Press Release: Roma Holocaust remembered by survivors
Today, 2 of August 2012, Roma Center for Social Intervention and Studies – Romani CRISS, National Centre for Roma Culture – Romano Kher, The „Elie Wiesel” National Institute for The Study of Holocaust in Romania and Center for Monitoring and Combating Antisemitism in Romania, organized a remembrance action of the massacre of 2/3 august 1944 when, in „Zigeunerlager” from Auschwitz – Birkenau (Poland), thousands of Roma and Sinti (elderly, women and children) were killed.
The Roma were victims of mass extermination policies of the Nazi Germany, but also occupied and allied states, and the number of the Roma victims reaching up to 1,5 million, according to the historian Ian Hancock. In Romania, the official number of Roma deported in Transnistria by the Antonescu government is about 36 000.
Mr. Manolache, a Holocaust survivor, shared his story to those present at the event, regarding the deportation of the Roma in Romania: „We were deported in 1942. Put in cars like cattle. There, where we arrived, at Bug, we had no food or water. My grandparents died there and children died. It was a life of slavery.”
„They embarked us in freight cars and took us to Transnistria”, says Mr Constantin, also a survivor of the Holocaust, attending the event. „There they put us in stables. There was no food, water, medical assistance. After some time, we all had to perform forced labor. Not long after, an epidemic of typhus broke and more than half of us died. Every morning, the gendarmerie came and took us to work, and the dead were put in carts and thrown into the trenches and then covered with soil. Four members of my family died in the same day: my mother, 30 years old, my uncle 21 years old, my grandparents 57 years old. At least 50 people died everyday. I stayed there 2 years…., 700 days. If we had been treated like animals, we would have lived a life of luxury. We did not have any human condition to live. Death was the only solution to escape that horror, that misery”.
Fifty people attended the ceremony, including His Excellency, Mr. Marek SZCZYGIEL, Ambassador of Poland, representatives of Germany Embassy, Sweden Embassy, United Kingdom, Kingdom of the Netherlands, Hungary, as well as representatives of the Government and civil society, Roma and non-Roma youth.
„The genocide Roma population was subject to during the fascist regime is a historic fact which will remain in the public consciousness. And our duty, of civil society, of politicians and everyone that embraces democracy is to assure that. But what it is really important is to understand and realize the mistakes of the past, so that to act promptly in present anytime values like tolerance, inclusion, diversity or freedom is questioned”, said the message of the Romanian Prime Minister, delivered by Mr. Damian Draghici, state counsellor, attending the event.
The participants held a moment of silence in the memory of the victims of the Holocaust and then watched a thematic movie, followed by a short debate.
For further information, you can contact us at office@romanicriss.org or phone 021 310 70 70.
Senate Republicans Reject ‘Genocide’ to Describe Treatment of American Indians - ICTMN.com
It was 1:30 p.m. April 19 when I received a frantic phone call from Colorado State Senator Suzanne Williams, D-Aurora, who said she had less than 24 hours to resurrect the Recognition of the American Indian Genocide resolution of 2008.
By noon the next day, the original draft of the new 2012 American Indian Genocide resolution, SJR12-046, was dead on the senate floor, and what was left was a watered-down euphemism that still reeks of sugarcoating and naiveté.
What was contentious to the republican state senators was the use of the word “genocide.” The bevy of right-leaning Reagan fans had nothing but acrimonious things to say about American Indians, including myself, who assert that genocide was inflicted upon the first peoples of this continent.
And the most boisterous polemic of the bunch that day was republican State Senator Ellen Roberts of District 6.
Her argument, which she repeatedly reiterated at the podium, was that she didn’t feel the death of millions of American Indians since Columbus qualified as genocide because American Indians are not extinct.
“When I look up the word ‘exterminate’ it is to destroy totally,” she argued. “And my problem with this resolution is I thank God that we have not destroyed totally the Native American people. And one of my challenges … is (the) wording; that is as if they are extinct, because they are not.”
It is curious then that the day prior Roberts added her name as cosponsor to Senate Joint Resolution 32 – concerning the declaration of April 16 through 22, 2012, as Holocaust Awareness Week.
Today, Germany is home to more than 200,000 Jewish people.
Jews are not extinct.
Then, on the same day Sen. Roberts voted down the American Indian Genocide Resolution, she signed on as cosponsor to Senate Joint Resolution 33 – Concerning the Colorado Day of Remembrance of the Armenian Genocide.
Today, the Armenian population in Armenia is more than 3 million.
Eo ipso, Armenians also are not extinct.
So, naturally, I’m prompted to wonder: How could Sen. Roberts, based on her logic, support two resolutions that recognize the genocide of both the Armenians and Jews when neither group has been expunged completely?
Indeed.
State Senator Ted Harvey of District 30 was the second loudest to object to the use of the word “genocide.” He asserted that it was a disservice to those “who have actually died at the hand of governments” and to those that were lined up “at mass grave sites,” and were shot and murdered.
Sen. Harvey either hasn’t heard of (or possibly rejects) the reality of the Wounded Knee massacre of 1890 when more than 150 Lakota men, women and children were brutally murdered by the U.S. 7th Cavalry Regiment and dumped into a mass grave near the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota.
Which is it, Sen. Harvey?
Soon after Sen. Harvey ended his pejorative diatribe, Sen. Roberts introduced an amendment that changed the language of the resolution from “genocide” to “atrocity.”
The new resolution passed 24 to 9 with the replaced phrasing, “Concerning the Remembrance of the American Indian Atrocity.”
“It’s contradictory that (Sen. Roberts) supported the other resolutions but jumped all over ours,” said Tessa McLean, of the Ojibwe Nation and senior at the University of Colorado Denver who attended the floor hearing. “She was denying the genocide against our people. I felt very angry and upset.”
Amanda Williams, 18, of the San Carlos Apache and Navajo nations and a University of Denver student, later cried in the office of Sen. Williams and said she felt personally offended by the arrogance of the senate republicans and their inability to recognize the systematic murder of American Indian peoples.
“I felt that it was a slap in the face and a further attempt at erasing the truth of the history of the native peoples (of the Americas),” she said.
The only conclusion I can come to is that our senate republicans suffer from blind patriotism. You can’t be the greatest nation in the world if you admit to genocide, right? Apparently not.
Simon Moya-Smith is a journalist and blogger from Edgewater and a registered member of the Oglala Lakota Nation.
(Source: rematiration)
To view the answer click the link.
I have very, very close ties to Germany. My dad’s side of the family is 100% German. My dad was born in Germany. Germany is a major part of my heritage. It’s something I identify with. I’m proud of the fact that I am German.
But I do not have a Nazi flag in my car. That is a part of my history about which I have collective guilt. Most Germans do, even though young one’s like me weren’t even alive at the time of WWII. We don’t say, “Well, yeah, that whole Auschwitz thing was bad, but it was just a part of the culture at that time to be racist.”
And yes, I may point out that my grandfather didn’t really want to be a Nazi soldier, but he enlisted so he could decide where he would go to fight. If they drafted you, you’d have no choice, and since he had friends in England and America, he figured if he had to fight anyway (and pretty much every young, able-bodied man would), it might as well be Russia. He was shot in the stomach with shrapnel and would have died if his mother hadn’t gone to the hospital just behind the front line and bitched out the doctor, saying, “You treat my son!” And then later, he was kidnapped and sent to a Russian gulag, which he miraculously survived with the help of his friend, Hans. Is anyone in my family proud that he was a Nazi soldier? No. In fact, war is a horrible, horrible thing, and no one should ever have to be a soldier. And I think most soldiers who saw real combat know this. War changes a person, and while we should always respect soldiers for their sacrifice, we should also always remember that it was a sacrifice. They lost something. Now maybe if they lost it for something worth fighting for, it makes that pill easier to swallow. But then, is anything really worth killing another human being for?
This idea of war as hell, as something unglamorous, it’s something that’s grown in me through hearing my grandparents stories of WWII. My anti-war, pacifist stance is something I think comes from the fact that my family has experienced war first-hand, in a way many American family’s haven’t. Hitler was certainly in the wrong, and had to be stopped, but a lot of wars aren’t that clear-cut. And even in WWII, the Allies weren’t exactly exemplars of human beings either. Remember Hiroshima and Nagisaki? Or how about something smaller:
My grandma’s school was bombed by the English when she was just a little girl. She had to crawl out through the rubble and dead bodies. French slaves helped her hide while the English planes tried to strafe her with gunfire. Yes, the English tried to kill my grandmother when she was just a little girl. Now I don’t hold this against the English themselves, but it just showed me growing up how no one is really innocent in war.
But I don’t think that these facts, that my grandma and grandpa had nothing to do with the Holocaust, and that they were hurt by the atrocities of the war as well, means that it is in anyway acceptable for me to fly a Nazi flag because I am “proud of your heritage.” I have no direct connections to the horrors of the Holocaust, and yet my German heritage is tied to it. And it is something I am always aware of, that I am careful about, that I feel guilty about.
So I don’t care if you have “negro” friends (do you really call them “negro”?). I have Jewish friends. That doesn’t make it okay for me to be “proud of my heritage” by celebrating Nazism. I don’t care that your family was rebelling against a “corrupt government.” The Germans were rebelling against the unjust Treaty of Versailles that crippled the German economy, but that doesn’t validate all the racism that went along with their war. And again, that doesn’t make it okay to fly a Nazi flag. That doesn’t make it okay to say, “The Reich will rise again!”
And I have no desire to do any of these things.
I feel guilty about this part of my heritage in a very real way, and I act on that guilt by fighting against racism and bigotry wherever I find it. A German who flies a Nazi flag would be considered a racist and anti-Semite for a very good reason. It’s those same basic reasons that people who fly Confederate flags and say “The South will rise again!” are considered racist. Because that is not a part of one’s culture about which one should feel proud. It’s okay to identify yourself as a “Southerner.” It’s okay to be proud of that heritage.
But when it comes to those actions of your forebears, when it comes to that war motivated by slavery and racism, well, that’s a place where you should have a healthy sense of collective guilt that impels you to do good. You know, to fight against racism in this country and the fact that many African Americans are still held down in ghettos and in poverty, which is part of the ongoing effects of the history of slavery and racism going all the way back to your slave-owning ancestor, regardless of how “nice” they were.
*drops mic and walks away*
Winner. Of. The. Whole. Damn. Internet.
(Source: brashblacknonbeliever)
Ghana - Western Intervention
As punishment, slaves were chained to this rock and left at the mercy of the sun and other forces of nature. The eroded base of the stone indicates attempts by victims to escape.
