Serbia’s Forgotten Role in the Roma Holocaust
It was early morning on October 29, 1941 when Nazi forces surrounded the predominantly Roma neighbourhood of Marinkova Bara in Belgrade.
At around 5am, Serbian collaborationist police and gendarmerie forces then entered the Roma settlement, taking away its male residents. Frightened men and their families were told they would be back soon after they finished work or after a routine ID check.
But no one returned.
Milena Stankovic’s husband, brothers and brother-in-law were among those arrested.
“They were taken from the apartment and put into the camp at Autokomanda [Topovske Supe concentration camp]. After two days there, they were sent away in an unknown direction. I have heard nothing about them to this day,” reads a statement that Milena, who was 48 at the time of the arrests, gave to Yugoslavia’s Commission for Determining the Crimes of Occupiers and their Collaborators on June 26, 1945.
The Commission, which operated across the whole of Yugoslavia, was established to document crimes and other atrocities committed by the Nazis and their domestic allies, as well as to count the victims. The testimonies given by Milena Stankovic and many others are now kept in the Yugoslav Archive in Belgrade.
At the outset of WWII, 60,000 Roma people lived in Serbia, and 300,000 in Yugoslavia as a whole.
Researchers and experts say there is still no exact data on the number of Roma who were killed during WWII, but estimates suggest that 12,000 to 20,000 of them died in Serbia.
Their deaths were a direct or indirect consequence of the Nazi occupiers’ rigorous anti-Roma laws, which were implemented by Serbia’s collaborationist regime led by Prime Minister Milan Nedic and his puppet government, usually referred to as Government of National Salvation.
From October 1941 until early 1942 in several cities and towns in occupied Serbia, Roma men were arrested, put into camps and executed alongside male Jews.
Roma women and children were also arrested and imprisoned at Staro Sajmiste concentration camp in Belgrade, together with Jews.
Around a third of them died, although the majority managed to survive – partly due to an easing of regulations and partly because they stopped being high on the Nazis’ priority list.
On Sunday, a commemoration was held at the Stratiste memorial site near the Serbian city of Pancevo to mark the annual Day of Remembrance of Roma victims of World War II, organised by Serbia’s Ministry of Labour, Employment, Veterans’ Affairs and Social Affairs.
“It is our duty, remembering everyone who was killed here, that we do not allow the victims to be forgotten and relativised. We have to testify about this horrible crime and keep warning humankind so that such horrors never happen to any nation and any human being anywhere,” Dalibor Nokic, president of the Roma National Council in Serbia, said at the ceremony.
Activists, victims’ relatives and experts argue that the ‘Samudaripen’ or ‘Porajmos’ – Roma words for the Holocaust – is an almost forgotten crime in Serbia, and that little has been done to preserve the memory of those who were killed or persecuted.
“There is a question of why no attention was given to the [persecution and killing of] Roma. No one was really interested,” Dragoljub Ackovic, a member of the Roma World Parliament who has done extensive research on the Roma Holocaust in Yugoslavia, told BIRN. “So it seems like the Roma did not suffer at all.”
A question of responsibility
The Stratiste memorial to people killed during WWII, near Pancevo in Serbia. Photo: Mazbln/Wikimedia Commons.
Direct persecution of Roma people in Serbia started in late May 1941, when the laws that institutionalised the persecution of Jews were applied to them as well.
From that moment on, Roma were obliged to do forced labour and wear a yellow armband with the word ‘Sinti und Roma’ (Gypsy in German) on it, were banned from working in state institutions, from going to hospitals and other public institutions and from using public transport.
They had to report themselves to the police and in some cases, were even forbidden to leave their homes.
Milovan Pisarri, a historian from Belgrade-based Centre for Public History and an expert on the Roma Holocaust, argued that although the Germans were in charge, they had a lot of help from the collaborationist authorities in Serbia.
“Serbia’s collaborationist authorities were ordered to monitor Jews and Roma and to make sure that all the imposed regulations were respected. And they were doing it thoroughly,” Pisarri told BIRN.
In June 1941, the collaborationist authorities adopted several provisions targeting both Roma and Jews.
One of them was issued by the Musicians’ Unions of Serbia, informing musicians of Jewish and Roma origin that they were forbidden to work from then on. Many Roma in Serbia have traditionally made a living by playing music and singing.
“So there was nothing they could do, apart from staying at their homes and the parts of the city in which they lived,” Pisarri explained.
However, the worst was yet to come – from mid-October 1941 onwards, Roma men were being arrested, held hostage and killed throughout occupied Serbia.
Around 1,500 men were interned at the Topovske Supe concentration camp and soon afterwards executed in Jabuka near Pancevo; 200 Roma men were killed in the western town of Sabac together with Jews, while several hundred were shot dead in the towns of Kragujevac and Leskovac.
“It was always happening in the same way: the Nazis would order arrests of Roma men, their forces would surround their neighbourhoods and then Serbian police and gendarmerie would enter homes at 4 to 5am, wake people up and say men had to go with them, citing forced labour or a regular check as main reasons,“ Pisarri said.
The arrested men would first be taken to local police stations and then Serbian police would transfer them to concentration camps.
“The Germans did order [arrests], but everything was being done by the Serbian collaborationist authorities,” Pisarri said.
There were also cases in which local collaborators were trading Roma for arrested Serbs, most notably in the southern town of Leskovac in December 1941, Pisarri added.
“Germans first arrested Serbs, but then local authorities intervened and said: ‘Let the Serbs go, we will give you Roma,’” he said.
‘Blood was everywhere’
Roma and Jews from the Macva region were shot by the German Wehrmacht at a concentration camp in Sabac. Photo: romasintigenocide.eu.
After the arrests and executions of Roma men, the Nazis began to focus on Roma women and children from Belgrade. From December 8, 1941, they were being arrested and taken to the Staro Sajmiste camp.
Some died there, while many of those who were subsequently released died as a consequence of the brutal treatment and bad conditions at the camp, including cold and starvation.
Those who survived gave detailed descriptions of life inside the concentration camp. One of them was Milorad Dekic, who was interned when he was 14.
“We were put into one huge hangar, like a shed, you could see the sky above and everything was broken. There were four or five floors of beds… wooden boards put in a circle and nothing more… There was no oven, no stove, and the hangar was full of Roma only… I think there were 700 to 800 of us,” said Dekic’s testimony, provided to BIRN by the Belgrade-based Centre for Holocaust and Research Education.
“They were bringing in food and handing it out in our pavilion, but if you were not there, there was a stick waiting for your head, to hit you, crack you on the head, and blood was everywhere, but there was no doctor, nothing,” Dekic recalled.
“And then typhus came, lice; every night ten to 15 people died.”
Even though the so-called ‘Gypsy question’ was high on the Nazis’ agenda, in July 1941 they adopted a provision saying that all those who could prove their residence in Serbia prior to 1850 would be temporarily exempted from anti-Roma laws.
There were several reasons for this decision, Pisarri explained.
“It has to do with other priorities at that time, such as the fight with the [Yugoslav Communist] Partisans and the fact that Germans realised there were lots of Roma living in Serbia, and it wasn’t the time to start solving the so-called Gypsy question,” he said.
“So Roma who could prove it were treated like Serbs, which is why many Roma women and children were freed from the Staro Sajmiste concentration camp from December till February 1942,” he added.
Although the Nazis intended to continue with the execution of all Roma after this temporary halt, they became distracted from 1943 onwards by the war on the Eastern Front.
No empathy for Roma suffering
Dragoljub Ackovic. Photo: Media Centre Belgrade.
After WWII ended in 1945, Yugoslav war courts charged several dozen people with war crimes, but the Roma Holocaust was never included in the indictments. The killings and persecution of Roma people were only sporadically mentioned in verdicts, while the main focus was on Serbian and Jewish victims.
In the years that followed, the Roma Holocaust also has attracted little attention from the general public and researchers, and has never been taught at university faculties or at high schools, said Nikola Radic Lucati from the Centre for Holocaust Research and Education, which is about to publish the first database of Roma Holocaust testimonies, a list of those who were killed and an interactive map of occupied Serbia.
Radic Lucati told BIRN that “there is simply no empathy [towards the suffering of the Roma people] which in a large number of cases exists towards the Holocaust [of Jews]”.
He suggested this was “either a question of ignorance or a question of prejudices, or it is simply not acknowledged by the wider public”.
Radic Lucati also argued that the persecution of Roma in Serbia has never really ended, and persists today with their economic and social marginalisation.
“It continued through socialism and after it, and Roma are an especially good example of how certain methodologies of fascism have never been eradicated,” he said.
Marija Mitrovic from the Coalition of Roma Youth of Serbia agreed that students in Serbia “are not given opportunities to learn the history of the Roma in formal education as part of a subject history”.
Mitrovic also argued that the vast majority of people in Serbia – including Roma – are not aware of persecution and killing of Roma during WWII. The Coalition of Roma Youth will attempt to address that by starting a series of lectures next year about the Samudaripen, contemporary discrimination against the Roma, and what they went through during the 1990s conflicts.
Ackovic argued however that members of the Roma community are aware of the persecution during WWII, but only know about it by word of mouth.
“There is no such thing as [organised] collective memory,” he said. “And that attitude is welcome here in Serbia,” he added, suggesting that the lack of uncomfortable questions about the fate of the Roma during WWII suits the Serbian authorites.
Ackovic, who was involved in a legal case which saw Germany ordered in 2000 to pay compensation to people made to do forced labour in Serbia during WWII, said he still hopes that the state authorities will fulfil their promise to turn Staro Sajmiste into a memorial centre, which is supposed to include a Roma museum.
Until that happens, the building in which his kin were detained and abused in Belgrade could remain as it is today – a restaurant specialising in Serbian national cuisine, surrounded by bus stops.
