Monday, August 17, 2009 POLICY CENTER/ROMA AND MINORITIES
Europe’s dirty secret – the continuing rise of anti-Gypsyism On
the night of 2 August, 1944, as Soviet troops closed in, 2898
Romani men, women and children were brutally murdered inside gas
chambers at the Auschwitz concentration camps. Although accurate
statistics are not available, in total the Roma victims of the
Holocaust likely number in the hundreds of thousands. This
figure includes 200 Romani children murdered in Buchenwald,
Germany, in 1940 as part of a research experiment on the
efficiency of the Crystal B gas later employed in the gas
chambers. On 2 August, 2009 (65 years later – in a day and age
when the events of the Holocaust are widely regarded as a dark
shadow on the history of humanity), Ms Maria Balog, a Romani
woman from the Hungarian town of Kisléta, became the latest
victim in a relentless killing spree targeting Roma in Hungary.
The killing in Hungary started in 2008 and Ms Balog was the
sixth victim. In Romania, just a day befor