Oswiecim / Poland (RNC Agency) 02.08.1997

Roma from across Europe gathered at the former Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp complex on Saturday to condemn nationalism and mourn the mass murder of Roma people by Nazi Germans during World War Two.

The annual ceremony specifically recalls the gassing on the night of August 2, 1944, of about 3,000 Roma prisoners -- mainly women and children -- who had survived in a special compound of the extermination complex in southern Poland. It also commemorates the many hundreds of thousands of Roma killed elsewhere by the Nazis in what some commentators call a ‘’ forgotten Holocaust ‘’. About 100 members of communities from countries including Germany, Serbia, Romania, the Czech Rep., Slovakia, Poland, and Austria walked quietly to a memorial amid the foundations of Birkenau’s Block 28, where Roma were held.

In steady rain, new memorial plaques to the dead were placed and Romani Rose, the head of the central council of Roma in Germany, reminded the gathering of recent European Union report discussing a breach of minority right in the neighbouring Czech Rep. an d Hungary. ‘’ I appeal for this type of practice t be eliminated and that nationalism not be able to spawn the National Socialism which led to the fascist occupation, ‘’ he said.