Between 1933 and 1945 Sinti and Roma (“Gypsies”) suffered greatly as victims of Nazi persecution and genocide. Building on long-held prejudices, the Nazi regime viewed Gypsies both as “asocials” (outside “normal” society) and as racial “inferiors”-believed to threaten the biological purity and strength of the “superior Aryan” race. During World War II, the Nazi and their collaborators killed tens of thousands of Sinti and Roman men, women, and children across German-occupied Europe.
-United States Holocaust Memorial Museum


When young kids these days learn about the Holocaust, they’re manly taught that the only people there were the Jews. They were never taught that Jewish people weren’t the only ones that were taken to the concentration camps.

My name is Jana. I’m a Roma (“Gypsy”). My people were also taken to concentration camps. We were told to line up in two lines, one line for men and the other for women. The women got on one train and the men got on a different train. On the way over to those camps my little sister, Luminita and me had heard screams from the other carts on the same train we were on. Both of us were terrified every time we heard them screams. We held on to each other, our eyes shut close hoping this was all just a bad dream. “Jana you’re not going to leave me are you?” Luminita asked.

“I’ll never let you out of my sight.” I responded to make her feel comfort.

There was a lady trying to get off the train from the small crack in the train cart. When she got out there was a shot heard. Everyone rushed to see what had happened and saw the lady lying on the ground with blood coming out of her chest.

When we got to the concentration camp the women in the train carts were almost pushed out. There was one camp made just for us though called Zigeunerlage it was in a horrible environment, right next to a sewage dump and a cemetery in Berlin.

The German demons pushed us to the entrance of the camp. I got separated from my Luminita, and when I looked back to look for her, I ended up seeing the demons drag dead bodies out the carts. There was one pile of hundreds of Roman woman lying on the ground, dead. What were they going to do? How did they die? Then that’s when I remembered the awful smell in the cart that I was on had.

Luminita and me didn’t see anything because we chose not to leave the spot we were at except when we heard the shot. The smell in the cart was the smell of sulfur.