I used to be like you. I lived in the city, I became vegan and I went ‘to the country’ occasionally, getting angry at the lack of signage about the massacres through which my fellow colonists come to be here. I knew about the bees dying and REFLEX paper through Facebook, and I thought that the old growth forests, like the greenies, were somewhere ‘out there’, somewhere further away than Daylesford or Castlemaine.

The corruption in Macedonia, however, is almost dystopian. This is not just a government where ministers seem to be appointed entirely due to their personal/political connections rather than expertise. Take the Prime Minister who, when confronted with evidence he has tapped 20,000 phones of ‘opponents’ says he will ‘face down the attack’ because to do otherwise would be weak.

Why, then, do Romani victims of the Holocaust remain peripheral to historical memory? Part of the answer is that majority populations in Europe continue to use Roma as a racialised scapegoat. In contemporary Australia, it is rightly considered offensive to refer to Jewish people by the derogatory terms used by the Nazi regime.

Romani people are still largely referred to by the names they were given as slaves and outcasts five hundred years ago; they are still stereotyped as dark skinned and uncivilised invaders from the East rather than as citizens of European Union states; physical violence against Roma as a specific ethnic group is not only under-prosecuted but often actually perpetrated by state institutions.