The International Roma Holocaust Remembrance Day is held yearly on the 2nd of August. It commemorates  the tragic events that happened seventy years earlier during the Second World War.

At the conference in Budapest. Deputy State Secretary for Social Inclusion of the Ministry of Human Capacities Katalin Victor Langer, noted that

in May of 1944 Roma prisoners in Auschwitz turned against their Nazi captors and fought heroically for their own survival.

She highlighted the importance of commemorating tragedies such as the Roma Holocaust as part of Hungary’s collective conscience.

Szabolcs Molnár, the Deputy Mayor of the fourth district in northern Budapest, where the conference took place, noted that on the 11th of July in 1944 ten thousand Jewish and Roma men and women were taken from Újpest to Nazi death camps. He said that the local government declared July 11th as the district’s own day of mourning in 2005. 

Based on the decision of the congress of the World Roma Organisation, August 2nd  was named International Day of the Roma Holocaust in 1972. On that day, over 3,000 Roma prisoners were killed in Auschwitz in 1944.

About 500,000 Roma are estimated to have been killed in Nazi camps; 23,000 of them in Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Sources: Hungary Today, Kormany.hu