Szczurowa massacre | |
---|---|
Part of Romani Holocaust | |
Location | Szczurowa, Poland |
Coordinates | 50°06′59″N20°38′14″E / 50.11639°N 20.63722°E |
Date | 3 August 1943 |
Target | Romani people |
Attack type | Extermination, mass murder |
Weapons | Guns |
Deaths | 93 Romani |
Perpetrators | German Nazi occupiers |
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 July 1943. [1] 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 July 1943 [2] German police rounded up almost all the Romani inhabitants of the village and transported them to the local cemetery where they were shot. [3] A list of all the victims has been preserved in the documents of the local church. [4]
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. [4] 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 Romani 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. [5]
Since 1960, Romani 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 Romani 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 Romani in addition to that at Szczurowa. Most of the victim's identities and their place of burial are unknown. Other mass graves of murdered Romani in the region include those at Bielcza (28 murdered), Borzęcin Dolny (28 murdered) and Żabno (49 murdered). [4]
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 Romani were killed by the Nazis throughout Europe during the Holocaust. [6]
Babi Yar or Babyn Yar is a ravine in the Ukrainian capital Kyiv and a site of massacres carried out by Nazi Germany's forces during its campaign against the Soviet Union in World War II. The first and best documented of the massacres took place on 29–30 September 1941, in which some 33,771 Jews were murdered. Other victims of massacres at the site included Soviet prisoners of war, communists and Romani people. It is estimated that a total of between 100,000 and 150,000 people were murdered at Babi Yar during the German occupation.
The Romani Holocaust was the genocide of European Roma and Sinti people during World War II. Beginning in 1933, Nazi Germany systematically persecuted the European Roma, Sinti and other peoples pejoratively labeled 'Gypsy' through forcible internment and compulsory sterilization. German authorities summarily and arbitrarily subjected Romani people to incarceration, forced labor, deportation and mass murder in concentration and extermination camps.
The Sinti are a subgroup of Romani people. They are found mostly in Germany, France and Italy 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.
Aukštieji Paneriai is a neighborhood of Vilnius, situated about 10 kilometres away from the city center. It is located on low forested hills, on the Vilnius-Warsaw road. Paneriai was the site of the Ponary massacre, a mass killing of as many as 100,000 people from Vilnius and nearby towns and villages during World War II.
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 six million Jews by Nazi Germany during World War II.
The International Holocaust Remembrance Day, or the International Day in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust, is an international memorial day on 27 January that commemorates the victims of the Holocaust, which resulted in the genocide of one third of the Jewish people, along with countless members of other minorities by Nazi Germany between 1933 and 1945, an attempt to implement its "final solution" to the Jewish question. 27 January was chosen to commemorate the date when the Auschwitz concentration camp was liberated by the Red Army in 1945.
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'.
Drobytsky Yar is a ravine in Kharkiv, Ukraine and the site of Nazi massacres during the Holocaust in Ukraine. Starting in October 1941, Nazi troops occupied Kharkiv and began preparations for the mass-murder of the local population. Over the following months, members of the Einsatzgruppen murdered an estimated 16,000–30,000 local residents, mainly Jews. Notably on 15 December 1941, when the temperature was −15 °C (5 °F), around 15,000 Jews were shot. Children were thrown into pits alive, to save bullets, in the expectation that they would quickly freeze to death. The site's menorah monument was allegedly damaged by Russia on March 26, 2022 in an artillery exchange during the invasion of Ukraine.
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 the Lithuanian 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 2,000 Poles, 8,000 Soviet POWs, most of them from nearby Vilnius, and its newly formed Vilna Ghetto.
Berlin-Marzahn Rastplatz was a camp set up for Romani people in the Berlin suburb of Marzahn by Nazi authorities.
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 Brześć Ghetto or the Ghetto in Brest on the Bug, also: Brześć nad Bugiem Ghetto, and Brest-Litovsk Ghetto was a Nazi ghetto created in occupied Western Belarus in December 1941, six months after the German troops had invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941. Less than a year after the creation of the ghetto, around October 15–18, 1942, most of approximately 20,000 Jewish inhabitants of Brest (Brześć) were murdered; over 5,000 were executed locally at the Brest Fortress on the orders of Karl Eberhard Schöngarth; the rest in the secluded forest of the Bronna Góra extermination site, sent there aboard Holocaust trains under the guise of 'resettlement'.
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 were erected. The creation of the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center was initiated in 2016.
Biķernieki Memorial is a war memorial to the Holocaust victims of World War II in Biķernieki forest in Riga, Latvia. Biķernieki forest is the biggest mass murder site during the Holocaust in Latvia with two memorial territories spanning over 80,000 square metres (860,000 sq ft) with 55 marked burial sites with around 20,000 victims still buried in total.
The Memorial to the Sinti and Roma Victims of National Socialism is a memorial in Berlin, Germany. The monument is dedicated to the memory of the 220,000 – 500,000 people murdered in the Porajmos – the Nazi genocide of the European Sinti and Roma peoples. It was designed by Dani Karavan and was officially opened on 24 October 2012 by German Chancellor Angela Merkel in the presence of President Joachim Gauck.
The Romani people in Poland are an ethnic minority group of Indo-Aryan origins in Poland. The Council of Europe regards the endonym "Roma" as more appropriate when referencing the people, and "Romani" when referencing cultural characteristics. The term Cyganie is considered an exonym in Poland.
Brzesko Ghetto was a Nazi ghetto during World War II in occupied Poland. The ghetto was created by the Third Reich in 1941 in the Polish town of Brzesko located in the Kraków District about 40 miles from Kraków. The ghetto was open when it was first created. In 1942, walls were put up and the ghetto became a closed ghetto. An estimated 4,000 Jewish people lived there but another 2,000 moved there by 1942, many arriving from Kraków and the surrounding area. The Jewish people living within Brzesko were sent to the Bełżec extermination camp and Auschwitz extermination camp. After the exterminations, the camp was closed end of 1942.
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.
Nazi Germany perpetrated various crimes against humanity and war crimes against children, including the killing of children of unwanted or "dangerous" people in accordance with Nazi ideological views, either as part of their idea of racial struggle or as a measure of preventive security. They particularly targeted Jewish children in the Holocaust, but also ethnically Polish children and Romani children and children with mental or physical disabilities. Thousands of children died in Nazi concentration camps. The Nazis and their collaborators killed children for these ideological reasons and in retaliation for real or alleged partisan attacks.