Chairman of the German Bundesrat, member of the Left Party Bodo Ramelow honored the memory of hundreds of thousands sinti and roma, killed by the National Socialists in Europe. Ramelov on Tuesday, August 2, the European Day of Remembrance for the Victims gypsy genocide in 1944 he visited the former Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland.
“We are here today to look horror in the face and thereby make it visible,” Ramelov said. His words were quoted by the State Chancellery of Thuringia, of which he is prime minister.
The politician urged to eliminate the ground for racism, discrimination and exclusion. Together with the chairman Central Council of German Sinti and Roma Romani Rose, he laid wreaths in memory of the dead.
Largest ethnic minority in Europe
It is about the largest ethnic minority in Europe. “And yet in a number of places they (representatives of the nationality. – Ed.) again become marginalized within the framework of tacit apartheid. In many countries, they face hatred, alienation, racism, violence and the denial of their civil and social rights,” the chairman of the Bundesrat said. At the same time, according to him, Sinti and Roma are an inalienable part of the public and social life of Europe.
“The war of the Russian Federation in Ukraine should not be a reason for the expulsion of the Roma”
The politician expressed the opinion that the attitude towards minorities is “an important criterion for the admission of new countries to the EU.” The Thuringian prime minister also stressed that Russia’s aggressive war against Kyiv should not be “a pretext for expelling the Roma from Ukraine.”
According to rough estimates, up to 500,000 people died during Poraimos, as members of this minority call the genocide. More exact figures are unknown. Decades after the events of those years, many German Sinti and Roma felt discriminated against by the authorities, who did not perceive them as a group of victims of National Socialism. It was not until 1982 that the German government acknowledged that the killing of Sinti and Roma was genocide.
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Horrors of National Socialism in graphic novels
Comic – part of the campaign against Nazism
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Horrors of National Socialism in graphic novels
“Mouse: A Survivor’s Tale”
The world-famous comic book by American Art Spiegelman was fully published in 1991. The Jews are represented here as mice, and the Germans as cats. The author tells the story of his father, a survivor of the Holocaust, and does not ignore either the suicide of his mother or the difficult relationships in the family. Mouse is the only comic book to win a Pulitzer Prize.
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Horrors of National Socialism in graphic novels
National Socialism through the eyes of a child
“When I have nightmares, I tell my mom and I feel better. Would you like to describe yours to me?” Elsa asks her grandmother Dunya. She breaks the silence of many years and the granddaughter finds out what her Jewish relative had to endure in France as a child. Author Loic Deauville, in his 2014 graphic novel The Hidden Child, urges us to remain human in dark times.
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Horrors of National Socialism in graphic novels
Between Germany and Mallorca
There are also autobiographical features in the 2016 Aunt Woossy comic. Author Catherine Bacher visited her aunt in Mallorca and learned the unknown stories of the family tree. In 1933, the family moved to this island from Germany, but three years later they were forced to leave Spain with the outbreak of the civil war. Back in Germany, the Jewish mother and other family members faced discrimination and persecution.
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Horrors of National Socialism in graphic novels
Nazi submarine bunker
The graphic novel by Jens Gener, published in 2019, is based on the diary entries of the Frenchman Reymond Portefey, who, as a concentration camp prisoner, was sent to build a protective structure for submarines near Bremen. During the construction of a shelter for submarines called Valentine, more than a thousand people engaged in forced labor were killed.
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Horrors of National Socialism in graphic novels
Married couple hunt Nazis
A 2020 comic by Pascal Bresson and Sylvain Dorange tells the story of Beate Klarsfeld. In Paris, she met her future husband Serge, whose father was killed in Auschwitz. They began to look for Nazi criminals who escaped punishment after World War II. In 1968, at a convention of the Christian Democratic Union, Klarsfeld slapped German Chancellor Kurt Georg Kiesinger, calling him a Nazi.
Author: Suzanne Kords, Pavel Mylnikov
