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Oswiecim (Poland) (AFP)

Roma and Jewish Holocaust survivors gathered at Auschwitz-Birkenau on Friday to mark 75 years since a massacre of Roma and Sinti people at the twin German death camps.

Survivors also paid homage to some 500,000 others the Nazis killed during World War II.

US civil rights activist Reverend Jesse Jackson called the Nazis' targeting of Roma and Sinti the "forgotten Holocaust" and urged vigilance today given the rise of far-right movements in Europe and the US.

In addition to murdering some six million Jews during the war, Nazi Germany killed an estimated half-million members of ethnic groups variously known as Roma, Sinti, or gypsy.

They deported some 23,000 Roma and Sinti people to the Auschwitz-Birkenau twin death camps from across Europe between March 1943 and July 1944. Nearly all of them perished there.

On August 2, 1944, the Nazis murdered the last remaining 4,200-4,300 Sinti and Roma people in the Birkenau death camp they built alongside Auschwitz in the south of occupied Poland.

"Three of my four siblings and my mother were murdered by the Nazis, I myself survived Auschwitz thanks to luck and the selfless actions of others," said Else Baker, a Roma.

"We, the survivors, must defend human rights and democracy -- we can't be sure that Nazi crimes will never happen again," she added.

- 'Stopped in their tracks' -

"I wish to those who murdered that night that as long as they live, and even beyond, they hear nothing but the terrible sounds of that night, and (feel) the fear the victims felt," Eva Fahidi, a Jewish Auschwitz survivor from Hungary who witnessed the massacre, said at the ceremonies.

Jackson drew parallels between the suffering of Roma and Sinti in Europe and those of African Americans in the US and warned that rising far-right movements that target minorities today must be "stopped in their tracks".

"The Roma people of Europe are confronted in the main with the same plight as African Americans; victims of genocide and violence, disenfranchisement, segregation and marginalisation," he told hundreds gathered at the memorial ceremonies on the ground of the former Birkenau camp.

"The deadly (mix) of fascism, racism, nationalism, neo-Nazism is rearing its head up (in) Europe and the US. We must crush... (it)," Jackson said, pointing to a spike in anti-Semitic and anti-Roma violence in Europe as well as an increasing number of racially-motivated attacks in the US.

Originally nomadic, Roma are believed to have migrated towards Europe from the northwest of what is now India around the 11th century.

An estimated 10 million to 12 million Roma or Gypsies live in Europe, generally in extreme poverty and with a lack of education opportunities in many EU states.

© 2019 AFP