Sàrmudaripen (Roma Holocaust) Denial: Still A Problem! / Phenipen-tele e Sàrmudaripenesko: bàro problemo
Like almost all Roma of the post-war “baby boom” generation, I grew up with constant reminders that the death of various close relatives, above all my maternal grandfather, at the hands of the Nazis and their associates and satellite states had devastated my family and thrown us into poverty, poverty that continued well into my own life and profoundly affected my grandmother and my mother. As a result, the Sàrmudaripen was never far from my thoughts and thus it remains today, and I remember very clearly that the post-war West German government, as was, denied that any genocide against the Roma had even occurred until well into my adult life (early 1980s) and even now it is continuing to resist paying compensation to survivors or descendants. And it was not until 2012 that any monument at all was erected by the German government: there is now a small one in central Berlin but, tellingly, it was created by gàdje and the inscription is made only in English and German, not in Romani.
I was inspired to write this article by the behaviour of a certain “gypsyologist” by the name of Rainer Schulze, an emeritus Professor originally of Ruhr-Universität Bochum and latterly of Essex University in the UK, who is promoting a known-false death toll of the Sàrmudaripen, conceivably with the intention of minimizing the exposure of the German government to compensation claims.
Those who are familiar with my writings will know that I have a particular objection to gàdje “gypsyologist” academics who, collectively, exclude genuine Roma from their academic circles and even attack the reputations of those of us who “dare” to contradict them with our knowledge of our own native language, history and culture, relying on the inherent racism of social media companies (who are known to permit gàdje to make racist attacks on Roma while censoring any Roma who challenge them, as I have illustrated many times in my writings) to silence criticism. Herr Schulze is evidently an exponent of this art, since he is making baseless accusations against the leader of the UK Sinti/Roma Holocaust Memorial Trust merely for telling him that his refusal to revise his outrageously low claim of 200 000 deaths was unjustified and that he has no right to claim that he knows better than the affected families what happened and how it affected us. And furthermore, he has obtained a posting ban against her based simply on his own, false, claim that she threatened him verbally (because of course the American media giants will take the unsupported word of a white man over that of a brown woman, and of course they will believe that a 5ft2 Roma woman is “dangerous”).
So... how do we know that Herr Schulze is knowingly promoting a falsehood?
Well, put simply, numerous eyewitness testimonies confirm that far more Roma were murdered on-the-spot wherever they were found by the Einsatzgruppen and other elements of the Nazi military machine than were sent to camps, and further, that because the Nazis considered us to be the ultimate form of Untermenschen, not even worthy of having our deaths recorded, even the camp records were grossly incomplete – and it is also known that numerous camps in satellite states such as Czechoslovakia were written out of the public record and conveniently “lost”.
The much-acclaimed and highly respected Wiesenthal Centre has suggested a death toll, based on Nazi records, of 2 to 2.5 million Roma, and based on eyewitness testimonies regarding the extent of unrecorded killings as well as an estimate of how much the Roma population of Europe was reduced during the Nazi years, Roma historian Vania de Gila Kochanowski suggested that the true figure might be more like 7.5 million.
Supporting these claims, firstly even the European Union, which is notoriously conservative regarding standards of evidence, as well as including a number of national governments that are outright hostile towards Roma, accepts a figure of 500 000. More significantly, it is known that in Czechoslovakia only around 600 of the entire pre-war Roma population survived (today's Czech Roma migrated in from elsewhere after 1945), from an estimated million people. So clearly, with around a million deaths among the Czech Roma alone, a figure of 200 000 is blatantly and insultingly wrong. And added to that, of course, were massive death tolls right across the entire Nazi sphere of influence, to the extent that several entire dialects of the Romani language were lost forever because every single speaker was murdered.
Furthermore, the pre-war Roma had a genuine “middle class” of educated and often quite wealthy families, and they were eliminated almost in their entirety by the Nazis, because being mostly settled rather than nomadic they were easy to capture, the Nazis wished to eliminate the educated classes particularly to minimize resistance to their program of genocide, and finally, the Nazis simply wished to steal their houses, businesses and possessions. This loss of successful, educated Roma had particularly dire consequences throughout our population.
Yet, Herr Schulze not only persists in promoting his false figure of only 200 000, knowing that all available evidence points to a figure ten to thirty times larger than this, but also attacks our own leaders who “dare” to contradict him, and insults our intelligence by claiming that he, a gàdjo who does not speak our language, would know our own history and culture better than we ourselves do, when he cannot possibly have had access to most of the eyewitnesses since a great many of the latter, unsurprisingly, will not talk with gàdje at all (nor indeed, in many cases, will they speak in any language but Romani) about what happened due to a loss of trust.
We have a saying in Romani, “so kerdo se e navesa e Romenge, numa bi e Romender, kerdo se muial e Romende”: what is done in the name of the Roma, but without the Roma, is done against the Roma. Herr Schulze is clearly acting muial e Romende, in the interests of gàdje (particularly the German government) and against us, and therefore I pronounce him dushmano e Romane jenengo, an enemy of the Roma people, and màkhado (defiled, unclean).