"I'm afraid that Europe is forgetting its past and that Auschwitz is only sleeping. Antigypsyist threats, policies and actions worry me greatly and make me very sad." — Ceija Stojka, Roma Holocaust survivor and artist.
Ceija Stojka knew what she was warning against. She was not imagining the future in an abstract way. She was reflecting on the reality of what she knew. Deported as a child, she survived Auschwitz-Birkenau, Ravensbrück and Bergen-Belsen. She knew that tactics and machinery that made Auschwitz possible can be repeated; repeated in different forms, narratives or by different politicians.
Roma communities have carried that warning alone for almost 80 years. On the night of 2 August 1944, the Nazis liquidated the so-called “Gypsy family camp” at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Nearly 3,000 Roma and Sinti men, women and children were murdered in a single night. It took Europe seventy-one years to give that night a name. And that’s the part of the memory that took Europe the longest to face, not what happened on the night of 2 August 1944, but everything that happened, or failed to happen, in the decades after.
After the war, Roma Holocaust had no real name. It remained at the margins of Europe’s collective memory, because postwar Europe spent decades refusing to classify Roma Holocaust as racially motivated at all. Roma survivors were rarely believed, rarely compensated, and almost never asked to testify. Their persecution was overlooked in public education, historical research and political commemoration.
Governments were slow to even call it what it was and in the end the recognition never came automatically, it was fought for. It took years for Roma-led organisations to advocate before it became recognised. That fight to get the Roma Holocaust recognised uncovered something bigger, antigypsyism didn’t end in 1945. Remembering the Roma Holocaust means confronting the same racism, still shaping Roma lives across Europe today.
In 2015, the European Parliament finally recognised the Roma Holocaust and called for a day to remember it as European Roma Holocaust Memorial Day, celebrated on 2 August. But unfortunately, we are still witnessing the ongoing denial and lack of recognition of Roma Holocaust, mainly because parliamentary recognition did not automatically become political recognition across Europe. The memory rests on a very thin archive: few recorded interviews, fewer published memoirs, fewer trials that ever took place. It leaves a gap in public understanding of our shared history. These missing stories are not accidents. They reveal a deeper pattern of exclusion. Simply put: if no one records what happened to you, no one has to reckon with it. And if you’re not named, no one has to answer for what happens to you.
This year marks eleven years since European Parliament recognised the Roma Holocaust. Eleven years is not very long. But it is long enough, apparently, for Europe to forget what non-recognition costs.
Right now, as we light candles for 2 August, Europe is entering a period defined by war, geopolitical instability, economic uncertainty and growing pressure on democratic institutions. Defence, competitiveness and security increasingly dominate political debate. Across the Union, funding for equality, fundamental rights and civil society is under growing pressure. Programmes are being consolidated, priorities redefined and organisations working on human rights increasingly asked to justify their continued relevance. In this landscape, Roma rights are once again becoming easier to overlook, not because discrimination has disappeared, but because other priorities are pushing them aside.
The EU is negotiating its next long-term budget, the Multiannual Financial Framework for 2028–2034. It is, by design, one of the least visible fights in Brussels. But this is where rights get funded or quietly disappear.
In the current draft of AgoraEU, the programme meant to cover EU funding for culture, media, and democratic participation, antigypsyism isn’t named at all. Although the European Commission has long recognised it as the specific form of racism directed against Roma, the term is absent from the proposed programme.
ERGO Network and its member organisations have asked for change: to explicitly name antigypsyism! Leave antigypsyism out of the text, and Roma organisations predictably get left out of who the money reaches. Not through any single decision, just through the ordinary mechanics of a seven-year funding cycle running exactly as written.
This isn’t the same event as the Roma Holocaust, and it shouldn’t be read as one. Historical atrocities should never be used as casual analogies for contemporary policy debates. But the underlying patter deserves attention, because it has the same failure mode: If you’re not named, no one has to answer for what happens to you.
The Roma Holocaust was possible in part because, long before Roma were deported and murdered, they had already been excluded from public life, criminalised, stigmatised and denied equal protection. Exclusion came first. Violence followed and recognition came much later.
Naming a specific form of racism isn’t just about terminology. It’s about recognising a distinct pattern of discrimination, so institutions can actually track it and act on it.
For decades, Europe failed to fully recognise the Roma Holocaust as part of its own history. Now it faces a similar test: whether it’s willing to recognise antigypsyism not just as something from the past, but as racism happening now, that needs real political action.
Memory only means something if it changes what a government is willing to sign off and commit to next. Otherwise, 2 August is just a date the EU is comfortable observing precisely because it’s finished, a wrong from 1944 that requires nothing further just to honour yesterday’s victims. While allowing today’s political choices quietly to weaken everything that remembrance was supposed to protect
