Someone needs to say what they did with the Sinti back then, the Nazis. Lots of people still do not know. But our people should not be forgotten! [...] I want the world to hear what happened to the Sinti. [...] I want them to know what it means to carry on when you’ve lost absolutely everything you loved. Actually, these words say it all. They are the words of Zilli Schmidt, who told us her story, the story of a German Sintezza.

Zilli Schmidt was born Cäcilie Reichmann in a village in Thuringia in 1924. Her family – a happy family, as she always emphasised – ran a travelling cinema in the Weimar Republic and traded in violins.

Zilli Schmidt was still a child when the National Socialists came to power. She experienced her family being insulted in the street and being refused service in shops; she experienced relatives suddenly disappearing, never to return. As a young woman, she fled criss-cross through Europe with her parents and siblings. She was detained in France, deported to Czechia, and locked up in the so-called gypsy camps in Lety and Auschwitz-Birkenau.

On 2 August 1944, on the day when she was transported to Ravensbruck for forced labour, the SS murdered three thousand Roma in the gas chambers of Auschwitz, including Zilli Schmidt’s four-year-old daughter Gretel, her parents, her sister and other relatives. Zilli Schmidt survived – a stroke of great fortune and a terrible burden, as she said. I am grateful that she found the strength, after many, many years, to tell her story publicly. A great contribution to the fight against forgetting!

Zilli Schmidt died on Friday at the age of 98. The news has made me and all who knew her very sad. My thoughts are with her family and friends. We all mourn Zilli Schmidt. We will not forget her. And here in the Tiergarten in Berlin, we pledge to honour her memory.

This memorial, which was – at last – inaugurated ten years ago today, is a place of pain and sadness, of remembrance and sympathy – but it is also a place of education and reflection. And so it is lovely that we can gather here today to open the new exhibition, which adds nine biographical portraits to this place, telling the stories of Vinko Paul Franz, Matéo Maximoff, Adam Ujvary, Noncia Alfreda Markowska, Lidija Krylowa, Branko Branislav Acković, Elina Emílie Machálková, Zilli Schmidt and Zoni Weisz, who is here today and will address us shortly.

Nine boards give the persecuted Roma names and faces and tell of their suffering, but also of their strength and courage, of resistance and new beginnings. They introduce us to very different individuals and reveal their lives to us.

It is sad that Dani Karavan did not live to see the opening of this exhibition. He designed it prior to his death last year. Today we also remember him, the great artist, to whom this place of remembrance was especially important.

This place recalls the stories of Roma and Romnja, of Yenish and other travellers from all across Europe who were persecuted by the National Socialists as so-called gypsies – first in Germany, then in Austria and Czechia, and, after the start of the German war of aggression, also in Poland and Slovakia, in France, Belgium and the Netherlands, in Italy, Serbia, Croatia, Romania and Hungary, in Ukraine, in Russia, and in other countries of the former Soviet Union.

These are the stories of members of the Sinti, Kalderash, Lovari, Lalleri, Manouches and many other Romani- or Yenish-speaking groups. The stories of men, women and children whose families, from the time of their arrival in Europe, were repeatedly ostracised as foreigners, harassed, criminalised and registered by the police; who were often refused the right to settle in towns and cities, to acquire land, to take up occupations; but who nevertheless, again and again, found and asserted their place in society.

Every single one of them was a unique individual, a person with their own particular qualities and characteristics. All of them were harassed and persecuted by the National Socialists. All of them fell victim to that barbaric racist doctrine, to the Hitler regime’s declared resolve to destroy Jews and Roma, because they were alleged to belong to alien races.

Roma and Romnja, Yenish and other travellers experienced immeasurable suffering during the National Socialist tyranny, in the German Reich, in the countries allied with the Hitler regime, in the countries of Europe occupied by the Nazis. They were deprived of their rights and ostracised, excluded from school, driven out of their jobs, forced to surrender their businesses, banned from marrying, declared stateless, measured and classified, arrested and incarcerated, robbed and expropriated, exploited as forced labourers. They were abducted, abused, forcibly sterilised and, finally, systematically murdered.

These were people who, to the very end, were committed to their families, who asked cardinals and mayors for help, who did not give up, even when their appeals were rejected. These were people who fought against Hitler as partisans or in their country’s army and who often engaged in desperate resistance in the camps. These were people who wanted to live, and who showed pride and strength even in the face of death.

Up to half a million Roma from across Europe fell victim to the National Socialist genocide, in Sachsenhausen and Lackenbach, Chełmno and Łódź, in Babyn Yar, Aleksandrovka and many other places. They starved and froze to death in camps and ghettos, died of disease or as the result of pseudomedical experiments, were shot, or suffocated in gas chambers.

It was a genocide, planned and prepared by Nazi functionaries, scientists, police officers and officials here in Berlin, driven by men and women in many places in our country, carried out by members of the SS and the Wehrmacht and their accomplices and collaborators throughout Europe.

But today we also know that a genocide of such dimensions cannot be realised by the state apparatus alone. Many Germans from all sections of society were involved in human rights violations against the Roma. Scientists carried out racial research to advance their careers; civil servants in towns and cities developed radical ideas in order to ingratiate themselves with those in power; neighbours, having long nursed resentment against the minority, denounced Roma.

Following the liberation of Europe from National Socialism, the perpetrators, those who helped them and those who simply kept their heads down and went along with the regime did not simply vanish from German society, and nor did anti-Roma prejudice and clichés. They experienced this directly, the Roma who had survived the persecution, who returned home from the death marches and the camps or came out of hiding bearing severe physical and psychological scars, with nowhere to go and nothing to their name, and – above all – without their loved ones.

As they clawed their way back to life, they received scant support from policymakers, administration, the judicial system or society in West Germany. On the contrary. They had to see how the crimes committed against them and their families were concealed, ignored, denied and even justified.

Scientists, doctors and police officers who had participated in the genocide against the Roma during the National Socialist era again assumed positions of responsibility in the Federal Republic, continued to spread their racist views, and claimed that the Roma had been persecuted, rightly, as criminals – a myth confirmed by the Federal Court of Justice in its scandalous judgement of 1956, in which it argued that gypsies, the discriminatory word still used in the decision, had not in fact been persecuted on grounds of race.

The surviving Roma were refused compensation. Only rarely were perpetrators prosecuted, and almost never convicted. And very soon the police again began to keep separate registers of Roma, Yenish and travellers.

For many survivors, this discrimination during the first decades of the Federal Republic was a second persecution. And it is true: it took far, far too long in our country for the crimes committed against the Roma to be recognised as genocide. Many Roma and Romnja died before Germany accepted responsibility. For many the compensation came too late.

That is why I want to repeat what I said on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the Central Council. On behalf of our country, I ask for your forgiveness – for the immeasurable injustices the Roma of Europe suffered at German hands under National Socialism, and also for the disregard experienced by German Sinti and Roma even in the post-war Federal Republic. I ask for your forgiveness. Mangau tamen, prosaran man!

That the genocide of the European Roma now at last has a place in our country’s culture of remembrance is thanks not least to the many committed survivors, their children and grandchildren, who joined forces across Europe to fight against forgetting and for their rights. People like Mano Höllenreiner, Anita Awosusi or Irina Spataru, from whom we will hear in a moment, and people like you, Romani Rose, Chairman of the Central Council of German Sinti and Roma, who have worked tirelessly for this memorial here in Berlin.

With this memorial, the Federal Republic of Germany commits to its responsibility to keep alive the memory of the genocide of the European Roma. This place is a permanent reminder to politicians and society, to all who live in our country: never must we forget what happened, because never again must it be allowed to happen.

That is why we must ensure that the victims’ stories are kept alive, even when one day there are no longer any survivors left to tell them. Above all, we must find ways in which to make young people realise what these stories have to do with them and with their lives today. Young Roma and Romnja will shortly tell us how we can do that.

A lot has happened in the ten years since this memorial was inaugurated. This place of remembrance has encouraged many people to self-confidently identify as Roma for everyone to see. The European Roma Institute for Arts and Culture showcases the great diversity of Roma culture. With the RomArchive, a digital space has been established in which Roma can at last present their music, art and literature themselves. And Roma, Sinti and Yenish showed in Schloss Bellevue in 2019 just how greatly their culture enriches our country and Europe.

For centuries, the European public talked first and foremost about the Roma. Scientists, politicians, journalists, authors and artists observed them and looked down on them, often fascinated and disparaging at once. They used Roma for their own ends, invented characters, created images, repeated generalisations. It is owing to these clichés that even today Roma are often not perceived in their individuality.

We know that clichés and prejudices can only be overcome through education and encounters. That is why it is so important that Roma and Romnja themselves stand up, raise their voice and make their history and culture visible and audible. That is why it is so important that politicians and society continue to support them in this. And that is why it is so important to have this place of remembrance, where very different people from our country, from Europe and the whole world, can get into conversation, hopefully with openness and curiosity, and hopefully always with mutual respect.

Because although there has been so much progress, although there are many places of remembrance, personal stories and engaged individuals, there is still a lack of knowledge in our society about the long history of the Roma, the largest minority in Europe, whose members have been at home in Germany and almost all parts of our continent for six hundred years.

There is still a lack of appreciation for the contribution Roma and Romnja have made since their arrival in Europe to business and culture, society and policymaking – despite all the obstacles, hostility and resistance they have repeatedly encountered.

Ladies and gentlemen, you all know from your own bitter experience that the old anti-Roma prejudices still stubbornly persist in sections of society, and that they are being rekindled by right-wing extremist or populist nationalist forces throughout Europe.

Here in Germany, too, Roma even now experience discrimination in their day-to-day lives – in public spaces, at school, on the job market, in official agencies. Moreover, they are again increasingly falling victim to racially motivated hatred and brutal violence, particularly in countries of eastern and south-eastern Europe, but also here in Germany. I am thinking of the attack in Hanau in 2020. Hardly anyone is aware that three young Roma were among those murdered.

To this day, German Roma keep their origins secret and hide their history, their language and their culture – for fear of being humiliated, degraded or treated with hostility. No-one in our country can remain indifferent to this. There must be an end to everyday discrimination against Roma and Romnja.

We must be alert, particularly now, in this time of war, crisis and change. We must not allow fears and worries within society to be used to stoke hatred against minorities. This, too, is part of our country’s special historical responsibility.

This place of remembrance is also a place of hope, hope for a better future in Germany and Europe. A future in which no Rom and no Romni need fear being disadvantaged if he or she acknowledges his or her own background. A future in which we live together in equality and self-determination as different people, in peace and freedom.

At this time, as war rages, it is hard to believe in such a future. But I firmly believe that, every day in our own country, we can make a small contribution to bring this Europe, the Europe of peace, freedom, equal rights and self-determination, a step closer. Let us join together in speaking out against hatred and violence, against antigypsism and antisemitism, and against inhumanity, no matter their origins and no matter their targets.

Barkrau man vono dschi. Thank you very much.