(Romani: "(the) devouring")
The Roma people's word for their own personal Holocaust: the genocide of between 500,000 and 1.5 million Roma (a.k.a. Gypsies) in the Nazi concentration camps, during the period 1940-1945.
The tragedy of this mass murder of Roma is made all the more terrible by the fact that it has been largely forgotten or overlooked, and has a very low profile in the historical consciousness of the public. The historical record, too, is extremely sketchy. At the Nuremberg Trials, no witnesses were called to testify concerning the Romani victims, and the plight of the Roma during O Porrajmos has not since been granted the same attention that the Jewish Holocaust has.