"Fifty years after half a million gypsies were exterminated in the Second World War - thousands of them in Auschwitz - we're again preparing the mass killing of this minority"
About this Quote
Tabucchi swings a moral sledgehammer by yoking past genocide to present-day policy, collapsing five decades into a single, accusatory “again.” The line refuses the comforting museum version of history where Auschwitz is a sealed-off horror with neat lessons attached. Instead, it treats memory as a live wire: if you can commemorate, you can also repeat.
The specific intent is alarm, but not the vague, candlelit kind. Tabucchi is indicting the bureaucratic, incremental nature of persecution - the way states and publics “prepare” violence long before the first shot or transport. That verb matters: it suggests planning meetings, language reforms, “security” measures, media scapegoating, the everyday administrative work that makes atrocity feel like procedure. The quote is written to puncture the self-image of postwar Europe as ethically inoculated.
Subtext: the Roma have been kept outside the circle of “proper” Holocaust remembrance. By naming “half a million gypsies” (a term that itself carries a history of slur and stereotyping), he exposes how easily their suffering is minimized, and how that minimization lubricates fresh cruelty. The mention of Auschwitz is less about shock value than about forcing equivalence: if that place means anything, it must mean something here, now, to people still treated as disposable.
Contextually, Tabucchi is speaking from an era of renewed anti-Roma politics in Europe - expulsions, segregated camps, policing framed as public order. He uses historical accounting as a weapon against euphemism: when a minority is branded a “problem,” the future starts getting drafted in the past tense.
The specific intent is alarm, but not the vague, candlelit kind. Tabucchi is indicting the bureaucratic, incremental nature of persecution - the way states and publics “prepare” violence long before the first shot or transport. That verb matters: it suggests planning meetings, language reforms, “security” measures, media scapegoating, the everyday administrative work that makes atrocity feel like procedure. The quote is written to puncture the self-image of postwar Europe as ethically inoculated.
Subtext: the Roma have been kept outside the circle of “proper” Holocaust remembrance. By naming “half a million gypsies” (a term that itself carries a history of slur and stereotyping), he exposes how easily their suffering is minimized, and how that minimization lubricates fresh cruelty. The mention of Auschwitz is less about shock value than about forcing equivalence: if that place means anything, it must mean something here, now, to people still treated as disposable.
Contextually, Tabucchi is speaking from an era of renewed anti-Roma politics in Europe - expulsions, segregated camps, policing framed as public order. He uses historical accounting as a weapon against euphemism: when a minority is branded a “problem,” the future starts getting drafted in the past tense.
Quote Details
| Topic | Human Rights |
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