Thousands of Soviet Roma were killed in 1941–1944 by Nazi Einsatzgruppen andlocal collaborators. They were almost never deported to extermination camps,but instead their bodies were left at the scenes where these crimes were committed.In the protocols of the Soviet Extraordinary Commission for Investigation ofWar Crimes, the Roma were often counted as murdered civil citizens, withoutspecifying their ethnicity. Despite the existence of a small number of accountsidentifying the victims of these murders as Romani, the Roma part of the Holocausthistory is still little known in post-Soviet space.In 1976 an official memorial at Babi Yar was erected in Kyiv on the locationof the largest massacre during WWII of Eastern European Jews and Roma. However,the Soviet leadership discouraged placing any emphasis on ethnic aspectsof this tragedy. The Nazi policy of extermination of Roma was neglected; the warwas depicted as a tragedy for all Soviet peoples.The discussion of the Romani identity cannot be isolated from the memoryof the genocide during WWII, which makes the struggle over the past a reflexivelandmark that organizes the politics of commemoration.