Z for "Zigeuner" -- "Gypsy", then a number. Some survivors still have the horror of the Roma Holocaust tattooed on their skin, a reminder of a lesser-known genocide that researchers are now trying to document.
Rosa Schneeberger is one of the few remaining Sinti, an itinerant community that has been around since medieval times in western Europe, to have returned from the darkness of the past.
She was only five when she was deported with her mother and siblings to the biggest internment camp for Roma in the Third Reich, Lackenbach, which was built in 1940 in Nazi-annexed Austria, and where entire families were subjected to forced labour.
Eighty-three years on, the memories she has pushed to the far recesses of her mind are still painful to recall.
"It must not start again," she said in the living room of her home in the southern Austrian city of Villach, which is filled with photographs of her four children, 10 grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.
She agreed to tell AFP what she remembers from long ago as a little girl.
"I only wasn't hungry when I stole the horses' food," she said of her time at Lackenbach. "They were better fed than us."
Children were made to carry rocks while adults toiled in the forest, on road construction or other public works.
The oldest and the poorest fell exhausted into latrines, she recalled. "The Nazis recovered their bodies in the early morning, frozen stiff," she added.
Her beloved grandfather died of sickness in front of her, she said.
Just 10 percent of Austria's 11,000 Roma and Sinti survived the Nazi atrocities. Some 4,000 were sent to Lackenbach, where 237 succumbed to outbreaks of sickness, the cold and beatings.
Many others were sent to extermination camps at Chelmno in occupied Poland, then to Auschwitz, which was liberated by the Soviet Red Army 80 years ago on January 27, 1945.
Schneeberger survived and was able to return home after the liberation of Lackenbach in March 1945 because her father, like many Sinti, played a musical instrument and entertained the guards.
- 'No exact figures' -
Historians do not know how many were not so lucky. German historian Karola Fings, from Heidelberg University, is putting together the first encyclopedia on the subject.
"For many countries, we haven't yet grasped the full extent" of the persecution, she said.
In Estonia, for example, the community was virtually wiped out and the dialect they spoke no longer exists.
Some countries, such as Belgium, the Netherlands and Croatia, were particularly affected. In places such as France, Bulgaria or Romania, many survived, depending on the regime in place.
No records exist from pre-war Europe about the size of the global Roma population. Today, it consists of some 12 million people from a wide cultural background and includes several hundred Holocaust survivors.
"If we put together the figures for which we know for sure that they were Sinti and Roma, we can perhaps say there were between 110,000 and 120,000 deaths," said Fings.
"But there are a great number of unrecorded cases," she added. "The hypothesis that has more or less prevailed in the research is that we can talk about around 200,000 deaths."
Apart from the Third Reich itself, where the first round-up took place in June 1938, nothing was documented while the crimes were being committed.
At the end of the war evidence was destroyed, and in the years that followed those responsible reintegrated into German society and "continued to stigmatise the Roma victims as antisocial and criminal", said Fings.
Internationally, research has only progressed in the last 20 years -- much too late to gather the testimonies of former deportees, whom the Nazis distinguished with a black or brown triangle, depending on the camp.
French historian Henriette Asseo said it was "atrocious" that after the war, survivors were not considered "racial victims" both in Germany, where their ancestral nationality was not reinstated, and in other central European countries.
By contesting nationality and demanding proof of residency, "most often, everything has been done to exclude them from reparations", Asseo added.
Yet as early as 1935, the Nuremberg Laws -- racial legislation on citizenship of the Third Reich and the "protection of German blood" -- stated that "Gypsies belong to impure races".
- Discrimination -
Recognition of the Roma genocide came very slowly from the 1980s, thanks to the mobilisation of activists born after the war, who set out to "reconquer the past" as communism fell and gave way to democracy, said Asseo, who has written extensively about the history of the Roma people in Europe.
It was only in 2015 that August 2 was recognised as "European Roma Holocaust Remembrance Day".
In December 2024, the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), a leading intergovernmental organisation, published recommendations for learning about this "neglected history".
But the memories of its victims have also been trampled underfoot, as in communist Czechoslovakia, where an industrial pig farm was constructed on the site of the Lety camp, which housed Roma southwest of Prague.
Between 1942 and 1943, 1,300 Roma were interned at Lety in appalling conditions. More than 300 died, most of them children aged under 14 but the figure, according to survivors, is an under-estimate.
It took 20 years of pressure until 2018 to get the Czech government to buy and then demolish the piggery.
"According to surveys, at least 75 percent of public opinion is still influenced by antagonism toward Romani people, which entails a lack of interest in the topic or its distortion through the prism of the current negative vision," said Jana Horvathova, a Czech descendant of survivors.
She runs the memorial museum at the site opened by Czech President Petr Pavel in April last year.
But it came too late, as the last deportee died before work was finished.
Anna Miskova, a Czech historian behind the permanent exhibition at the site, blamed anti-Roma discrimination for the uphill battle to break the silence.
"Some of the people did not want to talk about being the victims of the Roma genocide because then you have to say that you are Roma," she said.
A comb still holding tangled hair and a cup with childish designs are some of the few traces of humanity found during excavations.
"It (Lety) is in fact the first concentration camp of this kind to become a (large-scale) memorial and have its own museum," said Fings.
- 'If they knew I was one' -
Memories have not always been passed down in families. Many camp survivors married non-Roma and stopped speaking the language of their childhood -- Romani.
Christine Gaal is one. She was born in 1949 to parents who even abandoned their typically Roma family name -- Sarkozy -- to try to blend in with the crowd.
No one at her retirement home in Vienna knows her past. "If they knew I was one (Roma) the pensioners wouldn't be as nice to me," she said.
Her children do not feel Roma and cannot share customs, recipes or the cimbalom, the popular folk instrument with metal strings played by many Roma musicians.
Gaal's mother, who had 13 children, was the only one to return from the Ravensbrueck concentration camp. Her father lost seven brothers and sisters.
"The roaming, the musicians in inns, the jobs we had like horse-traders, all of that is gone," said Schneeberger's 64-year-old daughter, Gina Bohoni.
"The Sinti are disappearing," she said sadly, recalling the childhood insults she endured at school.
Her 27-year-old niece listened in silence, mindful of the heavy legacy. She refused to give her name. If her employer found out she was Roma, she said, it would be a disaster.