Half a million European Roma were exterminated by the Nazi regime; many more were subjected to a policy of racial discrimination similar to that suffered by the Jewish people. However, the persecution and torment of Roma in Hitler''s Europe has little presence in the history books. The Roma and the Holocaust places the Roma genocide in the context of the widespread violence of the Second World War, while offering an explanation that places it within a broader trajectory of anti-Roma persecution in modern societies.
The book explores the separation and destruction of families, the sterilisation of adults and children, the plunder of property and deprivation of livelihoods, slave labour, medical experiments, the horror of extermination camps and the mass murder that the Romani people were subjected to. Mar-Sierra uses the first section of the book to provide a much-needed critical overview and synthesis of the fragmented research and scholarship in the area that has been
