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Feedback August 2 is recognized as Roma Holocaust Memorial Day (sometimes referred to as the “Roma and Sinti Holocaust Memorial Day,” and occasionally as the “Gypsy Holocaust Memorial Day”). On the night of August 2–3, 1944, 4,300 Roma, prisoners of the so-called “Gypsy camp,” were murdered at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. This date has become a symbol of the tragedy of the Roma people, who were systematically exterminated by the German National Socialists in every country where the inhuman laws of the German Reich were imposed in the 1930s and 1940s.
The exact number of Roma killed in Europe is unknown; hundreds of thousands probably died — shot, suffocated with gas in mobile gas vans and concentration-camp gas chambers, tortured, or killed in “medical experiments.” The extermination of the Roma population was systematic. The Nuremberg racial laws deprived Roma of all rights, just as they did Jews. The Nazis introduced the concepts of Judenfrei and Zigeunerfrei, and commanders in the occupied territories zealously pursued these inhuman objectives, killing Roma and Jewish residents — everyone they could find, including children. Not to forget all the horror of the occupation authorities’ other crimes — while acknowledging the brutal massacres of entire villages, the torture of political prisoners, the suffering inflicted on prisoners of war, and the deportation of Ostarbeiter and Westarbeiter for forced labor — it is impossible not to recognize the particular tragedy of the two peoples whom Nazism condemned to complete annihilation: Jews and Roma.
It is therefore entirely legitimate to use the term Roma Holocaust, which has been adopted by the Council of Europe, the European Union, and numerous international educational and awareness-raising projects. There are objections, however. One sometimes hears: “We do not deny the genocide of the Roma during the Second World War, but it was not the Holocaust.” Those who do not wish to argue with those who have effectively monopolized the term Holocaust call the extermination of the Roma a genocide, as does, for example, an educational project for schoolchildren created with the support of the Austrian government to teach the history of this tragedy.
Another tendency is to avoid a separate Roma memorial day altogether and commemorate only January 27 — the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, which has become a symbol of the Holocaust —while speaking broadly of all victims.
The Council of Europe maintains a country-by-country overview indicating where and how Roma Holocaust victims are commemorated.
In addition to Council of Europe member states, the website also contains information about Russia and Belarus, countries outside the CoE that suffered under Nazi occupation. For both countries, it states that January 27 is commemorated, but that August 2 has not been officially designated as a memorial day specifically for Roma victims.
What the Council of Europe website does not reflect are the relatively recent Belarusian and Russian policies of recognizing the “genocide of the Belorussian people” (under a law in force since 2022) and the “genocide of the Soviet people” (under a 2026 Russian federal law). Neither law establishes a separate commemorative date. In Belarus, this “genocide of the Belorussian people” is now commemorated simply on December 9, the International Day of Commemoration and Dignity of the Victims of the Crime of Genocide, the anniversary of the adoption of the relevant UN Convention in 1948. The commemorations are conducted on a large scale — for example, with motor rallies. On the most recent occasion, December 9, 2025, Belarusian media reported:
“Participants in a themed motor rally in the Astravyets District honored the victims at a memorial in the village of Dainovka, erected this year. It was here that, in 1941, the Nazis shot villagers from the local Roma community, while two years ago search teams conducting excavations confirmed the horrific crime. ‘And today, as we lay flowers and pay tribute to them, we tell everyone — and above all ourselves — that it does not matter who they were: Belorussian, Russian, Pole, Jew, or Gypsy. We remember the victims of genocide and will not allow it to happen again,’ said Yelizaveta Sadovnichaya, senior assistant prosecutor of the Astravyets District.”
Overall, this approach — the idea that it does not matter who you are, because genocide affects everyone equally — is consistent with Belarusian Law No. 146-Z of January 5, 2022, “On the Genocide of the Belorussian People,” a short but interesting piece of legislation.
Article 1 of this law states that the genocide of the Belorussian people consists of “atrocities committed by Nazi criminals and their accomplices, as well as nationalist formations, during the Great Patriotic War and the postwar period.” This statement is accompanied by two footnotes which, in my view, are the most interesting part of the law:
“* For the purposes of this Law, the postwar period shall mean the period ending on December 31, 1951.
** For the purposes of this Article, the Belorussian people shall mean Soviet citizens who resided in the territory of the Belorussian Soviet Socialist Republic during the Great Patriotic War and/or the postwar period.”
Thus, it turns out that the Belarusian people were subjected to genocide until the end of 1951, and that this genocide affected those who lived in the BSSR during the specified period — including hundreds of thousands of people who moved to this part of the Soviet Union after the territory had been fully liberated from German occupation. It should also be noted that the law refers exclusively to “Soviet citizens.” This means that Jews, Roma, and other persecuted people who had fled Poland for the BSSR — and many of whom were subsequently murdered by the Germans in Belarus — are not included into the scope of this genocide if they were not Soviet citizens, even though they “resided in the territory.”
The second and final article of this striking “law” establishes responsibility for denying the genocide of the Belarusian people (God forbid we should suggest here that if part of Belarus’s population was subjected to extermination in 1945–1951, those were no longer Nazi atrocities but Bolshevik ones).
After such a masterpiece of legislation, the Russian law, adopted only in 2026 and likewise intended to punish denial of genocide — this time, the genocide of the entire “Soviet people” — seems like rather dull plagiarism. The Russian law limits the relevant period to 1941–1945 and defines genocide as “actions by the Nazis and their accomplices during the Great Patriotic War of 1941–1945 aimed at the complete or partial destruction of national, ethnic, and racial groups inhabiting the territory of the USSR.”
The only respect in which the Russian law surpasses its Belarusian “prototype” is the breadth of its ambition: it encompasses all the peoples who inhabited the USSR (the Russian authorities do not specify exactly how many national, ethnic, and racial groups they believe this included), whereas Belarus officially recognizes only two such groups. Numerous government websites repeat verbatim the following statement:
“During the Second World War, Belarus effectively experienced two genocides on its territory—the Holocaust of Belorussian Jews and the genocide of Belorussians as a constituent part of the Eastern Slavs.”
The genocide, or Holocaust, of the Roma of Belarus is not mentioned.
In Russia, if the extermination of the Roma population during the German occupation is commemorated at all, it tends to be remembered on April 8, International Roma Day (referred to in Russia as “Day of Roma”), although internationally the date is generally regarded as a day devoted to the struggle for Roma rights rather than as a day of remembrance for the victims of Nazism.
Which “constituent parts of the Eastern Slavs,” or which parts of the “Soviet people,” are meant to be covered by the concept of the genocide of the Soviet people is an interesting question — one that is not answered by the exhibition at the museum bearing that name, which replaced the Gulag History Museum in Moscow. Are the inhabitants of Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Western Ukraine, and Moldova — with their very different memories of the events of 1939–1945 — to be regarded as part of the “Soviet people”?
In any event, the Council of Europe’s index, which brings together information on the dates and forms of commemoration of Roma Holocaust victims, indicates that many of these countries have already officially established August 2 as a national day of remembrance (including Ukraine and Lithuania), while others are preparing to do so.
Stephania KULAEVA
First published on the Radio Svoboda blog