Slovakia commemorates Roma Holocaust Memorial Day

Slovakia is one of those countries which, since 2015, annually commemorates 2 August as Memorial Day for the victims of the Roma Holocaust. President Zuzana Čaputová also commemorated it in a social media post. According to her, the Roma Holocaust is still poorly documented. To prevent history from repeating itself, the head of state said it is necessary to understand what hatred, humiliation and discrimination mean for the specific people and families who experience it. She also referred to her meeting with Adela Makova from Badin. "She was only a year old when the guardsmen killed her father, a partisan. She told me how Roma were caught in the streets and executed in Kremnička by the Guards at the end of the war. How those murdered left orphans behind," she said. Slovak Minister of Foreign and European Affairs Ivan Korčok also recalled that the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance is dealing with this topic. "Slovakia is an active member and actively approaches international cooperation in the field of education, preservation of memory and research of the Roma genocide during the Holocaust," he said. The Memorial Day for Roma Holocaust Victims commemorates the events of 2 to 3 August 1944, when nearly 3,000 Roma were murdered in the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. It is estimated that as many as half a million European Roma and Sinti perished during the Second World War. The total number of Roma victims of the Holocaust in Slovakia is estimated at around 1,000.