More than 70 years after the end of the Second World War, Moldova is planning to build a new monument to Roma victims of the Holocaust.
Local politician Iurii Zagorcea, who has already constructed five monuments to Jewish Holocaust victims, told PRI he is now collecting donations for a memorial for the Roma.
Roma were targeted for extermination by the Nazis. But while there are many monuments to Jewish Holocaust victims, Roma memorials started being built only recently. Germany erected one just five years ago and Ukraine unveiled one last year. In Moldova, which has a large Roma minority, there is no standing monument to the Roma victims of the Holocaust.
“I know that the number of Roma Holocaust victims is small compared to Jews, but we must still build a monument,” said Zagorcea, a district council member in the town of Edinets who is neither Jewish nor Roma. “It should be made so that people know about the Holocaust.”
Approximately 25,000 Roma in Romania and Moldova were deported to camps in the Romanian-occupied region of Transnistria, now part of Ukraine, between 1942 and 1944, according to Ion Duminica, a Roma researcher who is head of the Ethnic Minorities Department at the Moldovan Academy of Sciences. He said only about 11,000 survived. The thousands who died were some of the hundreds of thousands, if not 1.5 million, Roma killed during the Second World War.
These are estimates, at best. Duminica explains that often the Roma did not keep documents and officials did not count them well either. In some instances, an official may have recorded the head of the household as deported to a camp, while not mentioning the rest of the family. Children were not counted. Women were often kidnapped by Romanian soldiers and sold to the German army to be raped, and no one saw them alive after that, Duminica said.
In general, very little is known about what happened to the Roma during the Holocaust in Moldova. While Jewish organisations have interviewed thousands of Jewish survivors, Roma victims’ memories of the atrocities are rarely recorded.
“We lost time. We should have done it in the Soviet time, or at least in the 1990s, but no one did it,” Duminica said. “Now even if you pay me, I can’t promise that we’ll be able to find a survivor [with their memory intact]. What we can find now is people with fragmentary memories of childhood.”
Moldova’s new Roma monument will be the country’s second attempt to honour the memory of the Roma during the Holocaust.
In 2003, a monument was built in the capital Chisinau, but it has been completely destroyed by vandals. Only the foundation is left.
