Roma Holocaust Remembrance: The Complicit Silence of History’s Bystanders and the Persistence of Anti-Roma Racism

August 2nd is known in a number of European countries as Roma Holocaust Memorial Day. It is a significant day in history because 80 years ago on the night of August 2nd, 1944 the Nazis killed the more than 4,200 Roma and Sinti incarcerated in the Auschwitz II-Birkenau concentration camp in gas chambers, effectively liquidating the Roma family camp in Section B-Ile at Auschwitz. Since 2015, more than seventy years after the Nazis destroyed the Roma family camp, the European Parliament has officially recognized August 2nd as European Roma Holocaust Memorial Day for Roma and Sinti, a subgroup of Roma.

Individuals, organizations, and political bodies across Europe had already been commemorating this immense loss of life at the hands of the Nazis every year even before the 2015 recognition by the European Parliament. While it is key that larger political bodies such as international parliaments and national governments take official steps to recognize and remember the Roma who died in Auschwitz, more needs to be done. Roma received no war crime reparations following the atrocities of World War II for a number of reasons, including the discriminatory practices of the administrative body set up to make decisions about compensation. In the Nuremberg Trials, no one was present on behalf of Roma victims of the Holocaust. While many European states have taken steps recently in officially recognizing the massive, generational disruption of the Holocaust, there has been little effort made toward reparations or reconciliation either for the Roma Holocaust, or for the centuries of slavery Roma endured in Romania. While it was not until the 1990s that Roma and Sinti in Germany became eligible to receive “compensation for the financial and property losses incurred because of the Nazi deportation,” no other country in Europe has taken steps to such an extent in reparations since. Yet, through a combination of recognition, reparation, and reconciliation efforts, justice with the goal of Romani emancipation could be possible.

For decades, Roma and Roma-led organizations across Europe have been fighting for political power, representation, and inclusion at every level—local, national, and EU. They have demanded more than just superficial policy changes; they call for the uncompromising safeguarding of human dignity, a say in political decision-making, and the radical education of the next generation. In Hungary, as elsewhere, Roma activists insist on the creation of cultural and academic institutions dedicated to Roma rights, the total prohibition of ethnic discrimination, and the immediate desegregation of schools. These demands are non-negotiable for the realization of true democracy in Hungary, one that confronts and rectifies both its historical and ongoing systemic exclusion of Roma. Yet, these transformative goals will remain out of reach unless gadjo, or non-Roma, emerge from our complacency and abandon the illusion that mere adherence to EU mandates or post-communist integration schemes will suffice for Roma emancipation and inclusion.

The Roma Holocaust and the Everyday Nazi Monster

In Romani languages, there are a number of terms for the Roma Holocaust including Porajmos, which translates as “the devouring,” Pharrajimos, “fragmentation” or “cutting up,” and Samudaripen, or “mass killing.” Addressing what the aftermath of the Holocaust has been like for Roma, Ian Hancock (2002) remarks, 

“The greatest tragedy to befall the European Romani population…, [a tragedy] even greater than the five and a half centuries of slavery in Romania, was the attempt to eradicate it as part of the Nazis’ plan to have a ‘Gypsy-free’ land. Although it wasn’t the first governmental resolution to exterminate Romanies (German Emperor Karl VI had previously issued such an order in 1721), it was by far the most devastating, ultimately destroying over half of the Romani population in Nazi-occupied Europe.” (40)

Hancock names the Roma Holocaust “the greatest tragedy” for Roma in Europe because it was a plan orchestrated on a never-before-seen massive scale for a Roma-free Europe, putting it on another level beyond any racist effort before or since World War II.

Prior to the Nazis taking power in Germany, dehumanizing terminology (e.g., “plague,” “menace,” “unworthy of life”) circulated in books conferences, studies, and the media to describe the Jewish and Roma populations, claiming that Roma had a tendency to engage in criminal activity. It was on December 16, 1942 that Heinrich Himmler issued the decree for the “Final Solution” in which all Roma in Europe were to be gathered and sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp to be exterminated. There are numerous estimates of how many Roma were killed in the Holocaust between 1939-1945, but the exact number is uncertain for several reasons, among them the many instances in German-occupied countries in which Roma were led to or arrested in a field or forested area, executed, and then buried in mass graves. Relatedly, Nazi records did not always label Roma victims according to ethnicity or social group, but instead were given non-specific labels that did not clearly identify victims. In the documentary film A People Uncounted (2011), historian Gerhard Baumgartner notes that the numbers estimated as to how many Roma were murdered in the Holocaust is 500,000 and up to 1,500,000 victims. Perhaps even more damning is his emphasis that 90% of the Roma in Europe were killed, which signifies the extermination of nearly an entire generation. This immense disruption of life had devastating effects on Roma traditions and cultures; such a major loss of life as that experienced by Roma victims of the Holocaust has repercussions with regard to equal rights for present and future generations to come.

Baumgartner also underscores that without the aid of locals, the Holocaust could not have happened as it was often locals who coordinated the rounding up of Jews and Roma for the trains that would take them away to concentration camps. He addresses this in the documentary, asking

“Why did people become Nazis? Why did they support this kind of racist policy? These were civilized people in the 1920s. In the 1940s they were carrying out a murderous policy. In order to understand how this could happen, we have to paint a much more realistic and much more varied picture of what Nazism was. As long as you try to portray the Nazis as monsters which you can’t understand it’s very easy to say that the whole story was invented. If you can show that this is a social development which leads to Nazism and that broad masses were affected by it and were prepared to act as perpetrators and also to act as just lookers on, to let it happen then you can explain why it happened and then you can’t just talk it away.”

Baumgartner’s commentary resonates with Hannah Arendt’s (1963) famous observations of the  Nazi bureaucrat Adolf Eichmann who was brought to trial, convicted, and executed for war crimes he committed in WWII against the Jewish population. According to Arendt, his actions and participation in the atrocities of the Holocaust epitomized the “banality of evil”—that is, he exhibited no fanatical hatred of Jews, he was just following orders—and thus the “monsters” who perpetrated the Holocaust could take the form of seemingly “normal” bureaucrats. Writing from Orbán’s Hungary in 2020 Angéla Kóczé argues that “the lack of public outrage and outcry” against “growing institutionalized anti-Roma racism” indexes the complicity of the ordinary person, the bystander’s dangerous silence, and the normalization of everyday discrimination against Roma.

The Endurance of the Roma Holocaust: the Persistent ‘Banality of Evil’ in Hungary

The case of today’s post-socialist, illiberal Hungary illustrates the endurance of the Roma Holocaust in ordinary life. Racializing silence—that is, the silence of not speaking against anti-Roma racism—reveals a deep inability for Hungary to reckon with its own past as it articulates its relationship with the stated values of the European Union. Anti-Roma racism continues in the present in new forms, shaping how Roma still experience exclusion in Hungary today. The ongoing racialization of Roma dates as far back as the first appearance of Roma in Europe and endured during their enslavement. However, the large-scale disruption of the Pharrajimos, or Roma Holocaust, that began with these prior ethnic persecutions of Roma and culminated in their mass extermination, is one of the defining events that has produced everyday racialized forms of exclusion that remain productive of modern-day, anti-Roma racial orders. Though anti-Roma legislation and exclusion pre-dates the Roma Holocaust, the fact that the legacy of a tragedy on such a massive scale as the Roma Holocaust goes unrecognized in majority society to this day is one way in which anti-Roma racial orders are reproduced. The appearance in recent decades of groups with explicitly anti-Roma agendas like Jobbik and the Hungarian Guard shows that Hungarian non-Roma have not reckoned with the legacy of the Roma Holocaust, especially when ordinary, gadjo citizens stay silent and complicit.

Racial legislation passed under Adolf Hitler’s totalitarian dictatorship even before WWII, which aimed to protect the “purity” of German blood from a “racially inferior” people, paved the way for authorities to arrest and incarcerate Roma en masse in concentration camps all across Europe. The German army occupied Hungary on March 19, 1944 after learning of Hungary’s plans to disengage from the war. This invasion was a turning point, but the processes of the Holocaust were already underway in Hungary. Anti-Semitic and anti-Roma sentiments had been festering, with discriminatory laws and actions beginning to take shape. After the occupation, German troops removed irredentist regent Miklós Horthy, the leader of Hungary who had allied with Nazi Germany, from power and replaced him with Ferenc Szálasi and his fascist Arrow Cross Party. Szálasi’s collaboration with the Germans in the war solidified Hungary’s full participation in the Final Solution. Under his authoritarian regime, Roma were officially “placed outside the law.” Although earlier deportations have been documented, the full-scale deportation of the Roma population in Hungary occurred in November and December of 1944. The Arrow Cross Party and Hungarian police had commenced the deportation of the urban Jewish population of Hungary in May and June of 1944, leading to the deaths of close to 600,000 Jews during the Holocaust in Hungary. Estimates of Hungarian Roma killed in the Holocaust range from 5,000 to 28,000, though “the total number of murdered Roma [in Hungary] are still under discussion.”

To get a capacious understanding of both the significance and lived experience of the Roma Holocaust, survivors’ accounts must be taken into consideration. In Hungary, documentation was conducted by János Bársony, Ágnes Daróczi, and their colleagues from the Roma Press Center in the late 1990s and published in a collection. In 1995, Daróczi, along with Bársony and Miklós Jancsó, investigated the massacre that took place in Lajoskomárom on January 23, 1945 in which all of the Roma living in the village were executed by the gendarmes. Their short film about the massacre was aired on public TV in the late 1990s. Further massacres took place in Hungary near the end of WWII in which hundreds, if not thousands, of Roma lost their lives at the hands of the Arrow Cross Party in the towns and villages of Doboz, Lengyel, Lenti, and Várpalota. 

In their testimonies, a number of Roma survivors of the Holocaust describe how once they returned to their villages after the liberation of the concentration camps, nothing was left of       places they had once called home. That is, they often found their houses emptied because locals thought they would have died in the war. There are testimonies describing further persecution, and accounts of being made to go on the run. Some who returned to where they once lived were evicted from their homes because neighbors did not want to live in close proximity to Roma. The experience of József Forgács, a Roma Holocaust survivor from Zalaegerszeg, Hungary is one example of how the suffering he endured did not end once the forced labor camp to which he had been deported was liberated. 

“Forgács could not believe he was still alive when Soviet troops liberated the camp. The gates were opened and he was free. But his ordeal was not over…They walked hundreds of miles, begging for shelter and food from people speaking a strange language. They slept anywhere they could find, usually outdoors in a field. Many children died like this on the road…When he arrived at Sopron, a city at the Hungarian-Austrian border, he knew he was home…But home was nowhere to be found. When he finally reached his hometown of Zalaegerszeg, his family house had been ruined…Forgács stayed in Zalaegerszeg all his life, working for over 40 years in construction and as a furniture manufacturer. Despite his ordeal he still faced discrimination in later years. He received no compensation from the state because he did not spend a full year at the concentration camp.”

A key fact that is less often acknowledged in Hungarian collective memory of the Holocaust is the role of ordinary Hungarian citizens’ participation in Nazi efforts. The banality of anti-Roma racism is fraught with the silence of being witnesses who are “thoughtless… a condition [Arendt] defined as the ‘inability to ever look at anything from the other fellow’s point of view.’” When the Roma and Jewish neighbors of non-Roma and non-Jewish Hungarians were rounded up and deported, Hungarians took part in identifying, locating, and transporting them to the local train station. The Holocaust was thus a genocide perpetuated by not only those who overtly associated with the Arrow Cross and Nazi Parties, but also by those who had no such affiliations, but actively or passively participated in atrocities nevertheless. This chilling participation reveals that the Holocaust was not solely the work of a small group of fanatics but involved a broader spectrum of society. The normalization of discrimination against the Roma today in Hungary reflects a continuity from this history of complicity and silence. Just as in the past, the perpetuation of discrimination against Roma often occurs through everyday acts of omission and commission, where individuals and institutions contribute to systemic biases and injustices. Understanding this historical context helps illuminate how deeply ingrained prejudices and structural inequalities persist.      

As recently as 2021, Ioanida Costache noted, “Roma are central to the historical and contemporary manifestations of race and racism in the European space.” Efforts in the social control of Roma are not new and remain in practice, albeit in slightly different forms, in present-day Europe. In Hungary, such racist practices endure, for example, as the racialized exclusion of Roma from adequate housing with the fear of imminent eviction or property seizure as an everyday, ordinary circumstance. Segregation continues in the Hungarian educational system in which Roma students are made to feel shame for their ethnicity, are treated differently, and are often segregated from their non-Roma peers. Quality healthcare for Roma in a pervasively understaffed healthcare system often resembles suffering before any actual care takes place—that is, Roma experience discrimination in hospitals, have unequal access to healthcare, suffer from chronic medical conditions at higher rates than their fellow non-Roma and are often provided lesser quality care than non-Roma. Dignified employment remains out of reach when Roma are excluded from workplaces that offer more than a survival wage. Such practices and circumstances endure as normalized, institutionalized phenomena. Anti-Roma narratives persist in Hungary, echoing different historical periods. 

During state socialism, from 1961 onwards, Roma were viewed not as a national minority but as a social issue. This era saw the emergence of the term “gypsy crime” in public discourse and in official police statistics. The recent political climate shift towards the right in Hungary has further marginalized Roma, mirroring trends in other countries. However, anti-Roma rhetoric is found across the political spectrum, with both left- and right-wing politicians exploiting the Roma community during election campaigns to mobilize their base. This scapegoating tactic risks reinforcing the stereotype of Roma as criminals, even though Hungarian police do not record ethnic data in crime statistics. The mid- to late 2000s witnessed a rise in violence against Roma, coinciding with right-wing nationalist groups such as Jobbik and the Hungarian Guard gaining visibility through violent rallies aimed at “protecting communities” from (the manufactured threat of) crimes committed by Roma.

There is a long history of Roma activism in Hungary with Roma activists mobilizing since the 1930s to promote Romani emancipation. From the 1930s through the 1950s, journalist and community organizer Mária László worked independently and later as part of a government-sponsored organization to advocate for Roma and defend their rights. The Roma Civil Rights Movement launched in the late 1980s with a protest led by Aladár Horváth against evictions of Roma residents in the city of Miskolc. In the past couple of decades, the work of the late civil rights activist Jenő Setét on Roma Pride events gave new momentum to Roma rights efforts. More recently, Roma activists have made demands for the inclusion of Roma in decision-making concerning policies and funding that have direct effects on Roma lives—recalling the slogan “Nothing about us without us” that many Roma scholars and activists have adopted.

Despite the Roma-led activism and struggle for recognition, there are no government-sponsored yearly commemoration events for Roma Holocaust Memorial Day in Hungary, nor has the Hungarian government established an official annual commemoration day on August 2nd. Roma-led groups organize the two main Roma Holocaust memorial events that take place each year on August 2nd. Roma and non-Roma gather annually at the Roma Holocaust Memorial located on the Nehru Bank along the Danube River in Budapest to hold a vigil in memory of Roma victims of the Holocaust. Despite these and other Roma-led commemorations taking place across the country to honor the victims and survivors of violence perpetrated against Roma, the Hungarian government has not designated a single memorial site on former extermination sites from the Roma Holocaust. In schools, in-depth lessons on the Roma Holocaust are offered only as special topics courses, and have no place in the national curriculum. According to a report on the teaching of the Roma Holocaust published by the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, in Hungary teaching materials are not made widely available for teachers that wish to teach about the Roma genocide. Further, Hungarian history textbooks altogether omit the role Roma played in important historical events such as the wars of independence. Thus, not only are the sites of the Roma Holocaust in Hungary absent from Hungarian history textbooks, but so are everyday Roma heroes like the activists, musicians, laborers, teachers, and historians who have enriched Hungarian history and culture. Such representation is important because it can serve as a source of national memory and pride as well as the lessons necessary to begin repairing historical injustices. For the creation of a positive image of Roma, it would be essential that all Hungarian students—Roma and non-Roma alike—learn about key cultural, social, and political Roma leaders in Hungary like journalist and pioneer activist Mária László, writer Menyhért Lakatos, poet József Choli Daróczi, activist Béla Puczi, revolutionary fighter Ilona Szabó, activist Aladár Horváth, writer and activist Ágnes Daróczi, and civil rights activist Jenő Setét, to name just a few.

The Role of the Gadjo (Non-Roma) Majority in Contributing to Change 

To be clear, I write these words not as a Romani woman, but as someone who is gadjo, or non-Roma. I believe it is essential to be transparent about my own position because the urgent work of advocating for Roma emancipation and the inclusion of Roma voices cannot fall solely on the shoulders of Roma individuals and organizations. While policy-driven integration and inclusion are important, they must be part of a broader struggle for true emancipation. This means dismantling systemic racism, amplifying Roma voices in all spheres of society, and ensuring that non-Roma actively engage in the fight against oppression. Non-Roma allies have a critical role in challenging oppressive structures, acknowledging their historical and present-day complicity, and working alongside Roma communities to achieve genuine freedom and equality. Each group, both Roma and non-Roma, has responsibilities in commemorating the massive loss of life that occurred during the Roma Holocaust. While some of these responsibilities overlap (mourning, remembering), others are distinct. Non-Roma have the additional responsibility of acknowledging their predecessors’ involvement in Nazi atrocities and making reparations for the extensive, transgenerational harm inflicted[22] . Reparations in this context refer to tangible actions, for which Roma scholars and activists have called, such as financial compensation, the establishment of educational and cultural programs, and policy changes aimed at rectifying historical injustices and supporting the Roma community’s recovery and empowerment. As Margareta Matache has asserted in relation to the legacy of Romani slavery in Romania, “Forgetting, distorting, and erasing the past have always been powerful tools in the hands of oppressors and their descendants in all corners of the world.” So too when it comes to the legacy of the Roma Holocaust. All across Europe, Roma activists and organizations have struggled and negotiated for compensation, recognition, commemoration, more say in policies affecting Roma, and Holocaust education. 

In Europe, particularly in Hungary, integration and inclusion have become prominent goals of social policy regarding Roma, especially after joining the European Union. However, the so-called “failures” of integration often manifest as racialized removals from spaces that are subsequently repurposed for public and market value. The persistent practice of evicting Roma from their homes without providing alternative housing is frequently justified by municipal officials as a public health concern, unfairly placing blame on those being evicted. In Hungary for example, once Roma residents are removed, the area of their former residences are gentrified into soccer stadiums or private housing for non-Roma. While social policy tends to frame integration as a problem that must be solved via programs that assist Roma in integrating into majority society, I want to call attention to an aspect of integration and inclusion that usually receives less attention from policymakers by asking: what responsibility does majority society have in building a society that is not just accepting but also respectful of Roma life and demands for emancipation and how do all members of society integrate into it collectively? As noted above, Roma have called for representation and inclusion in political decision-making on the local, national, and EU levels, but have also made demands for more than just anti-racist policies. 

Returning to the case of Hungary, past and present Roma Civil Rights activists have been calling for the safeguarding of “the values of human dignity” claiming that “it is the moral obligation of every responsible and learned citizen to uphold them.” Aladár Horváth, one of the founders of the Roma Civil Rights Movement, in expressing the goals of the movement, has further stressed the importance of building organizational and media support for civil resistance and educating the next generation. János Orsós, Roma activist, educator, and co-founder of Dr. Ámédkar High School, and Jenő Setét reaffirmed László Majtényi’s claim that Hungary cannot be a democracy without Roma emancipation and detailed their demands for measures that the state must take and the legislative changes that must be made to ensure equitable opportunities for Roma. These demands include the establishment of cultural and academic institutions for Roma rights; a guarantee for Roma participation in social and political decisions; the prohibition of discrimination and segregation based on ethnic grounds; the end of all state funding mechanisms that ultimately serve to isolate the poor; the executive branch to uphold all court decisions protecting Roma rights; the preservation of the dignity of all citizens living beneath the poverty line; and the desegregation of schools. To them, Majtényi’s claim about the relationship between Roma and democracy in Hungary is an “opening” for Hungary to face its exclusionary present and past. 

Widespread majority group participation in these values and the struggles to realize Roma emancipation and the inclusion of Roma voices are key to its long-term success as Hungary and the EU remain spaces that are not wholly safe for Roma. Though policy that focuses on the majority-responsibility feature of the “integration problem” may offer routes to a society resembling one in which the burdens of integration and inclusion do not remain solely the province of the oppressed, I argue that eradicating the endurance and impacts of anti-Roma racism in its contemporary forms requires more than another set of EU policies or recommendations. In a near vacuum of effective frameworks and action plans designed to “integrate” Roma, many Roma have made the difficult decision to leave their home countries, while others have no choice but to stay in a place without channels through which their voices could be transformative. Violence and threats of violence that anti-Roma groups launch against Roma are evidence of resistance not only to the values contained in integration and inclusion policy, but in the values signifying and necessary for Roma emancipation. The racialized erasures and removals taking place in ordinary life show the inability of majority society to take the aforementioned necessary, tangible next steps for creating a society that welcomes and celebrates Roma life and emancipation on a daily basis and in ordinary ways.

While there have been steps taken to address and recognize the history of anti-Roma racism, statistics still paint an image of inadequate progress for Roma in Hungary and across Europe in the areas of housing, education, employment, and healthcare. At the time of writing this essay, it has been thirty-four years since the fall of Communism, thirty years since the passage of the Minority Law which gave Roma in Hungary a place in public life, nineteen years since Hungary became an EU member, and eighteen years since the start of the Decade of Roma Inclusion. Each of these historical events involved significant applications and mobilizations of funding, organizational efforts, human resources, and policy change to address and move forward with efforts for integration and inclusion of Roma into mainstream society. Relying solely on EU policy and national and local government structures to transform relations between majority society and Roma citizens is insufficient. Truly transformative material solidarity would involve more than just policy changes; it requires concrete actions and commitments. Despite policy efforts, the eviction of Roma residents from their homes remains common; many schools and municipalities continue to practice segregation; Roma have a noticeably lower life expectancy compared to non-Roma; and unemployment rates are high, with many Roma relying on government assistance or survival wages. These troubling signs indicate that minimal progress in Roma emancipation and inclusion is the norm, suggesting that EU recommendations and policy frameworks are often seen as the pinnacle of ambition. However, these realities for Roma citizens should invoke a sense of urgency for immediate, transformative solidarities that ensure all members of society are free from anti-Roma racism, driven by the genuine inclusion of Roma voices in decision-making processes.

To all non-Roma individuals: it is time to take action. It is time for us to recognize the critical importance of August 2nd and commit to ending the ongoing marginalization of Roma communities. The absence of official, public recognition of the significance of August 2nd in European nations is just another glaring example of distorted ambition and inadequate urgency. This lack of acknowledgment not only signals an unwillingness to confront historical atrocities but also sends the disturbing message that the Nazi execution of over 4,200 Roma and Sinti at Auschwitz 80 years ago on August 2nd, 1944 is insignificant; that it is an unmemorable act. By remaining silent, we perpetuate the notion that such horrors need not be mourned; that there is no need for amends or apologies to the victims, survivors, their descendants, and the intergenerational trauma they carry; and that such an act need not serve as a warning to future generations to ensure that history does not repeat itself. The silence surrounding August 2nd on behalf of national governments and ordinary citizens is deeply troublesome and is an exposure of the everyday hostility Roma continue to face. The Hungarian and EU projects sustain anti-Roma racism with ineffective recommendations and inaction forged into policy. As Europe’s largest minority, Roma are an essential part of its fabric and are integral to European cultures, values, and institutions, so it is imperative that the non-Roma, gadjo majority take action to treat Roma as inalienable to our shared society. We must carry out a revolution of values to understand our role in this massive, deadly disruption of lives and recognize the lasting need to disrupt and dismantle its legacy. Now is the time for non-Roma to stand up, acknowledge this dark chapter of European history, and commit to ensuring that it is never forgotten or repeated.