Hungarians marked the anniversary of the Roma Holocaust up and down the country on Thursday.
Addressing the Roma communities’ main event, Katalin Langer-Victor noted that in May 1944 Roma prisoners of Auschwitz turned against their Nazi captors and fought heroically for their own survival.
She noted the importance of commemorating tragedies such as the Roma Holocaust as part of Hungary’s collective conscience.
Szabolcs Molnár, the deputy mayor of the fourth district of Budapest, noted that on July 11th in 1944 ten thousand Jewish and Roma men and women were taken from Újpest to Nazi death camps.
The local government declared July 11th the district’s own day of mourning in 2005, he added. August 2nd was named international day of the Roma Holocaust in 1972.
On that night, more than 3,000 Roma prisoners were killed in Auschwitz in 1944 and are commemorated on that day each year. About 500,000 Roma are estimated to have been killed in Nazi camps, 23,000 of them in Auschwitz-Birkenau.