2019-08-02 18:58 update: 2019-08-07, 20:16
Photo: PAP/Jacek Bednarczyk
Poland marked the International Roma and Sinti Genocide Remembrance Day on August 2 to commemorate 500,000 Roma people murdered by the Germans during the Second World War.
Holocaust survivors, Roma people from all over Europe, Polish state and European Commission officials, foreign diplomats and young people visited the former Nazi German Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp in Oswiecim, southern Poland, to attend events commemorating the 75th anniversary of the liquidation by Germans of the Gypsy camp.
Before the official ceremony began, participants walked in silence a few hundred metres from the camp's gate to the monument commemorating the killed Roma.
Later, observances were continued at the Oswiecim Centre for Dialogue and Prayer.
President Andrzej Duda wrote in a letter to participants that the memory of the Roma and Sinti killed in the Nazi German extermination camps "is a moral duty of the whole human family," while Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki wrote in his message that "the extermination of the Roma during World War II must find a rightful place in the awareness of our and subsequent generations."
Some 21,000 Roma and Sinti people were murdered by the Germans in the so-called 'Gypsy family camp' (Zigeunerlager) at Auschwitz-Birkenau during World War II. On the night of August 2, 1944, the Germans killed 2,897 Sinti and Roma in the gas chambers. (PAP)
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