The massacre in Szczurowa was the murder of 93 Romani people, including children, women and the elderly, by German Nazi occupiers in the Polish village of Szczurowa on 3 August 1943. Between ten and twenty families of settled Romani had lived in Szczurowa for generations, alongside ethnic Poles with whom they had friendly and neighborly relations. They were integrated enough into the general community that there were several mixed marriages.
On 3 August 1943 German police rounded up almost all the Romani inhabitants of the village and transported them to the local cemetery where they were shot. A list of all the victims has been preserved in the documents of the local church. [1]
On 8 May 1956, local inhabitants of the village and members of local veterans' associations erected a memorial stone with a suitable inscription at the site of the mass grave of the victims. This became the first memorial commemorating victims of the Romani Holocaust in the world. [1] The memorial is cared for by local schoolchildren and the memory of the tragedy is part of the local historical consciousness. The memorial refers to the victims as "locals" rather than Romani, which may reflect the integration of the Romanies into the larger community. The decision to omit reference to the Romani people on the memorial may also be a result of political narrative shaping by the Polish government of the time. [2]
Since 1960, Romanies from Tarnów have been coming to the region to honor the memory of the victims. Since 1996 the International Romani Caravan of Memory travels around the Tarnów region to commemorate the Nazi mass murder of Romanies during World War II. The main stop of the caravan is Szczurowa where after a visit to the mass grave, a mass is held at the local church.
The Tarnów region was the site of other Nazi crimes against Romanies in addition to that at Szczurowa. Most of the victim's identities and their place of burial are unknown. Other mass graves of murdered Romanies in the region include those at Bielcza (28 murdered), Borzęcin Dolny (28 murdered) and Żabno (49 murdered). [1]
The Romani people, who lived in Europe from the 15th century, were among the groups singled out by the Nazi Germany regime for persecution and were often murdered along with the Jews. Between 500,000 and 1,500,000 Romanies were killed by the Nazis throughout Europe during the Holocaust. [3]
The Romani Holocaust or the Romani genocide—also known as the Porajmos, the Pharrajimos, and the Samudaripen —was the planned effort by Nazi Germany and its World War II allies and collaborators to commit ethnic cleansing and eventually genocide against European Roma and Sinti peoples during the Holocaust era.
The Sinti are a subgroup of Romani people, found mostly in Germany and Central Europe, numbering some 200,000 people. They were traditionally itinerant, but today only a small percentage of Sinti remain unsettled. In earlier times, they frequently lived on the outskirts of communities.
Friedrich-Wilhelm Krüger was a German mass-scale murderer and a paramilitary commander acting as a high-ranking member of the SA and the SS. Between 1939 and 1943 he was the Higher SS and Police Leader in the General Government, giving him command of all police and security forces in German-occupied Poland. In this capacity, he organized and supervised numerous crimes against humanity and had major responsibility for the German genocide of the Polish nation: the extermination of six million Poles and massive destruction, degradation and impoverishment of the Polish state. At the end of the war, he committed suicide.
The AB-Aktion, was a second stage of the Nazi German campaign of violence during World War II aimed to eliminate the intellectuals and the upper classes of the Second Polish Republic across the territories slated for eventual annexation. Most of the killings were arranged in a form of forced disappearances from multiple cities and towns upon the German arrival. In the spring and summer of 1940, more than 30,000 Polish citizens were arrested by the Nazi authorities in German-occupied central Poland, the so-called General Government. About 7,000 of them including community leaders, professors, teachers and priests were subsequently massacred secretly at various locations including at the Palmiry forest complex near Palmiry. The others were sent to Nazi concentration camps.
Bełżec is a village in Tomaszów Lubelski County, Lublin Voivodeship, in eastern Poland. It is the seat of the gmina of Gmina Bełżec. It lies approximately 8 kilometres (5 mi) south of Tomaszów Lubelski and 114 km (71 mi) south-east of the regional capital Lublin. It is located in the Roztocze region.
Names of the Holocaust vary based on context. "The Holocaust" is the name commonly applied in English since the mid-1940s to the systematic extermination of 6 million Jews by Nazi Germany during World War II. The term is also used more broadly to include the Nazi Party's systematic murder of millions of people in other groups they determined were "Untermenschen" or "subhuman," which included primarily the Jews and the Slavs, the former having allegedly infected the latter, including ethnic Ukrainians, Poles, the Serbs, Russians, the Czechs and others.
Holocaust victims were people targeted by the government of Nazi Germany based on their ethnicity, religion, political beliefs, and/or sexual orientation. The institutionalized practice by the Nazis of singling out and persecuting people resulted in the Holocaust, which began with legalized social discrimination against specific groups, involuntary hospitalization, euthanasia, and forced sterilization of persons considered physically or mentally unfit for society. The vast majority of the Nazi regime's victims were Jews, Sinti-Roma peoples, and Slavs but victims also encompassed people identified as social outsiders in the Nazi worldview, such as homosexuals, and political enemies. Nazi persecution escalated during World War II and included: non-judicial incarceration, confiscation of property, forced labor, sexual slavery, death through overwork, human experimentation, undernourishment, and execution through a variety of methods. For specified groups like the Jews, genocide was the Nazis' primary goal.
A Stolperstein is a ten-centimetre (3.9 in) concrete cube bearing a brass plate inscribed with the name and life dates of victims of Nazi extermination or persecution. Literally, it means 'stumbling stone' and metaphorically 'stumbling block'.
The Ponary massacre, or the Paneriai massacre, was the mass murder of up to 100,000 people, mostly Jews, Poles, and Russians, by German SD and SS and their Lithuanian collaborators, including Ypatingasis būrys killing squads, during World War II and the Holocaust in the Generalbezirk Litauen of Reichskommissariat Ostland. The murders took place between July 1941 and August 1944 near the railway station at Ponary, a suburb of today's Vilnius, Lithuania. 70,000 Jews were murdered at Ponary, along with up to 20,000 Poles, and 8,000 Soviet POWs, most of them from nearby Vilna (Vilnius), and its newly formed Vilna Ghetto.
Borzęcin is a village in Brzesko County, Lesser Poland Voivodeship, in southern Poland. It is the seat of the gmina called Gmina Borzęcin. It lies approximately 14 kilometres (9 mi) north-east of Brzesko and 55 km (34 mi) east of the regional capital Kraków. It is located on the Uszwica river and divided into two sołectwos, Upper Borzęcin and Lower Borzęcin. Currently it has a population of about 3,700 inhabitants.
The Korosciatyn massacre took place on the night of February 28/29, 1944, during the province-wide wave of massacres of Poles in Volhynia in World War II. Korosciatyn, which now bears the name of Krynica and is located in western Ukraine, was one of the biggest ethnic Polish villages of the interwar Poland’s within Buczacz County in Tarnopol Voivodeship (pictured). Located along the railway line from Tarnopol to Stanislawów, in 1939 it had some 900 inhabitants, all of them being ethnic Poles. Korosciatyn had an elementary school, a Catholic church and a railway station. It belonged to the Catholic parish of nearby Monasterzyska, which also covered several nearby villages. Among the most famous of the citizens of this parish, are Rev. Stanislaw Padewski, professor Gabriel Turowski as well as two scientists, professor Michal Lesiow of Lublin’s Maria Curie University and doctor Jan Zaleski of Krakow’s Pedagogical College. Altogether, in 1939 the Deaconry of Buczacz had around 45 000 Polish inhabitants.
Polska Roma are the largest and one of the oldest ethnolinguistic subgroups of Romani people living in Poland. Some Polska Roma also live in North America, Switzerland, Sweden, Great Britain and countries of the European Union. The term "Polska Roma" is both an ethnonym of the group and a term used in the academic literature. As such it is distinct from the terms "Polish Roma" or "Roma in Poland" which better denote the broader Roma population in Poland. Polish ethnographer Jerzy Ficowski, writing in the 1950s and 1960s used the term "Polish Lowlander Gypsies" to refer to the same group, though this terminology is no longer in widespread use.
Babi Yar, a ravine near Kyiv, was the scene of possibly the largest shooting massacre during the Holocaust. After the war, commemoration efforts encountered serious difficulty because of the policy of the Soviet Union. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, a number of memorials have been erected. The creation of the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center was initiated in 2016.
The massacres in Piaśnica were a set of mass executions carried out by Nazi Germany during World War II, between the fall of 1939 and spring of 1940 in Piaśnica Wielka in the Darzlubska Wilderness near Wejherowo. The exact number of people murdered is unknown, but estimates range between 12,000 and 14,000 victims. Most of them were Polish intellectuals from Gdańsk Pomerania, but Poles, Jews, Czechs and German inmates from mental hospitals from the General Government and the Third Reich were also murdered. After the Stutthof concentration camp, Piaśnica was the largest site of killings of Polish civilians in Pomerania by the Germans, and for this reason, is sometimes referred to as the "second" or "Pomeranian" Katyn. It was the first large-scale Nazi atrocity in occupied Poland.
Bronna Góra is the name of a secluded area in present-day Belarus where mass killings of Polish Jews were carried out by Nazi Germany during World War II. The location was part of the eastern half of occupied Poland, which had been invaded by the Soviet Union in 1939 in agreement with Germany, and two years later captured by the Wehrmacht in Operation Barbarossa. It is estimated that from May 1942 until November of that year, during the most deadly phase of the Holocaust in Poland, some 50,000 Jews were murdered at Bronna Góra forest in death pits. The victims were transported there in Holocaust trains from Nazi ghettos, including from the Brześć Ghetto and the Pińsk Ghetto, and from the ghettos in the surrounding area, as well as from Reichskommissariat Ostland.
The Romani people, also known as the Roma, qualify as an ethnic minority group in Poland of Indo-Aryan origins. The Council of Europe regards the endonym "Roma" more appropriate when referencing the people, and "Romani" when referencing cultural characteristics. The term Cyganie is considered an exonym in Poland.
The Mausoleum of the Martyrdom of Polish Villages in Michniów is a museum located in Michniów, in Świętokrzyskie Voivodeship, in Poland, constituting a branch of the Museum of the Kielce Village, commemorating the pacification actions in German-occupied Poland.
The Roma Holocaust Memorial Day is a memorial day that commemorates the victims of the Romani genocide (Porajmos), which resulted in the murder of an estimated 220,000 – 500,000 Romani people by Nazi Germany and its collaborators during World War II. The date of 2 August was chosen for the memorial because on the night of 2 – 3 August 1944, 2,897 Roma, mostly women, children and elderly people, were killed in the Gypsy family camp (Zigeunerfamilienlager) at Auschwitz concentration camp. Some countries have chosen to commemorate the genocide on different dates.
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