Аннотация: The translation of this text into English is done by Valery Novoselsky, Executive Editor of Roma Virtual Network (RVN).
Every student in the world knows today about the Holocaust - the mass murder of Jews by the Nazis during the World War II. Or at least, if they do not know, they heard of it, after all.
And what does Paraimos mean? And Samudaripen? And have anyone heard about Kali Thrash?
Meanwhile, these terms mean the same thing as the Holocaust. With the only difference that it"s not the Holocaust of the Jews but of the Roma whom the Nazis and their collaborators murdered in the same way.
And if the Jewish Holocaust is studied in research centers, thousands of volumes of scientific literature and fiction have been written and published on this subject, many kilometers of documentaries and feature films were shot, the Holocaust (this term is translated as the extermination order) of Roma, has not been referred to a lot.
For the Roma Holocaust there was no place either in Jerusalem, Yad Vashem memorial or in a similar institution in New York - the two major research centers engaged in the study of the Holocaust. The speakers at the ceremonies habitually forget about Roma, when they say from the high tribunes that the Nazis killed the Jews only on ethnicity principle, yet the fate of the Roma in the Nazi-occupied countries was exactly the same.
The term Holocaust has long been referred to the Jews only. There"s rarely anyone that recalls the Roma in this regard. As if they do not count. As if the victims of the Nazi genocide are divided into first-class and second-class, those that are your own ones and others.
It"s for sixty years already that Germany has been paying compensation to Israel for whatever the Jewish people suffered during the Second World War.
But I've never heard of a similar compensation paid to the Roma survivors of the Holocaust.
And yet, I often wonder why the Jews themselves, subjected to suffering and persecution throughout their history, do not remember the suffering of another people, with whom they went through all the hell of Nazi terror? After all, it would be logical to assume that the Jews as a people, who suffered so much in their long and in many ways tragic history, would be characterized by greater compassion for other people's misfortune.
But alas, we have our great tragedy, we jealously guard its uniqueness and we are not up to other people's troubles. Hardly anyone of Israeli schoolchildren is aware of Paraimos, because the Roma Holocaust theme is not taught in the school curriculum. Our parliamentarians align recognition of the Armenian Genocide with diplomatic consequences for our country. Simply put, they fear to complicate the relationship with Turkey that way. Of course, the consequences are to be considered, but what would the same parliamentarians say, if the recognition of the European Jews Holocaust would be linked by their colleagues from any other country with certain benefits for their state?
And one more thing: today in Israel there are thousands of people from Africa and Asia, who are looking for refuge from war, famine and persecution in their homeland.
The Government of Israel is very concerned about how to protect themselves from... refugees. It is with this aim that the government decided to build a special fence on the border with Egypt, the Israeli parliament has toughened penalties for illegal immigrants seeking asylum in Israel.
What a pity that while taking these decisions, the government and parliament in Israel completely forget the words the people usually say at the ceremonies commemorating the Holocaust victims: how the world remained indifferent to the fate of the Jews seeking refuge from Nazi persecution in other countries during World War II. Then, what makes us better than those we charge, in this case?
Link: http://samlib.ru/w/wlad_r/paraimos.shtml (text in Russian)