(This takes 2¾–3¾ minutes to read.)
Quoting Ari Joskowicz’s Rain of Ash: Roma, Jews, and the Holocaust, pages 34–35:
The reality of persecution and death ultimately challenged Jews’ received images of “Gypsies,” transforming them from static tropes into embodied beings. Roma, too, increasingly encountered Jews as real people who suffered and died within their view. Camps and killing sites were never completely separated, even where the Nazis intended them to be. Suffering and death thus created sensory experiences that victims found hard to ignore.
In places such as Auschwitz-Birkenau, section BIIe—the “Gypsy camp” or “Gypsy family camp”—was located within the [Axis’s] geography of death such that Roma became direct witnesses to the destruction of European Jewry. Their camp was close to the ramp used after May 1944 for arriving deportation trains. Although they could not easily observe the unloading of trains, Romani prisoners, like Konrad Reinhard, managed to glimpse some part of the selection and destruction process. This included seeing the SS driving Jewish deportees who were too fragile to walk to the gas chamber.⁶⁴
Many testimonies that have emerged from legal settings tend to emphasize sight, or seeing, because prosecutors needed visual confirmation from eyewitnesses for convictions. Even in these testimonies, accounts of smell nevertheless sometimes appear. While it was possible to avert their eyes from the organization of death at the ramp and the road to the crematoria, the stench when the SS ordered the corpses of murdered Jews incinerated was inescapable.
Jewish testimonies of Romani suffering often dwell on the visual, the dominant sense of the testimony genre, but emphasize auditory aspects just as often. Breaking the familiar association of “Gypsies” with music, these testimonies are largely about Jews hearing Roma screaming.
In a 1995 video testimony, Manya Altman, a Polish-Jewish survivor, addressed the fate of the over 5,000 Roma from the Austrian Burgenland whom the [Axis] had deported to a fenced-off part of the Jewish ghetto in Łódź.⁶⁵ Altman never saw the Roma who stayed nearby in a few blocks of segregated buildings, but explained that the “Gypsies” kept her awake at night. Asked about witnessing their murder, she answered instead with the reason [that] she could not sleep: “We heard the screams.”⁶⁶
Many other Jews who lived in the parts of the Jewish ghetto nearest to the Romani ghetto gave similar testimony, with one witness emphasizing over and over how their “screams of death” were “out of the ordinary.”⁶⁷ Unable to see into the separate ghetto established for Roma, most Jewish ghetto inhabitants could only speculate as to precisely what was befalling their Romani neighbors.⁶⁸
Jews left similar recollections of the dreadful sounds of anguish during the liquidation of the subcamp for Sinti and Roma in Auschwitz-Birkenau on the night of August 2, 1944. For many Jews, the murder of over four thousand remaining inmates of the “Gypsy camp” came as a shock.⁶⁹ Since the SS forced all prisoners to stay in their blocks, there were few eyewitnesses, but many who heard what transpired.
Among the Jews who spoke about the event, nearly everyone reported on the screams, attributing them to the brutality of the SS and the will of Romanies to resist. Testimonies of these events proved useless for legal purposes because they demonstrated awareness of suffering but could not help identify the perpetrators. Nevertheless, they emerge as wrenching and vivid moments in Jewish memories of the “Gypsy camp.” Many Jewish witnesses described the night as the worst they experienced in Auschwitz, largely based on the sounds they heard.⁷⁰
Seeing, hearing, and smelling the suffering of others were impressions that survivors often found difficult to forget. In Auschwitz, it was the memory of months or even years of serial murders, while at temporary killing sites—the “snake pits” that Sutzkever conjured in his poem—survivors recalled singular incidents. Yet, in all of these cases, these sensory experiences clearly moved those who recounted them.⁷¹
(Emphasis added. Click here if you have time for more.)
Page 36:
Witnessing the killing of members of another community left some victims attempting to make sense of their own survival. We find this in Romani reports about the murder of Jews in Transnistria, the administrative name of Romanian-occupied Ukraine.⁷²
In 2013, a Romani woman from a family deported from Moldavia to Transnistria told an interviewer of her encounter with a killing operation when she was a young teenager: “The Jews were also shut up in a stable, but they were burned, killed alive. And we were fortunate, because the Queen Maria had posters sent saying that the Roma from Moldavia were a happy and useful people.”⁷³
This story as well as others that portrayed the miraculous rescue of Romanian Roma by a beneficent queen (who had in reality died before the régime deported Roma), allowed Romani witnesses to explain their own survival where so many others perished.⁷⁴
Other testimonies primarily convey dread regarding the atrocities survivors witnessed against people they hardly knew. The account by the Jewish brothers Michael and Zvi Rajak of the mass murder of Roma in the town center of Glubok (today’s Hlybokaye in Belarus) is typical in its vivid and horrifying detail. Their testimony in their community’s memorial book told of how the [Axis] forced Romani children to sit naked on the cold ice, forcing their parents to watch them perish in agony before the [Axis] murdered everyone in a nearby forest.⁷⁵
Another Jewish survivor who grew up about a hundred miles south in Iwieniec (today’s Ivyanets in Belarus) recalled that he had seen about 1,000 Roma who had been traveling with their animals and wagons as they were murdered by Einsatzgruppen outside of town.⁷⁶
Wanting to dump these kind of people who perpetuated this or supported it into a mine-shaft apparently is a rot and a mark of evil character that needs to be re-examined.