The voices of the victims make chillingly clear just how desperate their situation was and the fears and hopes they had. The murders in the concentration and extermination camps were preceded by years of humiliation, deprivation of rights and forced isolation. The families who were interned at the Linas-Montlhéry camp in occupied France in 1940 and petitioned to be released in 1941 did not survive. They were deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau via the transit camp at Mechelen in Belgium.

Josip Joka Nikolić gives the names and ages of his relatives – wife and child, parents, brothers, sister-in-law, nieces and nephews – who were deported with him in May 1942 from the village of Predavec to the Jasenovac concentration camp. Once they arrived at the camp, they were shot in front of freshly dug pits. He was the only one to succeed in escaping, which makes him one of the few witnesses of the systematic murdering of Roma in the fascist ‘Independent State of Croatia’.

Milena Stanković gives testimony to a commission. It was mainly in German-occupied Southeastern and Eastern Europe that the murders took place not in the camps but close to the victim’s place of residence. For example, in Belgrade, where in October 1941 all Roma were arrested and shot.

With these words, the 31-year-old Lonny Indus tries to describe her desperate situation. Her petition to have her husband released is unsuccessful. The couple and their six children were deported in February 1943. None of them survived. Around 95 per cent of the Roma population in Estonia was murdered during the German occupation.

This is the message the 28-year-old Ivan Ivanov sent home while serving at the frontline in Stalingrad. This sentence from the message was written in Romani to ensure that the letter would pass the censorship and reach his wife. Ivanov died in November 1942 while performing military service. He was one of many hundreds of Roma who fought for the Red Army against the invader. In other countries as well, Roma fought actively in the regular armies or as partisans against the armies and allies of the German Reich.

On 31 March 1945 the 17-year-old Anton Reinhardt sent these final words to his parents. He was shot the very same day by an SS captain. Facing forced sterilisation, Reinhardt had fled from Germany to Switzerland, from where he was deported back to Germany and then arrested. As he again tried to escape, he was seized and murdered.

Like many other survivors, Petrus Johannes Vos tried to find his relatives after liberation. For the most part, the authorities showed little sympathy and made virtually no effort to find out the fate of the deported. As a result, many Sinti and Roma remained in the dark for decades about what had happened to their relatives. Vos first found out much later that his daughter, son-in-law and three grandchildren had not survived deportation to Auschwitz.

Karl Höllenreiner gave evidence to a US investigator in June 1947. He had survived the torture-like saltwater experiments carried out on 40 Sinti and Roma in the Dachau concentration camp on behalf of the German Air Force and was a prosecution witness at the Nuremberg ‘Doctors’ Trial’. Only a very small number of those involved in the crimes against Sinti and Roma were ever put on trial, while even fewer were convicted for their actions.