “Gypsy family camp” or Zigeunerlager at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

That night, the SS guards rounded up the men, women and children wearing brown triangles on their uniform (the identification given for “Gypsy stock”) and transported them to the gas chambers and crematoria.

It is estimated that between 2,000 and 4,000 Romani and Sinti people were killed on that night alone, although the overall death count of the Holocaust ranges between 220,000 and 500,000, with the exact figure unlikely to be ever known.

Persecution of the Gypsy population had begun before the war, as early as the 19th century.

The German government implemented a system of registration and surveillance of Romani individuals, often requiring them to carry identification papers or wear special identification symbols.

During the Weimar republic era (1919-33), discriminatory laws were passed targeting Romani people.

They were subjected to forced sterilisation under the Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring, which aimed to eliminate individuals deemed genetically “undesirable” from society. This, for Roma, wasn’t an uncommon practice in many European countries at the time.

When the Nazis came to power in 1933, the persecution only intensified. The Nazis considered that, just like the Jewish people, the Romani were racially inferior and “asocial” and “work-shy.”

Nazi policies at this time declared that it was enough for someone to have one great-grandparent to be considered of Gypsy stock and be sent to the camps or be killed.

Like other marginalised groups, Gypsy people were subjected to horrific medical experiments both before and after death while interred in the camps, with Josef Mengele taking a particular interest in Romani children for whom he would buy sweets, have them call him “Onkel Mengele” and was known to personally take them to the gas chambers.

Eyewitness accounts tell of the story of one set of Romani twins who were sewn together back-to-back during one of the horrific experiments, and who were later euthanised by their desperate parents to end their suffering.

Despite this, during the Nuremberg trials, there was not one mention of Gypsy victims, and the Roma Holocaust was not acknowledged widely until 1982, when the Federal Republic of Germany finally recognised that Romani people were victimised by race and not, as they had previously claimed, based on their criminality.

Roma Holocaust Memorial Day was only recently established in 2016 by Romani and Sinti activists.

Nico Fortuna, a Roma sociologist, observed perhaps the most haunting and devastating effect this has had on the collective Roma Sinti experience, stating: “There is a difference between the Jewish and Roma deportees. The Jews were shocked and can remember the year, date, and time it happened. The Roma shrugged it off.

“They said, ‘Of course I was deported. I’m Roma; these things happen to a Roma.’

“In remembering the thousands of Roma Sinti who were killed or subjected to horrific medical experiments in the second world war, we must also address the staggering deep-seated prejudices and stereotypes that members of the Gypsy, Roma, Traveller and Sinti people suffer daily across Europe today.

“From the huge impact the Police, Crime, Sentencing & Courts Bill has on a cultural way of life — with its impact nothing short of a continued cultural genocide — the discrimination Roma people have faced when fleeing the war in Ukraine, to the microaggression of Labour MP Charlotte Nichols’s now withdrawn campaign leaflet that promised to deal with ‘Traveller incursions.’

“It is clear the left has a lot of work to do to tackle this ‘last acceptable’ form of racism.”