The year 2025 will mark the 80th anniversary of the end of the Second World War and the liberation of the major Nazi concentration camps by American, British and Soviet troops. In this regard, Elon Musk’s comment about the “past guilt” is particularly indicative of the shift in the thinking of a certain part of the global business, financial and political elites, but what he said does not particularly apply to the case of Roma and is not exclusively a “German problem”.
For decades, the Romani Holocaust was a taboo topic for both the winners and losers of the WWII. Even communist Czechoslovakia after the war built a pig farm on top of the concentration camp for Roma in Lety. The camp was run by Czechs, not Germans. It was only in 2017 that the Czech government finally decided to purchase the pig farm from the private owner and turn it into a historical site. No trace of “past guilt” here. Why?
To paraphrase Musk – too much of the focus is on Nazism and we need to move beyond that and realize that racist ideas can take root on both the right and the left. You do not need to be a Nazi to hate the Gypsies. The Romani Holocaust survivor Ceija Stojka described her return to her hometown in Austria after the war as follows:
“In our own country so many people looked at us crookedly… They asked themselves: “Why did they survive? Why are they back?”
The quote is from a documentary on Roma and Sinti in Bergen-Belsen camp:
Perhaps we will hear these questions more and more often in the near future and 2025 could turn out to be a crucial year, a year of reckoning and critical self-assessment for Roma in Europe, if Roma are willing to face the truth 80 years later.
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