On 2 August, Europe marks Genocide of the Roma Memorial Day, remembering the hundreds of thousands of Roma and Sinti people persecuted and murdered during the Nazi era. The harder question sits right behind the ceremony: what happens on 3 August, and every day after that? The answer, in too many places, is silence dressed up as remembrance.
Names Lost to Bureaucracy
For decades, one of the most haunting images of Nazi persecution was known only as the “girl with the headscarf.” She was filmed looking through the closing doors of a train leaving the Westerbork transit camp, and for years she was widely assumed to be Jewish. Only later did historical research restore her identity. Her name was Settela Steinbach. She was Sinti.
Settela was nine when she and her family were deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau in May 1944. She was most likely murdered there with her mother, two brothers and two sisters on the night of 2 to 3 August 1944. Only the photograph survived. Her name, her identity and the history of the people to whom she belonged almost vanished from the story attached to it. That kind of erasure doesn’t happen by accident. It happens when institutions decide which dead are worth naming and which are left to drift into the archive’s dust.
Roma and Sinti people were subjected to racist laws, imprisonment, forced labour, deportation, mass shootings and murder across Europe, yet their genocide remains one of the least recognised chapters of Nazi persecution. The neglect didn’t end in 1945. For decades, Roma and Sinti victims were denied recognition from national histories, and many survivors received neither justice nor proper acknowledgement. The prejudices that had helped make persecution possible did not disappear when the war ended. They just changed paperwork.
Memory Culture, Managed Late
Some progress has been made. Some memorials have been established and research has deepened. Survivors, descendants, scholars and organisations have painstakingly recovered names and histories. Recognition remains patchy, though. In too many classrooms and museums, the genocide is still presented as an optional appendix to the history of the Nazi era rather than an integral part of it.
The article says Nazi crimes did not begin with mass murder. They began with stereotypes, exclusion, paperwork, racial classification and the steady removal of rights, the bureaucratic preliminaries to barbarism. That sequence matters. It shows how state power works when it wants to sort people, mark them, and strip them down to categories before it strips them of life.
Teaching this history also means refusing to flatten Roma and Sinti people into anonymous victims. They had families, professions, communities and ambitions. They resisted persecution and rebuilt lives afterwards. Settela was not merely the frightened child caught on film for a few seconds: she was a daughter and sister; her father was a trader and violinist.
Institutions Asked to Do the Work
As opportunities to hear directly from living survivors and witnesses become fewer, responsibility passes increasingly to institutions. Because recognition came so late, many Roma and Sinti voices were never recorded in the first place, making the testimonies that remain all the more precious. Archives must be opened, sites connected to the genocide safeguarded, photographs correctly identified, and Roma and Sinti perspectives placed at the centre of education and commemoration.
The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s “Recommendations for Teaching and Learning about the Persecution and Genocide of the Roma during the Nazi Era” were developed to turn that obligation into something more useful than good intentions. They were designed for governments, policymakers, teachers, museums, memorial sites, archives and civil-society educators. The framework says countries should bring this history into mainstream education and memory culture, safeguard the historical record, counter distortion, and ensure that teaching includes Roma voices, resistance and, crucially, agency. It also offers guidance on curricula, educational resources and teacher training, while recognising national and local experiences and involving Roma communities themselves.
Europe’s commitment to remembrance cannot be measured only by ceremonies held on 2 August, however moving or well attended. It must be measured by what happens in classrooms, archives, museums and public institutions throughout the year. The test is whether future students will still encounter silence where this history should be taught, and whether people like Settela remain merely an anonymous face in an old film, or are remembered as people with names, families and a history. Europe cannot return those who were murdered. It can at least refuse to lose them twice.
Michaela Küchler, Secretary General of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, wrote the piece. She said the opinions expressed in the article are those of the author and do not represent the editorial position of Euronews. The article also notes that Küchler has held a range of positions including Press Attaché in Santiago de Chile, Cultural Attaché in former Czechoslovakia, and Consul General in Chennai. She also served as a negotiator for European Union enlargement and as a European policy adviser to two Federal Chancellors and three Federal Presidents. As Chair of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance German presidency in 2020, she spearheaded initiatives to counter distortion of the Holocaust and the genocide of the Roma.