I'm Sheila Donut historian and this is the Romani Holocaust and unfinished history for the BBC World Service. Before the war there were settled in the Balkans from 3 to 4 million Roma and of this

number no one can trace how many have survived.

For like the Jews, our race has been swept out of Europe by a nation of overlords,

who wanted to enslave all of the nations they could not eliminate. As early as 1946, the French Romani writer Mateo Maximoff, who'd been incarcerated in a camp in France from 1940 to

1944, published a searing essay about the mass murder of Roma

during the Nazi occupation of Europe.

What countless hundreds and thousands of them set forth and

how many were ever seen again, not one.

The Germans asserted that the Roma were barbarians, but is it not better to be

barbarians than monsters?

The Germans asserted that the Roma were thieves,

but the accusers have themselves robbed the whole of Europe.

The Germans asserted that the Roma were murderers, but they are the very men who

ordained the horrors of Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Dachau and Ravansbruck.

Between 1933 and 1945, up to half a million people,

labeled as gypsies, lost their lives as a result of racial policies

enacted by Nazi Germany and its allies.

The derogatory term Gypsy was used to refer to a large and diverse minority who self-identified

as Roma, Sinti, Manush, Yinish, or as members of numerous other Romani communities across Europe.

Many spoke dialects of Romanes, the Romani language. O'Doy Pandlom Robirano.

Bishil, Bishil,

Bishhel, Bongolina.

...