Roma mark holocaust at Auschwitz

[IndianaGreen]

For those that think the Holocaust was exclusively Jewish, the Roma (Gypsies), the mentally impaired, and the homosexuals were targets too! Gay Jews suffered the most for they had to content with the rejection from their own community, as evidence by the opposition by the ultra-religious to a memorial to the gay Jewish victims of the Holocaust.

Roma mark holocaust at Auschwitz

By Adam Easton
BBC, Warsaw

The 60th anniversary of the Roma holocaust is being marked this week at Auschwitz and elsewhere.
In August 1944, the Nazis killed all those in the camp they had created for the Roma, or Gypsies, who like Jews were singled out for extermination.

Roma leaders from across the world are gathering at Auschwitz camp in southern Poland on Monday to commemorate the date.

It is the largest act of remembrance ever for Roma victims of the holocaust.

At the concentration camp, Roma leaders will take part in a large rally to the crematoria.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/3527024.stm

[Octafish]

1. Remember when Bush wondered if the Holocaust happened?

Revise and Conquer

Bush Family Whitewashing in Iraq and Nazi Germany

By CHRIS FLOYD

EXCERPT...

So it was most apt that the only question Bush was heard to ask during his Auschwitz tour actually dealt with Holocaust revisionism: "Do people challenge the accuracy of what you present?" he asked his guide, the New York Times reports. This might seem a rather bizarre question at first glance--but then, Bush has a personal stake in the cultivation of historical amnesia. His own family fortune was built in part by a long and profitable collusion with the Nazis--an ugly story oft told here, and raked up again by Newsweek Poland during the presidential visit.

SOURCE:

http://www.impeach-bush-now.org/Articles/Bush/bushrevision.htm

[Octafish]

2. Poppy taught Smirk all he knows.

Which isn't much, but what is there is evil.

"Boy, they were big on crematoriums, weren't they?" - - George Herbert Walker Bush, (Comment made on tour of Auschwitz)

[SOS]

3. 12 million died in the camps

All victims of fascism.
The Nazis used triangular badges or patches to identify prisoners in the concentration camps. Different colored patches represented different groups. The colors and their meanings were:

Yellow - Jew
Brown - Gypsy
Violet - Jehovah's Witness
Pink - Homosexual
Green - Habitual criminal
Red - Political prisoner
Black - Asocial
Blue - Emigrant

Image below shows the system in a WW2 era poster:

[HuckleB]

4. Thanks for sharing.

No one was immune from entry to the camps, that's for sure. Polish and Soviet POWs were actually used as guinea pigs at Auschwitz, early on, as the Nazis perfected the killing machine.

I actually am rereading Elie Wiesel's "Night" at the moment, and I read Art Spiegelman's "The Complete Maus," which is absolutely brilliant on so many levels.

For those who haven't read many histories of the Holocaust, Robert S. Wistrich's "Hitler and the Holocaust," is possibly the best "holistic" view in a condensed form that's available. And, of course, Primo Levi's "Survival in Auschwitz" is probably the most harrowing inside description of what it was like to be a prisoner there.

I bow my head in remembrance...