Croatia’s Roma: A Long-Hidden History of Holocaust Suffering

[TomSea]

August 3rd today, I think this article reads that August 2nd is the day the genocide against the Roman in WWII is remembered:

Croatia’s Roma: A Long-Hidden History of Holocaust Suffering
Serbs and Roma being rounded up and taken to the Jasenovac concentration camp, 1942-43. Photo: Wikimedia Commons/Wertq1.
Anja Vladisavljevic   Zagreb   BIRN
August 2, 2019

On International Roma Genocide Remembrance Day, historian Danijel Vojak tells BIRN how thousands of Roma were persecuted and killed by the Nazis and their Croatian allies – and how one 11-year-old Roma boy’s disappearance highlights the crimes against his people.

Danijel Vojak, a historian from Zagreb-based Ivo Pilar Institute of Social Sciences, is recalling how he once found an old photograph of an 11-year-old Roma boy called Stjepan Mavrovic, whose childhood was disrupted in June 1942.

Young Stjepan and his family, who lived in Stupnik in the Zagreb area, were photographed by police officers when they were detained and then sent to Jasenovac, a concentration camp run by Croatia’s World War II-era Nazi allied Ustasa movement.

“All traces of him were lost [in the Jasenovac camp],” Vojak told BIRN in an interview.


Roma women and children in Zagreb in 1941. Photo: Wikimedia Commons/Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-2004-0203-502/CC-BY-SA 3.0.


Two Roma girls enter the gate of the former Nazi concentration and extermination camp Birkenau. Photo: EPA PHOTO/PAP/JACEK BEDNARCZYK.

Read more at: https://balkaninsight.com/2019/08/02/croatias-roma-a-long-hidden-history-of-holocaust-suffering/

You'd find a lot of stories on the Roma and apparent problems they have in Europe from this year alone and I'd not even single out individual countries, just look for oneself. Some countries even surprised me.

[mountaineer]

The Roma were just one of the ethnic and social groups the Nazis decided should be annihilated. The Croatians (Catholic) attempted to eliminate not just the gypsies but the ethnic Serbs. I've stood at the site in a little Serb village in present-day Croatia where the Ustase (Nazi-supporting Croatians) machine-gunned women, children, the elderly, every Serb they could round up - dozens of them - on Orthodox Christmas. I thought it was strange that so many Catholics were killed by Nazis at Dachau, yet the Catholic Croatians still joined up with them.