chirikli:

revolutionaryeye:

On
the evening of May 16, 1944, in the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration
camp, SS guards armed with machine guns surrounded the area of the camp
designated for Roma and Sinti prisoners. Their intent was to round up
the nearly 6,000 prisoners there and send them to the gas chambers. But
when the guards approached the area, they were met with armed resistance
from the inmates.

The prisoners had learned of the planned “liquidation” and fashioned
weapons from sheet metal, wood, pipes, rocks, and any other scraps of
material they could get their hands on. According to the memories of
survivors and witnesses to the incident, the inmates forced the guards
into retreat, and though some prisoners were shot that night, the act of
resistance allowed the Roma and Sinti prisoners to put off execution
for several more months.

How can such an epic episode have been lost to history? Who knows about the Sonderkommandos revolt of August 1944? Who knows about Witold Pilecki,
who infiltrated Auschwitz to organize its resistance network? Keeping
alive the memories of these events could help prevent such crimes from
happening again in the future.

This is why La Voix des Rroms is raising awareness around May 16, the Romani Resistance Day in Europe.
The Romani Resistance Day represents a change in the way Romani culture
and identity appear in public space. This change comes from an
understanding of this space as a political one, where a history of
resistance replaces a history of oppression. We have urged Romani
organizations across Europe to embrace this date: there are several
events planned this year in Budapest; Lety (Czech Republic); and Paris,
where we are organizing Romani Resistance Day (Fête de l’insurrection gitane) in collaboration with other stigmatized minorities like Muslims and blacks.

For too long, Roma people have been misrepresented by stereotypes:
the beggar, the prostitute, the compassionate victim, the folkloric
artist. Those stereotypes overshadow the nuances of Romani culture and
identity, which have to be the result of political struggle. Romani
cultural creation aims to challenge mainstream culture, identity, and
representation, just as the African American civil rights movement in
the United States changed the whole of America’s identity.

We must do all we can to promote Romani culture and identity. For
more than four decades, Europe’s Roma communities have wanted to
establish an institution that would give their traditions and creations
their own stage. Across Europe, institutions exist to celebrate an array
of cultures, nationalities, and identities, but there is nothing of
this kind for Roma.

The European Roma Institute,
recently proposed by the Open Society Foundations, the Council of
Europe, and leading Roma organizations and figures, is a unique way to
address this imbalance and give Romani traditions and creations their
own stage.

In order to be successful, the European Roma Institute will need to
tackle the breadth of Romani culture and identity. A lot has been done
in the past to promote Romani culture with the help of an institutional
framework, but it failed, in my opinion, because the specificity of
Romani culture cannot be expressed using mainstream categories. There
are some very specific features of Romani identity and culture that need
to be addressed, like Romani humor; among all Roma, there is a common
perception of the world, a common distance from society, as is
exemplified in Charlie Chaplin movies—whose grandmother was, in fact, a
Roma woman from England.

The main challenge of the European Roma Institute will be to deal
with the tensions between unity (we are all “Roma”) and multiplicity (we
all belong to the “landscape” or the territories we live in). That
double belonging has always structured Romani identity. It needs to be
fully addressed.

Source:- http://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/voices/forgotten-history-romani-resistance

This is an older article but gives a nice overview of some of the history behind Romani Resistance Day. Ushten!