I was reading a NYTimes article today which included the quotation "President Trump has moved to alienate Mexicans (by declaring they would pay for a border wall), Jews (by disregarding their unique experience of the Holocaust)..."
I remember vaguely from my US History classes in high school that other groups of people faced persecution and death at the hands of Nazi Germany during World War II, including the disabled and the Romani. It seems to me that the Romani Genocide was an equally horrendous extermination of a group of people that directly mirrors the Jewish Holocaust.
Is this is a valid line of thinking and is it incorrect of the NYTimes author to think that the experience of the Holocaust is unique to Jews? Or were the circumstances faced by the Jews worse for any historical reason? As a follow-up to this (possibly related to an answer to the question above), why is the Porajmos so underplayed in much of the visual and written works I would typically be exposed to about Nazi ethnic cleansing?
I will leave it to a more focused expert who knows more about the Porajmos to talk a bit more about this, but basically the Porajmos and the Shoah (to use the most unambiguous names) were fairly similar. The Nazis attempted a genocide on both groups, and by-and-large they succeeded, completely eliminating those groups from significant parts of Europe.
There are key differences, though. First of all, the Nazis used antisemitism as a much more important part of their platform than hatred of Romani. They were fighting "Jewish Bolshevism", not "Judeo-Romani Bolshevism". Their hatred of Romani came from prejudices at the time (and today) about them being criminals and not integrating into societies, whereas their hatred of Jews was one of their basic founding principles.
Second, the extent of the Porajmos was significantly smaller. For starters, there were less Roma in Europe than there were Jews. But, according to most estimates, a smaller percentage of Roma were killed than Jews (estimates vary a ton, so I'd definitely need an expert to speak more authoritatively on this). The genocide against Jews was far larger in scale, and was executed far more successfully.
But if I may take this a bit more broadly, the main issue is that the Shoah often gets subsumed into a much larger number of Nazi-related killings (or put another way, the definition of the Holocaust gets very broad^1 ). Usually people don't talk about the mass murder of Jews and Romani, they talk about the murder of those plus disabled people, communists, Slavs, etc.
The problem with that is much larger. First of all, Communists and disabled people are not ethnic groups, so that's not a genocide. Second, with the Slavs, the killings were simply very different. Though the Nazis wanted to at some future time mass murder slavs, they never really attempted this, instead killing off select groups of them (i.e. Polish intellegensia). There are still Poles, Ukrainians, and Russians living in Eastern Europe (among others), but there really aren't Jews there.
That point in particular is very important to understand. Jews in Europe, especially Eastern Europe, were a very large minority in a way they really aren't in any area today, except possibly the Northeast cities in the US. Multiple Jewish political parties were elected to parliaments in Eastern Europe. Many towns and even some decent-size cities, like Bialystock (home of the underrated breakfast food the Bialy, the inventor of Esperanto, and my grandmother's parents), had Jewish majorities. Poland was about 10% Jewish, most of whom spoke Yiddish. Ukraine was about 5% Jewish, Belarus 10%. For comparison, New York State is about 5-10% Jewish. These communities were killed almost in their entirety. Those who survived either didn't want to go back to the Eastern Bloc, or were not welcomed back by their neighbors (who had generally taken over their homes and businesses and did not intend to return them) and left. A huge chunk of Europe simply vanished.
Plus, a large portion of the non-Jews killed by the Nazis were killed by semi-intentional neglect (starvation, disease, exposure, and overwork), particularly POWs. That's true of many Jews, too, but most Jews were actually murdered directly. It is important to make this distinction, because Holocaust deniers sometimes claim that most or all of the Jews killed were killed from disease and neglect, which is somehow construed as not the Nazis fault because how were they to know that huge camps full of people need food and medicine? By putting the genocide of Jews (and in this regard Romani are very much in the same boat) in the same historical classification of other groups who were killed en masse, it serves to subtly deny part of the Holocaust, that Nazi mass-murder was very much intentional and planned (though how planned is a big debate).
This exists especially when talking about the Holocaust in an Eastern European context. People sometimes point out that many Poles (and in this context it usually is talking about Poles) suffered and were killed. This is true, but there are still lots of Poles in Poland. Individual towns and groups of Poles were rounded up and shot. Which is obviously a terrible atrocity, but a very different sort of thing than every town's Jews being rounded up and shot (which happened in large parts of Eastern Europe) by mobile murder squads, and the remaining Jews sent to labor camps and/or killed in murder factories.