Holocaust Memorial Week 2010

 

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Since 2007, the University of Essex has marked Holocaust Memorial Day with a series of events at the Colchester Campus in the week that leads up to or includes 27 January, the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz concentration camp by Soviet troops.

For Holocaust Memorial Week 2010, students and staff from across the University of Essex are joining together to organise a wide range of events. We want to offer an opportunity and a framework within which to reflect and discuss the central themes of genocide and its causes.

The focus of the week will be on the experience of the Roma and Sinti (commonly referred to as ‘gypsies’) under the Nazi regime. They were persecuted, like the Jews, for racial reasons, from the beginning of Nazi rule in Germany. The ‘final solution of the gypsy question’ bore close parallels with the ‘final solution of the Jewish question’. It is estimated that by the end of the World War Two between 220,000 and 500,000 Roma and Sinti had been murdered, amounting to up to 50 per cent of the pre-war European population. This has often been referred to as ‘the forgotten Holocaust’.

Other events will emphasize broader issues of prejudice, intolerance, discrimination and stigmatization.

We hope that you will find our programme thought-provoking and inclusive, highlighting the extreme consequences of hatred, and helping us to look at our behaviour to others and to explore how each of us can help make our communities stronger and safer.