Byelorussian gypsies lit candles to commemorate their relatives perished during World War II

Minsk, April 9, Interfax – Byelorussian gypsies commemorated their relatives perished in the years of World War II on Tuesday, the day of Romany nation, head of CIS and Baltic gypsy communities and head of the gypsy diaspora Oleg Kozlovsky told Interfax.

They lit candles and let wreaths flow in the river in their memory.

According to Koslovsky, the question of World War II genocide is still very important for Byelorussian gypsies and all gypsies of the CIS countries. “Byelorussian gypsies murdered by the fascists should be recognized the same victims as Jews or representatives of other nationalities,” the interviewee of the agency stressed.

He explained that if gypsies killed during World War II had been recognized as genocide victims, then the question of moral and material compensation to the victims and their families would have been considered from “a different angle.”

“We are collecting historical documents about gypsies suffered from Nazism, but the process of finding the documents is very complicated, as no gypsy had a passport then. Historians say that only 1% of the total pre-war gypsy population survived the war in Byelorussia,” Koslovsky noted.

According to him, about 60, 000 gypsies live in Byelorussia today, the majority of them inhabits the Gomel region. All Byelorussian gypsies are settled, they ceased migrating about 50 years ago and live mainly in the cities, and 90% of them are Orthodox.

Germany Recognizes Gypsy Holocaust

Berlin, Dec 20 (Prensa Latina) The Upper House of the German Parliament (Bundesrat) Thursday agreed to demand the government build a monument to recall the extermination of the central European gypsies by the Nazi Germany.

The belated apology to the half million gypsies deported and killed in Nazi extermination camps was agreed on the occasion of the 65 anniversary of the signing of Auschwitz decree by the chief of the SS Heinrich Himmler, on December 16, 1942.

When he was leader of the Schutzstaffel, which was a major Nazi military organization exclusively under Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party, Himmler ordered the killing of millions of people for the simple reason of being different.

It was then that 11 million people, half of them Jewish, as well as Polish, homosexuals, Jehovah witnesses and Gypsies in Germany and other occupied countries, were systematically and methodically killed.

Can the world stop genocide?

A conference in the Canadian city of Montreal has been discussing ways to prevent genocide. BBC world affairs correspondent Mark Doyle, attending the meeting, asks whether this can be done.

The 75-year-old woman sat on stage in front of hundreds of United Nations officials, legal experts and academics.

The day before, Marika Nene had travelled from Hungary to Canada - the first plane she had ever taken on her first journey outside Hungary.

She was not intimidated by the gathering. Her long hair was lit up by a stage light and her facial features were strong.

But the strongest thing about Marika Nene, a Roma - or Gypsy - woman who was trapped in the anti-Gypsy pogroms during World War II, was her determination to tell her story.

"I had no choice. I had to give myself up to the soldiers," Marika Nene said through a translator.
"I was a very pretty little gypsy woman and of course the soldiers took me very often to the room with a bed in it where they violated me. I still have nightmares about it".

Many members of Marika Nene's Roma family died in the work camps and the ghettos.

She had travelled to Montreal to give a reality check to the experts and UN officials at the "Global Conference on the Prevention of Genocide".

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