In Romani, this word means “(the) murder of all” (collective murder) and refers to the genocide of the Roma, Sinté and Kalé during the Second World War.

The Romani people will never forget, even if all too often historians and the media are silent on this tragedy in which the Romani population of Europe lost more than 500.000 of their own people between 1933 and 1945.  The Nazis and their allies persecuted, sterilized, imprisoned, tortured, shot and gassed the Roma in the concentration and death camps or in the forests.  The Nazi classification of Zigeuner (Roma) was for a person to have at least one great grand-parent who was of Romani origin.

Under the orders of the Nazi officer Himmler in 1938, the Roma were condemned for extermination (although they were “Aryan” in the true sense of the word), they were seen by the Nazis as pariahs, social deviants, criminals, “mixed-blood”, hence dangerous for the "pure German blood". One must also remember that apart from the high death toll within the Romani/Sinté communities, many Roma were orphaned, widowed, sterilized and traumatized for life in their minds and bodies by the horrors the Nazis inflicted on them.

In 1997, the then President of the United States Bill Clinton, chose Professor Hancock, a Roma intellectual, to be a member of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council as representative of the Romani people. In the 17 years of the Council’s existence, this was only the second time that a Romani representative became part of the Council’s 65 members. During the Nuremberg Trials in which the Nazi war criminals were put on trial, not one single Roma who had experienced and survived the horrors of the death camps was called to testify. Why ?????

We have just commemorated the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps, and yet, the Romani population still awaits world recognition of the Romani Holocaust, and the martyrdom of the Roma/Sinté during the Second World War. Up to the present, only the Romani/Sinté victims of German nationality have received (minimal) financial “compensation” and in terms of historical reference, next to nothing has been put into place to recognize the Romani Holocaust, the Samudaripen.

source: "La voix des Rroms"