Read on Twitter
One of the most tiring things on Holocaust Memorial Day, as a disabled queer Romany Gypsy is being reminded that to a lot of people who aren't Romani or Jewish, being those things makes you the Holocaust Friend. Every year I get some well-meaning variation on;
"I thought of you today"/"I lit a candle for remembrance today" - and I'm reminded that just casually in the minds of many gorjers, my culture is death and loss, but simultaneously don't see that having it casually brought up might be upsetting in a way that isn't just abstract.
When I think of my queer ancestors, my ancestors-in-spirit, who were lost in the holocaust, I am thinking of an abstract loss- The loss of community, the memory of coming out into a devastated community which had lost decades of knowledge and thousands of people.
It is a real loss- In many ways, the nazis' war on queers worked; we talk of the modern gay and trans rights movements in the West as starting at Stonewall, those are the terms and cultural concepts that survive. The words and ideas of the earlier Berlin scene went up in flames.
When I think of my blood relatives lost in the devouring, I think of literal people whose names I know or would have known, who were instead just a shrug and "I don't know what happened to them" at the end of some rarely-told story. And for me, it's only one branch. Not all.
I don't like that for many of my white, cultural Christian gorjer friends, it's a tick box; "Mention to Tragedy Friend that you know what day it is. Do not check if they want to talk first. Feel very socially aware."
It's cliché for a reason that many Roma go offline that day.
It's cliché for a reason that many Roma go offline that day.
And tomorrow they go back to not posting the pictures of bodies piled up, or the infamous gates and mournful candles, they go back to the holocaust being a spectre that they hold up as a rhetoric device about today. And Roma and Jews and millions of others continue to carry it.
