A German grabbed her by the hair, and her long braid came off in his hand. She escaped. But it wasn’t only the Germans who caused harm. On 2 August, the Roma and Sinti Genocide Remembrance Day is observed.

Maria was born in Czarna Góra, right on the border with Slovakia. Her father was a blacksmith, he had his own forge. He lived with his eight children in a wooden shack – a stove made of bricks stood in the middle, life was poor. There were three such Roma „huts” in the village, as Maria called them. In the other two lived her father’s brothers with their families. „We were despised, the village head hated us, people from the village used to beat us – it’s hard to talk about” – she recalls. She was nine years old when the war broke out.

When the Germans came, the village headman defended the Roma who lived there, he felt sorry for them. „He begged them to leave us in peace”. Asked about the events of those days, 69-year-old Maria remembers that it was at night. They arrived by car, it was dark. They took them away by force – everyone except three children, including Maria. The older ones were to be taken for forced labour, but to this day no one knows where they were taken. „We never heard from them again”.

She was left with her two brothers. Whether it was 1939 or 1940, Maria cannot remember. People in the village gave them food – it was already warm. They went from house to house, wandering around. Everyone knew that their parents had been killed. In winter, they were taken into stables. There was no wood, no coal – it was cold. Maria went hungry. Her brothers called her „mama”, waiting for her to bring them something to eat. And when there was nothing left for her, she ate nettles.

„A person must live – what would you have done?” – she asks the camera.

When the war ended, she and her siblings went to Limanowa, to distant relatives.

„The end of the war? And what of it?” – Maria shrugs – „There was no father, no mother, no place for us”.

Maria’s testimony was recorded. The interview for the Steven Spielberg Shoah Foundation was conducted years later by Stanisław Laskowski. There are one hundred and one other recorded testimonies of Roma speakers in Polish who survived the Holocaust preserved in the archive. Although I have been reading and writing herstories of women’s experiences of the Second World War for over ten years, this is the first time I am listening to the account of a Polish woman of Roma origin. And I feel somewhat ashamed.

Dr Joanna Talewicz, anthropologist, co-author of „Voices of Memory 7: Roma in KL Auschwitz” and appointed in 2025 to the Council of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum, explains: „It’s not that the stories of Roma victims and survivors of the Holocaust were once part of collective memory and later forgotten. These testimonies were simply never present in mainstream discourse or historical narratives – for many reasons”.

Everything comes back

Olga was born in 1927 in the village of Mszana, near Dukla. Her mother Aniela and father Michał told her when the war began: „We’ll marry you off, Ola, so at least you will survive”. She was twelve years old on her wedding day. But her husband was unable to protect either himself or her. The Germans stormed into their home. She tried to break free. One grabbed her by the hair – her long braid came off in his hand – but she escaped. She survived thanks to a Polish woman who took her in. The woman found her under a window, wearing a thin dress frozen to her body – the same one she had run away in through the fields, in the middle of winter.

That Polish woman – Olga remembers her name – allowed her to warm herself by the stove. What happened next is unknown, because the 71-year-old survivor interrupts her testimony: „I don’t want to tell any more, I don’t want to, really”.

She only adds: „We escaped... I can’t go on, everything comes back to me”. She stops mid-sentence, rips off the microphone, trembles, barely breathes. That is where her account ends.

Dr Talewicz continues: „After 1945, many perpetrators responsible for the persecution and murder of Roma and Sinti were never brought to justice. What’s more – some continued their professional careers in post-war Germany, enjoying full social and institutional recognition. One example is Dr Robert Ritter, head of the Nazi Institute for Research on Racial Hygiene and Population Biology, who, together with his associate Eva Justin, carried out so-called ‘racial studies’ on the Roma community. They decided which individuals were deemed ‘racially pure’ and which were to be sent to the camps. Despite their direct responsibility for the suffering and death of hundreds of Roma and Sinti, they were never held accountable. Ritter became the head physician of a hospital after the war; Justin became a respected child psychologist specialising, ironically, in work with Roma children. This impunity – and the later privileged status of the perpetrators – instilled in Roma survivors a deep and justified fear. They were afraid to speak about their experiences – not only because of trauma, but also because they felt unsafe. How could they trust the state and its institutions if those had never recognised their suffering, nor called their tormentors by name? In fact, the Federal Republic of Germany officially recognised the genocide of Roma as genocide only in 1982 – and even so, it was the first state to do so”.

They shot on sight

Antonina, born in 1933 in Żołynia. Her father Bronisław, a trader; her mother Maria. She remembers fleeing into the forest with her family when the Germans entered the village. The men had already been taken away on carts to Łańcut – from there, sent to a camp.

Her family was nomadic. They had a cart and carriages, with hay and dishes loaded at the back. They slept in canvas tents, lit candles at night. In her interview, Antonina says, „The German didn’t do as much harm as our own – the Poles and the Ukrainians”. She recalls how once the latter took petrol and set fire to two Roma women with small children – and then threw them alive into a well. „The Roma hid like mice – crawling into holes so they wouldn’t be killed”, she says. She survived the end of the war hiding in a forest near Przeworsk.

The testimony of Irena. She came from Krynica and remembered the terrible poverty.

„We slept in the kitchen on the ground, on straw, like little pigs”, she says. Her mother picked blueberries and bilberries to sell, helping her father – a blacksmith – to support thirteen children.

When the Germans came, they hid in the cellar for three days without food. Before they were found, Irena managed to escape into the forest. The others didn’t want to go – they thought nothing would happen to them. When she returned, they were all dead. Shot. Their bodies lay where they had fallen.

I reach for the book „Gypsies on Polish Roads” – by poet, essayist and enthusiast of Roma culture Jerzy Ficowski – through which Joanna Talewicz learned what happened to the Roma and Sinti during the Nazi occupation.

„I was a teenager when my father gave me this book”, she says. „I was astonished by what I read. Although I myself came from a Roma community, I had no idea about that past – even though there had been Holocaust victims in our own family, and I was born and raised near the Auschwitz Museum – in Oświęcim”.

Quoting Jerzy Ficowski: „The majority of Polish Roma were murdered not in camps, but in numerous mass executions”. And further: „The relatively small percentage of Polish Roma murdered in the Roma camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau does not in any way mean that fewer were exterminated than Roma from other countries. It only confirms the otherwise well-known fact of the different methods of extermination used against most Polish Roma – mainly executions carried out in the places where they lived or nearby”.

These accounts are confirmed by further testimonies preserved in the USC Shoah Foundation archives.

Matylda, born in 1927, remembers how the Germans buried children alive. „It wasn’t a happy life. For the Germans, Jews and Roma were like dogs”, she says.

The mother of nine-year-old Bronisława was shot in the village – along with her sister – when she went to the forest to warn others. The men were taken by the Germans to Auschwitz. Before that, they had been ordered to play the accordion at the campfires.

Wacława, aged 62, born in Ostrołęka, says: „I had a very hard childhood”, and immediately starts to cry. She doesn’t remember her father – he was shot in Warsaw, as were her sisters and brothers. „The Germans killed, but there were also good people – Poles. They hid me in barns, in straw. Without the Poles, we wouldn’t have survived”, she says.

Marianna from Warsaw lived with her family in Powązki. She remembers the round-ups in the city. „We dressed up so as not to look like Roma. When the Germans saw a skirt, they shot immediately”.

We pretended to be from Romania

Before the war, Siejana also lived in Warsaw, in „shacks”. „Next to us, the Jews lived in apartments – they traded, gave us bread rolls. We got along well with the Jews – they let us earn a living”, she says. But after September 1939, what she remembers most is that they had to run – „because the Germans were hunting Roma”. They took away her father and brother. In the village of Mańki, she hid in a barn with her mother and other Roma women. „The women – the men took them into the barn cellar at night. They came and raped the Roma women – one of them was pregnant”.

This is the fourteenth testimony I’ve listened to in the past few days. The word „rape” appears for the first time. From the context, it seems the women were abused by Poles. The interviewer doesn’t ask for more detail, although in other parts of the interviews he often follows up with additional questions.

I stop at Siejana’s testimony for longer because of another detail. In Ficowski’s „Gypsies on Polish Roads” I read that Łódź was the first place in Poland where the „preliminary extermination” of Roma was carried out in camp-like conditions. And that very little information has survived about what took place in the „Roma camp” located within the Łódź ghetto – mainly because the „Roma district” was completely separated from the rest of the ghetto.

Siejana spent twenty-four hours there. According to her account, the Germans in Łódź – where she and her mother were taken – carried out a round-up. They drove people together with rifles. „Into the car, into the car. They gathered fifty cars full of Roma and took them to the camp”. Friends, strangers – all together. „We saw poor Roma who had nothing to eat, children crying, hair being cut, lice everywhere. Lice on the grass – it was summer. We were sitting there in the camp with Jewish women; the Roma women next to us. Then the Jews, the men – a big fenced square. Germans with guards – they were killing, and we cried. Mother just kept saying ‘quiet, quiet’, afraid they’d shoot us. We slept there – those children – one day and one night. Then they let us go, because we were supposedly from Romania”.

Romania, at that time, was one of the Axis states – an ally of the Third Reich. According to her memory, around two hundred people managed to leave the Litzmannstadt Ghetto (as the Germans renamed Łódź) on that occasion.

Dr Joanna Talewicz: „In ‘Gypsies on Polish Roads’, Jerzy Ficowski – for the first time in Poland – published not only information about sites of non-camp extermination of Roma men and women, but also about the Zigeunerlager in the Łódź ghetto and KL Auschwitz. We must give him credit – it was thanks to him that these stories were recorded and brought into the light for the first time”.

Murder of them all

Because so many Roma men and women were killed where the occupiers found them, the number of victims is difficult to determine today. Dr Joanna Talewicz explains: „It is estimated that around half a million people were killed – between 70 and 80 per cent of the pre-war Roma population in Europe. These figures are only approximate and imprecise, just like the data concerning their pre-war numbers. We know of about two hundred mass graves located in Polish forests. Unfortunately, because the extermination of the Roma community often took place outside of camps – including in countries of the former USSR – and because no systematic research was carried out on the subject, we may never know the true number of Roma victims of the Holocaust”.

Only since 2011 has 2 August been recognised by the Polish Parliament as the Day of Remembrance of the Extermination of the Roma and Sinti. The European Parliament later adopted this date as the European Roma Holocaust Memorial Day – in 2015.

On the night of 2–3 August 1944, the liquidation of Block 18 – the so-called Zigeunerfamilienlager, the „Gypsy Family Camp” in KL Auschwitz – took place. Some Roma and Sinti who were deemed fit for work were spared, but the rest – mainly women, children, and the elderly – were murdered in the gas chambers. The Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum estimates that around 4,300 people were killed that night.

2 August is not only a date commemorating the Auschwitz massacre – it is also regarded as the symbolic day of remembrance for the genocide of all Roma and Sinti during the Second World War. In the Romani language, it is called Porajmos – literally „the devouring” or „the swallowing up” – or Samudaripen, meaning „the murder of all”.

From the author: In the recorded testimonies, the survivors use the term „Gypsies”. They used the expression that was common in Poland in the 1990s. Today, however, we have greater awareness, and due to the derogatory nature of the word beginning with „G”, I have chosen to use the term „Roma” consistently in public communication. Similarly, in quotations from Jerzy Ficowski’s book, I have left its title unchanged.

The term Sinti refers to the German-speaking minority of the Roma people who have lived in Central Europe since the late Middle Ages.

This text was created thanks to a grant from the YES Foundation, whose mission is to create a better world for women. My thanks go to the Foundation „Towards Dialogue” for their substantive support.