THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

No one disputes the tragedy of the Jews in the Holocaust, but they were not the only ones targeted by the Nazis for extermination. As the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz rolls by, one group seems to have been overlooked, the Roma. More commonly known as Gypsies, they have not been included in ceremonies and feel they are being pushed aside in the remembrances of Nazi genocide.

Presidents and prime ministers, movie moguls and elderly survivors of slaughter gathered on Tuesday to mark the 70th anniversary of the liberation in 1945 of Auschwitz, the notorious Nazi death camp where about 1.1 million people were killed. "The French Republic will never forget," French President François Hollande said to those gathered at the site in western Poland, including 300 Auschwitz survivors. Remembering what happened there, said British Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond is "of fundamental importance … for prevention of future genocides."

That commitment to remember is deeply felt in Europe, and yet there is a group of Europeans who suffered terribly at the hands of the Nazis but whose voices are all but absent from this week's ceremonies — the Roma, sometimes called Gypsies. Some Roma organizations sent representatives to Tuesday's gathering at Auschwitz, but they were not among the official speakers. Roma groups also asked to participate in this week’s Holocaust Remembrance events at United Nations headquarters in New York, but there is no Roma speaker on the program.

Many Roma say they fear being lost to the history of the Holocaust — a measure of their broader, ongoing struggle to be treated as full-fledged citizens of Europe. "Leaders speak about the victims of the Holocaust, and how cautious we have to be not to have it happen again," Marius Taba, monitoring officer for the Roma Education Fund, in Budapest, Hungary, told Al Jazeera. "So how can they ignore some people?"

Declared "racially inferior" by German authorities in the 1940s, much like the Jews, the Roma were victims of a determined campaign by the Nazis to herd them into ghettos and labor camps, and ultimately to kill them. By the war's end, the Roma were believed to have lost anywhere between 300,000 and 500,000 people across central and western Europe through starvation, disease, mass shootings and gassing. Of those, at least 19,000 died in the gas chambers of Auschwitz.

All the targets of Nazi extermination were treated the same. All the victims deserve to be remembered.