Who knows the meaning of the word "Porrajmos"?
Porrajmos in the Roma language means "devouring", indicating the persecution and the extermination of the Roma population by the Third Reich.
During Second World War 500.000 gypsies have been killed, victims of the Nazi National Socialism and its fanatic projects of racial domination. The history of the gypsy extermination is a forgotten history, offended by the lack of attention from historians and intellectuals: till today the documentation of the facts is fragmentized and their linkage is insufficient, although the issue should gain attention just for the fact, that the gypsy prosecution in the Nazi era, obviously together with the one of the Jews, has been the only one grounded entirely on racial motivations: Just like the Jews, the gypsies were prosecuted and killed just because they were considered as an “inferior race” which was, following the Nazi-fascist ideology, not destined to submission and servility for the Third Reich, but to death. This is the core of the problem. In fact, for a long period after the Second World War the Nazi extermination of the gypsies hasn’t been recognized as racially motivated. Instead, it has been considered as being the consequence – for some obvious – of the crime prevention measures which are “naturally” undertaken in war-times. That thesis found its ground in the decrees and orders of the first years of the Hitler regime, were the gypsies were indicated and defined as “asocial”. As we know the Nazi terminology is not always an explanation of real facts: in this case the term “asocial” has been used to indicate those people who are for one or another reason impossible to integrate and homologize in the new Nazi National Socialist system.
In reality the gypsies have been prosecuted, imprisoned, tortured, sterilized, used for “medical” experiments, gased in the extermination camps, because of their being gypsis, that in the Nazi Ideology meant “inferior race” unworthy to exist. Following this argumentation, the gypsies were genetically thieves, betrayers, nomads: the reason for their dangerousness had to be found in their blood, which precedes always the behavior. (Giovanna Boursier, in Zigeuner, lo sterminio dimenticato, Sinnos editrice)

The radio documentary is divided in three parts, each of them of thirty minutes duration.

In 1936, on the eve of the Olympic Games at Berlin, Hitler decided that the town had to be cleaned up. The racial politics of the Nazis led to the construction of a concentration camp at Berlin-Marzahn, where hundreds of Roma and Sinti got imprisoned.
As Otto Rosenberg gets imprisoned in Marzahn, he’s only nine years old. That’s how his story of prosecution begins, taking him seven years later to deportation in the Zigeunerlager, the camp for the gypsies at Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Otto Rosenberg maintained his silence for years, till he decided to give his testimonial.
Together with his story, one of the rare testimonials of the Roma and Sinti prosecution, we’ll listen in the first part to the considerations of two Italian historians who devoted their work to this subject: Giovanna Boursier and Luca Bravi.
 

In the second part we keep on listening to Otto Rosenberg’s testimonial. Rosenberg, the only survivor of his family, is deported to the Zigeunerlager of Auschwitz and to other Camps: Buchenwald, Dora, Ellrich and finally to Bergen-Belsen where he is liberated by the allied forces.
 But his tragedy doesn’t end with world war’s ending, like the tragedy of all of the surviving Roma and Sinti. The German Federal Republic will admit the racial prosecution suffered by these nations only after a long silence and will grant compensations only with an irremediable delay.
 Besides Giovanna Boursier and Luca Bravi, we’ll listen in the second part of the documentary to the voice of Mirella Karpati, profound connoisseur of the Roma and Sinti history and culture in Italy and among the first in this country to collect the oral testimonials of Nazi prosecution.

Third part

"I was born in 1920. As child I lived in Croatia. Then I came to Italy with my parents. After a while they detained us and put us into the camp of Agnone, in the province of Campobasso. I’ve been three years in that concentration camp."
 
"I was born in 1940 at Prignano in a concentration camp. Like all the other people my parents had made their tour to the markets and then came here to Modena to pass the winter. One morning we found ourselves in front of the carabinieri and the chief of police. After one day of controls my parents were brought into that little village in the mountains of Prignano."
 
That’s how the testimonials of Emilia Goman and Gnugo de Bar begin. Using their memories we try to tell that the little that is known about the active role of the Italian fascist politics in the Porrajmos of the Roma and Sinti, a page of our history which is almost entirely to be investigated.

thanks to:

Emilia Goman, Gnugo de Bar, Mirella Karpati, Giovanna Boursier, Luca Bravi, Alberto Rossatti, Paola Palminiello, Aleramo Virgili, Giusi Marcante and Davide Ravera