With the “371 Stars” performance at the National Theatre in Budapest on Saturday night, on the Day of Courage and Roma Youth, Hungary remembered the Birkenau camp uprising and the Roma victims of the Holocaust.
In her commemorative speech, Katalin Langerné Victor, Deputy State Minister for Social Inclusion at the Ministry of Human Resources, said that the facts remain unchanged and we all know them, but facts alone are mere history. She said that without commemoration we only recite the facts, but commemoration transforms the events of a distant past into something tangible and alive.
Speaking of the child victims of the Roma Holocaust, she said that they perished before given a chance to “make the world more valuable”. She said that we must hear their message, see the value in every new-born child and also see in every parent the potential to become a person with enough courage to stand up to their oppressors in a death camp.
Remembering the events of 16 May 1944, when the inmates of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Roma camp rose up against their guards, she said that they put up a brave and valiant fight, the message of which is that no one should accept the victory of evil and of death, but should instead join forces to stay alive. These people could not have been strong as individuals, and today in our remembrance we need unity, as they needed it in their fight.
The performance was entitled “371 Stars” in memory of the 371 Roma children born in the camp, who all lost their lives there at the hands of the Nazis. Prominent Hungarian artists evoked the events of the past through literary pieces and survivors’ testimonies.
On 16 May 1944 Roma inmates of the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp showed resistance to the guards and SS officers when being taken to the gas chambers – the first incident of its kind in the camp’s history. That night several Roma were executed and their subsequent treatment became even crueller. Roma inmates were then transferred to Buchenwald, Ravensbrück and other camps, while the 3,000 Roma men, women and children who remained in Birkenau were all sent to their deaths in gas chambers on the night of 2–3August 1944.