"Romer", uttjatat ämne javisst, men vad vet vi om deras historia?

Men vad har de med gamla Rom, och Egypten att göra?

Får inte riktigt kläm om deras tidiga ursprung, och varför de aldrig någonsin har blivit accepterat som en etnisk grupp.

(2) Kan jag helt plötsligt kalla mig Romer i samhället, om inte varför ?

Determining the percentage or number of Romanies who died in the Holocaust has not been easy. Bernard Streck noted that “any attempts to express Romani casualties in terms of numbers . . . cannot be verified by means of lists or card-indexes or camp files; most of the Gypsies died in eastern or southern Europe, shot by execution troops or fascist gang members”.

Much of the Nazi documentation still remains to be analyzed and, as Streck intimates, many murders were not recorded since they took place in the fields and forests where Romanies were arrested. There are no accurate figures either for the pre-war Romani population in Europe, though the Nazi Party’s official census of 1939 estimated it to be about two million, certainly an under-representation. Regarding numbers, König says:

The count of half a million Sinti and Roma murdered between 1939 and 1945 is too low to be tenable; for example in the Soviet Union many of the Romani dead were listed under non-specific labels such as Liquidierungsübrigen [remainder to be liquidated], ‘hangers-on’ and ‘partisans’. . .The final number of the dead Sinti and Roma may never be determined. We do not know precisely how many were brought into the concentration camps; not every concentration camp produced statistical material; moreover, Sinti and Roma are often listed under the heading of remainder to be liquidated, and do not appear in the statistics for Gypsies.

In the eastern territories, in Russia especially, Romani deaths were sometimes counted into the records under the heading of Jewish deaths. The Memorial Book also discusses the means of killing Romanies:

Unlike the Jews, the overwhelming majority of whom were murdered in the gas chambers at Birkenau, Belzec, Treblinka and all the other mass extermination camps, the Gypsies outside the Reich were massacred at many places, sometimes only a few at a time, and sometimes by the hundreds. In the Generalgouvernement [the eastern territories] alone, 150 sites of Gypsy massacres are known. Research on the Jewish Holocaust can rely on comparison of pre- and post-war census data to help determine the numbers of victims in the countries concerned. However, this is not possible for the Gypsies, as it was only rarely that they were included in national census data. Therefore it is an impossible task to find the actual number of Gypsy victims in Poland, Yugoslavia, White Ruthenia and the Ukraine, the lands that probably had the greatest numbers of victims.

The 1997 figure reported by the late Dr Sybil Milton, then senior historian at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Research Institute in Washington put the number of Romani lives lost by 1945 at “between a half and one and a half million”. Significantly, the same figure appeared again in a November 2001 report issued by the International Organization for Migration (the IOM), a body designated to locate and compensate surviving Romani Holocaust victims. The brief states that “[r]ecent research indicates that up to 1.5 million Roma perished during the Nazi era”.

It is certainly a fact that interviews in the past four years by trained Romani personnel who have obtained testimonials at first-hand from claimants throughout central and eastern Europe have already shed startling new light on this issue: the number of Romani survivors is far in excess of anything previously estimated. By extrapolation, and from the same eyewitness accounts documented in recent years, the numbers of Romanies who perished at the hands of the Nazis has also been grossly underestimated. Eventually, these revised figures will find their way into the public record.