The Holocaust and genocide of the Roma must never be forgotten - Lord Pickles

Secondly, ‘The Girl with the Headscarf’ is a nine-year-old Dutch Romani girl looking out of a railway truck. In this case too, we have a name: Anna Maria ‘Settela’ Steinbach. The terror and hopelessness in that young girl’s face will stay with me forever. Sadly, Settela did not survive. She is a vivid symbol of a lost generation, of what could have been.

The village of Szczurowa had been home to Polish Roma families for centuries. But on July 3, 1943, a German police unit used local farmers to round up the Roma of the village and take them to the local churchyard on carts.

They were murdered and buried in a mass grave. Afterwards, the Nazis and their collaborators burned the Roma homes.

The murder of the 93 Szczurowa Roma was not an isolated incident. We know of over 180 sites in Poland alone where Roma were executed in large groups, sometimes together with Jewish people.

So, the Polish Roma were killed in extermination camps, died in ghettos and murdered by the Nazi’s murder squads. There are differences depending on when and where you look.

But one thing remains constant: none of this could have happened without deep-rooted prejudice against Roma. This prejudice continued after 1945.

In 2020, the Member Countries of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, the IHRA, pledged their political commitment to remember this history, to honour the victims and the survivors.

That same year, we adopted the IHRA working definition of antigypsyism/anti-Roma discrimination, which provides a starting point for raising awareness and for taking action.

In 2018, the Czech government closed down the industrial pig farm at Lety on the site of a former concentration camp for Roma. In March this year, I attended the moving ceremony which saw the opening of the Lety Memorial.

Remembrance triumphed over neglect and a government took ownership of their duty to history. Earlier this year the groundbreaking online Encyclopaedia of the Nazi Genocide of the Sinti and Roma in Europe was launched.

It marks the first comprehensive overview of the existing knowledge on the persecution and murder of the Sinti and Roma under National Socialism.

The IHRA is now finalising a set of recommendations to help policy makers include this history in education curricula.

It will sit alongside the materials to help educators teach about the broader history of Roma in Europe developed by the Council of Europe.

An abridged version of a speech by Lord Pickles, chair of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, at the 80th anniversary of the Genocide of the Roma ceremony.