Dani Dayan

Commemoration speech on the occasion of 2 August 2024, Holocaust Memorial Day for Sinti and Roma

5th of December, 1941 

“Today the first group of Roma arrived in the ghetto. They arrived in locked wagons. Almost all the men were handcuffed. The women carried their children on their shoulders along with some laundry and bedding. Almost all the women were dressed in light clothes. The children were without shoes. [Remember: it was December, not August] The picture is impossible for me to describe. I cannot decide whether what I see is actual reality or merely a dream. Never before have I witnessed such a terrible scene”. 

This quote is taken from the Diary of Shlomo Frank, a Jewish deportee in the Lodz Ghetto, originally written in Yiddish. 

Frank was witness that day to the arrival of approximately 5,000 Roma, from Austria, who had been deported by Nazi Germany to the Lodz Ghetto, which at that time already included over 200,000 Jews. 

Within the ‘Jewish ghetto’, the Nazis created a separate camp for Sinti and Roma, referred to by the Nazis as the ‘gypsy camp’. 

Conditions among the Roma deportees were particularly atrocious and soon an epidemic of typhus broke out. The death rate was rapid and appalling high. Soon afterwards the Nazis began sending the remaining Roma to their deaths by gas, in Chelmno. 

In the perpetual hell created by the Nazis and their collaborators throughout the occupied Europe, our two peoples, the Jews and the Roma and Sinti, “shared” only the murderous racist hatred of their captors, who allowed them then nothing else. 

They were deliberately and manipulatively kept apart, each people destined for its own horrible fate.  

Sinti and Roma and Jews, we were transported in similar cattle cars, we were murdered in the same gas chambers, here at Birkenau and elsewhere, our bodies were burned in the same crematoria and our ashes dispersed in the same fields. Thus, we became everlasting partners in the moral battle against evil and for the remembrance of the innocent victims and their legacy. 

My participation here today as Chairman of Yad Vashem, The World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem, can be seen as a milestone of that moral partnership. 

At this pivotal and symbolic commemoration, at this horrible yet meaningful place, I would like to express on behalf of the Jewish people our profound recognition of the catastrophic genocide inflicted upon the Roma and Sinti parallel to the Holocaust, and I wish to relate personally to your eternal grief. 

Currently, both our peoples are experiencing frightening global phenomena of denial and distortion of the terrible crimes committed against us in the past. Such denial and distortion have already led to hatred, conflict and violence, and if unchecked will continue to poison our societies and threaten their existence. 

My own country has recently discovered, to our utter shock, that destructive forces, motivated by genocidal hatred, are capable of denying even documented atrocities that were committed only a few months ago! 

Thus, we should not naively assume that fighting prejudice and ignorance is easy or simple. 

As we continue to face hatred, nations committed to morality, justice and truth, must join hands and hearts against racism and antisemitism. 

This requires deep commitment, constant effort, professional skill and adequate resources. 

With this in mind, Yad Vashem has taken and will take a central role within IHRA (The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance) in the development and implementation of what is known as the Recommendations for Teaching and Learning about the Persecution and Genocide of the Roma during the Nazi Era. 

This is our way of helping to share your story, your memory, with the entire world. I conclude with the Biblical exhortation, in Hebrew, which encapsulates our shared commitment to the eternal remembrance of what was done here to our peoples eight decades ago: 

 זכֹור ולא תשכח! 

Remember And Do Not Forget!