20,000 victims is price of Roma people Holocaust in Ukraine

August 3, the representatives of the Roma community from Kyiv, Odesa, and Chernihiv commemorated the victims of the Roma people Holocaust in the Babyn Yar Kyiv preserve.

“We have come to lay flowers and pay tribute to the memory of victims of the Holocaust of the Roma people,” Fedir Kondur, head of the youth and sports department in the Chiricli Charity Foundation, says.

“There is no accurate statistics of victims of the Holocaust of the Roma people in Ukraine. The investigation began several years ago,” historian of the Institute for Ukrainian Archeography and Source Studies at the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, Natalia Zynevych says. “The current estimates, backed by archive documents and memories, are 20,000. Perhaps, the figure will continue growing, because today we lack information.”

Member of staff of the Babyn Yar National Historical and Memorial Preserve Artur Zolotarenko says that many people in camps had no documents. This problem complicates determination of the number of victims, since there could be 50 people in one camp and 300 in the other one.

Four Roma camps were killed in Kyiv during the World War II, Natalia Zynevych says

During the Nazi occupation of Kyiv, the Roma community also suffered badly from the raids. Most of the survived Roma saved their lives thanks to help of the local population, their neighbors, who hid them.

During the war years, the Roma were very well integrated into Ukrainian society. It was difficult for the Nazi to identify them as the Roma.

“The matter is that the Roma in Kyiv were rather socialized, wealthy, and integrated into society. It was very difficult for to the Germans to distinguish them, because they were fluent in Ukrainian and Russian. The Roma did not wear extraordinary clothes. It was not easy to figure them out, unlike the nomadic Roma, who differed in lifestyle and clothing,” Natalia Zynevych explains.

Zynevych tells the story how a Roma girl saved her brother.

“One day in 1941, the Germans took a brother and a sister from the Sandulenkos family. Then there was still no order to kill the Roma. The Germans killed those, whom they considered to be asocial Roma. When they detained the Roma brother and sister, they first used their abilities. The brother and sister sang and danced well. The Germans took them to concerts. One day, the girl was on the stage and said to her brother in Romani language, ‘I’ll distract attention of the Germans, and you run. The brother performed his dance, and sister continued singing and went down to the audience. The boy managed to escape, and the girl was executed accused of organizing the escape.”

Yulian Kondur, coordinator of the youth programs in the Chiricli Foundation, says that the Roma forget their history. Therefore, the Foundation is trying to attract the attention of young people to the tragedy of the Roma Holocaust. As is known, 23,000 Roma, deported from 14 countries, were killed in the Auschwitz-Birkenau Nazi concentration camp. Only in the night of August 3, 1944, 2,897 Roma were killed in the gas chambers of the camp. It is believed that from 600,000 to 1.5 million Roma were killed during the Holocaust.