Discurso del Presidente de la Unión Romaní, Juan de Dios Ramírez Heredia. Versión inglés.

Authorities, ladies and gentlemen, dear friends and brothers and sisters:

An event like this has to be, necessarily, a sad event. We can be happy for the survivors; we can be happy because, perhaps, their reason for living is a future of hope in our fight against racism. But the memory of the tragic past, the blood of so many innocent victims, the lives of so many children cut short just when they were beginning to blossom, has to be, for us, necessarily a sad memory.

The first time in my life that I heard anyone talk about the gipsy Holocaust -I had heard about the Jewish Holocaust ever since I can remember- was when Central European gipsies told me directly about what they had suffered, when I had the chance to talk to those gipsy women, who could barely hold back their tears when they spoke of their parents, their grandparents brutally murdered in the Nazi gas chambers, and I became totally aware of the anti-human enormity represented by that terrible moment in the history of collective madness.

The Holocaust is something that we should recognise, and in which we should recognise ourselves, and remember, black on white, as one of the most tragic passages in the history of humankind. And remember, dear friends, that it didn´t happen just because. I, who have great respect for the German people, do not believe that one night, they went to bed democratic, liberal, and respectful of human rights, and awoke the following day drunk with hatred, with a blind hatred ready to blot out everything that did not fit into their idea of humanity and their own collective personality. It was forged over time.

With my words this afternoon, I would like to call attention to the situation at that moment which made the Holocaust possible, because sometimes, one looks at the world we live in, today in 2007, and begins to realise that there are certain circumstances, in certain countries, at certain specific moments�events that somehow recall the prologue to the Holocaust. It is true that in 1933, ´35, German legislation began to throw up laws as unthinkable as having to prevent hereditary illnesses that could come from non-German citizens, and therefore Jews and gipsies had to be placed in quarantine, because they, in their very blood, apparently, carried a germ for hereditary illnesses. And it was accepted as the most natural thing in the world. And two years later there arose a law as outrageous as to say that pure German citizens could not have sexual relations�much less marry�anyone who did not belong to the unpolluted purity of that supposed Aryan race. And it was accepted.

Today, now, in 2007, in one of the countries making up our Community, sterilisations are being practised on certain gipsy women; I´m talking about the Czech Republic. I have testimonies to prove it. Because somehow, certain groups, races, ethnicities that are considered bothersome must be done away with.

The memory of the Holocaust, dear friends, must therefore be a permanent memory in our midst, in order to avoid certain circumstances, which could somehow reflect what happened then, being repeated now.

A few days ago, Mr Minister�whom I love, respect, and admire�I heard some words of yours after a meeting at the European Council of Ministers, and you were scandalised, and with reason, at the sight of certain games that some of today´s children have in their computers, in their homes. And it´s a good thing that the Minister of Education also has the possibility to hear what I am going to say now. When I represented the Spanish Government at the European Observatory on Racism and Xenophobia in Vienna, my colleague who represented Luxembourg brought me one of those games, in which, ladies and gentlemen, the children won prizes for piling up the most dead in a gas chamber, and when they had been able to pile up 50, 60 corpses, they could have two gas chambers.

Today, in 2007, these games are being handed out at the gates to certain schools in our community. This is why I insist that the memory of the Holocaust has to be kept in our midst, with all of its tragic connotations, and in the midst of our societies, so that we may rend our garments, if necessary, in the face of so much infamy, carried out by human beings like us.

My dear friend Henar Corbi told me, when she invited me to participate in this event once again, that today I was to say a few words in homage to those present amongst us today, testimonies to what that epoch of horror was like, and who were able to save their lives. And Henar said, I´m sure that you must have met some gipsy who has also had such an experience. And with the memory of this gipsy, and the narration of his little piece of history, I am going to end my remarks.

A few years ago, in the German city of Bettelheim, I was taking part in the 3rd International Congress of the Romani Union, and while I was there, a little man came up to me and said, "I´m the director of the wonderful film Skupljaci perja (I Even Met Happy Gipsies), and I was witness to one of the most tragic scenes that our people went through, in union with the Jewish people." He went on to tell me, "I was a little boy, and I was fleeing the Nazis through the forests of Hungary. It was 1943-44, and we were surrounded by hoards of Nazis, and they took us prisoner and brought us to an empty field along with about a hundred Jewish men and women who had also been taken prisoner at that time." And the boy of the story said, "My mother pushed me so that I would escape, and I was able to get away and hide behind a tree. From there," this gipsy told me, and I was overcome with emotion, "I saw what happened. First, they took the Jews, and they forced each one of them, especially the men, to take shovels and pickaxes and to dig an enormous ditch. When the ditch was finished, they forced the men and women to strip naked. Those martyrs already knew what was going to happen to them. I saw how those Jews raised their hands to heaven, crying, and at the same time praying to God, commending their souls to God, asking forgiveness for their sins and expressing their hope in the better life that they would enter in a few minutes, which is indeed what happened when the machine guns of those blind murderers cut down their lives, and they all fell into that open ditch which they themselves had dug. Then it was the gipsies´ turn. A group of 20-25 men and women, some very young." And that gipsy told me, "Then, my father, my mother, my uncles, my grandparents, didn´t have to dig a ditch�the Jews had already dug a ditch. When they were told to take off their clothes, they refused, because they knew what was going to happen next�the Jews hadn´t been able to know what was going to happen to them, but they were the first to fall. The gipsies didn´t need anyone to tell them what was going to be their imminent destiny, to fall into a mass grave, which is why they refused to take their clothes off. It was those vile soldiers who went over to those women and men, and with their own hands violently ripped off the clothes they were wearing." That man told me about his childhood memory of how those gipsy women, like wildcats, clawed at the Nazis´ eyes, how they bit them, how the men defended themselves like cornered beasts in the face of such infamy, of that tragedy about to befall them.

This is an homage to you, dear survivors, who are the living witnesses to this history, this tragic history which humanity must never forget. The Jewish people and the gipsy people, united in pain and hope. And allow me, in the spirit of homage, of love and respect, for this universal people, to give a small testimony of my own: I have six children, and one of them is sitting here today, Pablo, but another of my sons, who is now twenty-some years old, when he was born, I wanted to name him Israel. Gipsy people, Jewish people, together in their misfortune, but also together in hope. Thank you very much.