There are approximately 500,000 Roma and Sinti people killed by the Nazi-fascist regimes. This genocide is called Porrajmos by many. Despite its size, the historical memory of those events is little known and has not helped to build a collective heritage that would allow us to prevent discrimination and stereotypes towards these people who, even if in different forms, survived the end of the totalitarian regimes of ‘ 900. The inclusion of specific references to Porrajmos in school books is a fundamental step.
The RemAgainstDisc project (Reinforcing historical memory of the Porrajmos to combating discrimination), financed within the Citizens, Equality, Rights and Values Program of the European Union, and on which the Italian Coalition for Civil Liberties and Rights, the University of Florence, Sucar Drom and Associazione 21 Luglio has precisely this among its objectives.
One of the planned interventions concerned raising awareness towards publishing houses that publish books for schools of all levels and for universities, so that in school textbooks there is a specific reference to what the Porrajmos was.
Prof. Luca Bravi, researcher at the University of Florence, has, in this regard, developed the following text:
Porrajmos
Night of 2 August 1944, Birkenau, “gypsy camp” (Zigeunerlager, sector BII-E). Until the day before, the noise of life reigned, albeit in an extermination camp, in the area of the Lager intended for Roma and Sinti, a linguistic minority that arrived in Europe from Asia starting from the 14th century and the object of ancient prejudices: at the Zigeunerlager Thousands of families lived together and waited to die. Now there is nothing but silence: in a single night the Nazis “liquidated” the camp, exterminating its inmates. Over four thousand men, women and children were murdered before dawn. Although this scene and other similar ones seen throughout Europe remained for a long time in the memories of the other internees and in the testimonies of the very few Sinti and Roma survivors, and despite the vast documentation of this other extermination, the story of the Roma and Sinti in Auschwitz will long represent an absent memory: when everything ends it will be difficult to study and recognize an event as tragic and radical as the Shoah: the Porrajmos.
The word Porrajmos means “devouring”, and is used to indicate the extermination of Roma and Sinti immediately before and during the Second World War: it is estimated that 500,000 of them were murdered after being persecuted by Nazi Germany for two different and converging reasons : initially they were considered “asocial”, subsequently they were considered, like the Jews, “racially inferior”, and for this reason they were hunted down and destroyed.
Even fascist Italy first and then the Italian Social Republic, expelling, rejecting, interning and deporting Roma and Sinti for years, participated in the Porrajmos.
The proposed online resources:
The site of the virtual museum of Porrajmos
The story of the Gypsy camp diAuschwitz Bikenau
The extermination of Roma and Sinti
Visit to block 13 of the Auschwitz State Museum
On the occasion of a meeting held at the University of Florence, in which several managers of publishing houses participated, the theme of Porrajmos was introduced and the text in question was proposed, with the aim that, also following a sharing path, can be introduced within the books, thus constituting part of that discovery of historical memory, so fundamental for looking to the future without the weight of prejudices and discrimination.