Roma Holocaust Remembrance Day has been commemorated in Slovakia on August 2 since 2005. It is a commemoration of the almost three thousand Roma men, women and children who died on the night of August 2-3, 1944 in the Nazi camp, Auschwitz-Birkenau.
During the Second World War, approximately 500,000 Roma died, persecuted on ethnic grounds and subjected to racially motivated violence. At the time, this meant at least a quarter of the total Roma population in Europe. We call the Roma Holocaust the attempt of Nazi Germany and its allies to exterminate the Roma in Europe as the Nuremberg Laws, adopted by the Reichstag on September 15, 1935, declared Roma and Jews "enemies of a racially pure state."
According to the population census of 1938, there were 26,265 Roma inhabitants in Slovakia, but the actual number is estimated to be twice that. Persecutions against the Roma took place in several ways. In the first period, there were efforts to eliminate the nomadic way of life. The second period, already under the direct occupation of Slovakia by Nazi Germany, had a much more brutal character and is marked above all by the creation of a detention camp for Roma in Dubnice nad Váhom. There, on February 23, 1945, after the outbreak of the typhus epidemic, the Germans murdered all the sick Roma.
Source: RTVS
