Persecution of Roma and Sinti commemorated in Camp Westerbork

The persecution of Sinti and Roma by the Nazis is commemorated on Sunday in the former Camp Westerbork.

In May 1944, 80 years ago, 578 Roma and Sinti were rounded up in a large-scale raid and transported to Camp Westerbork. Of these, 245 were deported by train to the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp in Poland. Only 31 returned alive.

The commemoration starts on Sunday at 1:30 p.m. Participants will then walk from the barrier at the camp to the memorial with stones. There, the names of all the deported Sinti and Roma will be read out. The outgoing State Secretary, Maarten van Ooijen (Victims of War), will give a speech. At 3 p.m., the participants will lay wreaths.

There is little known about the ethnic minority's history in the Netherlands. Marcia Rooker, a lawyer specializing in the legal position of Roma and Sinti in International Law, explains that there are two reasons for this: "The government has never recognized them as an ethnic minority, and people from this community are generally distrustful of authorities. They do not believe that solutions to the problems they raise are being worked on," she told RTV Drenthe.

However, the new generation is bringing more to light, and the young people, as successors, want to know more and speak openly about the difficult past of the Sinti and Roma, says Rooker.

The Sinti and Roma were persecuted, imprisoned, and murdered by the Nazis, as were Jews, communists, homosexuals, and Jehovah's Witnesses. The mass persecution of the Roma and Sinti is called Porajmos in their language. Before the Second World War, there were over one million Roma and Sinti in Europe. It is estimated that a quarter to half of them were murdered.