The New York Times today,
January 26, 2014, has a front-page story titled "Holocaust Told in One Word, 6 Million Times." The
word is "Jew," and the story is about a newly published volume that
consists solely of the word "Jew," repeated six million times.
Whether this is the best way to convey the sheer enormity of the Nazis' crimes
against the Jews I'm not sure. But one thing is certain: the people killed by the
Nazis included more than Jews. Here's what the US Holocaust Museum says about what
happened in those same years to the Roma, or Gypsies:
It is not known precisely how
many Roma were killed in the Holocaust. While
exact figures or percentages cannot be ascertained, historians estimate that
the Germans and their allies killed around 25 percent of all European Roma. Of
slightly less than one million Roma believed to have been living in Europe
before the war, the Germans and their Axis partners killed up to 220,000.
This isn't news, actually, but I hadn't grasped
it until I heard about it on Friday at a conference honoring the great civil
rights lawyer Jack Greenberg, who 60 years after helping argue Brown v.
Board of Education in the Supreme Court is now deeply involved in
advocating equal rights for the Roma.
Once one knows this, it is hard to feel
comfortable with a definition of the “Holocaust” that is limited to Jews. Many
more Jews than Roma were killed, and a much higher percentage of Jews as well
(two-thirds of Europe’s Jews), but it appears the Nazis set out to destroy two
ethnic groups rather than one. It would have been better had the new Holocaust
book included, after roughly every 30 repetitions of the word “Jew,” the word “Roma”
as well, 220,000 times in all.
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