Maria Danielova lived to see the worst of the twentieth century. During the Second World War, along with 6,500 other Roma Gypsies from what is now the Czech Republic, Maria was deported to a Nazi concentration camp, in her case Auschwitz. Like nine out of 10 Czech Roma, her mother, father and sister died in the gas chambers. Maria was one of only 600 to survive.

Communism kept a tight social lid on anti-Roma racism after the war but now the evils that Maria experienced have caught up with the next generation. Her son, Milan, was beaten up by police during an anti-racist demonstration. Her grandson, also called Milan, was attacked by 'skinheads' with baseball bats. They shattered his knee, broke his hand and fractured his skull. Her nephew was assaulted.

'My grandmother saw too many children die in the camps,' says Milan Jnr, now in north London with his family waiting to hear whether their application for asylum is accepted by Britain. 'Now she saw all of us being beaten up too. For my grandmother history was repeating itself.'

Maria died in 1995. Two years later her family fled the Czech Republic to escape the rising tide of anti-Roma violence which they, and many others, assert is allowed to continue by state authorities - local police, town councils, mayors - who are as racist as the thugs. 'Under Communism it was safe, because you could go to the police,' says Milan. 'Now most of the skinheads are policeman. Gypsies don't have any rights.'

The story of Maria and her family illustrates the depth of suffering of a people who have fought for generations for recognition of their plight. The violence they have experienced is horribly commonplace, yet that Maria had children at all is unusual. 'Of the few Czech Roma who survived the Holocaust a large proportion had either been surgically sterilised while in the camps or rendered infertile by their treatment,' says Dr Donald Kennrick, one of the few academics to have carried out research on the Nazi genocide of gypsies.

Since the death of the Eastern bloc in the Nineties there have been countless incidents of Roma being murdered or assaulted, of their homes being firebombed and their businesses being destroyed. If the victims were the families of Jewish survivors of the Holocaust it is unimaginable their persecution would not be met by international condemnation. But, because they are Roma and have been less than successful in publicising their own cause, it has slipped by widely unremarked.

The problems faced by the Roma of central and eastern Europe do not appear to trouble Britain. Since the autumn of 1997, when there was a sudden increase in the number of Roma from the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Romania claiming asylum in Britain, the Home Office has maintained a policy of refusing almost 100 per cent of claims at point of application.

By contrast, Canada has accepted more than 85 per cent of similar claims. 'It's clear from examination of the claims that the overwhelming majority are purely economic migrants,' the Home Office said last week; it's a position that has done little to discourage racist press comment with which some tabloids and local newspapers have greeted the Roma's arrival in the UK.

The Home Office may not be able to sustain opposition to Roma asylum-seekers for long. On Thursday the House of Lords will give its judgment in the case of Milan Horvath, a Slovak Roma who entered the UK with his wife and child in October 1997.

He claimed asylum on the grounds that he had a well-founded fear of persecution. In 1985 his father was murdered by racist thugs, a killing police failed to investigate. His brother was beaten up by a group using chains and baseball bats, and other Roma neighbours were killed. His home was set on fire and ransacked so many times that he and his family took refuge in a makeshift dugout in the back garden. The police, says Horvath, did nothing.

Home Secretary Jack Straw has argued that the authorities in countries like the Czech Republic and Slovakia have the powers to investigate racist attack and that therefore Roma cannot claim a well-founded fear of persecution as understood by the 1951 International Convention on Refugees, because the racism is not state-sponsored.

Horvath's legal team is arguing that, whatever the theoretical position, in practice the authorities in Slovakia are so racist that they will not act, leaving their client in fear of his life. The House of Lords is being asked to decide what level of police inaction amounts to the state condoning racist violence. Should it find in Horvath's favour, the ruling will apply to other countries.

In the early stages of Horvath's case the Home Secretary refused to accept his account of his family's suffering. Straw said it was unbelievable his family had been attacked so often. Since then, as the case graduated from the asylum tribunals to the court system, his account has been taken as fact. Even so, says Peter Jorrow of the Refugee Legal Council, which has represented Horvath, the Home Office has little time for the details.

'They've been ignoring the evidence,' Jorrow says. 'We put in lots of evidence on the plight of the Roma, from the US State Department and the UNHCR [the United Nations' refugee agency]. All they put in was a letter from the Slovak ambassador. The Home Office refuses to engage with the issue on an evidential basis. All they say is, in our view it doesn't amount to persecution.'

Milan Daniel will be interested in the outcome of Horvath's case. 'The British government say the Czech Republic is a safe country and this is why we must go back,' he says. 'They are very, very wrong. I have to thank the British government for all they have given us, but they mustn't send us back. We have nothing to go back to.'

The Bock family, now living in a council flat in Clacton-on-Sea, Essex, will be watching the Horvath case closely. Villem Bock' s father, Frantisek, spent years as a child in Auschwitz. He was one of only three children of 11 to survive. 'All the time my father would talk about the camp,' Villem, 48, says. 'He told me how he saw his parents being taken to the gas chambers. That was the last he saw of them.'

Sixty years later, Villem also found himself detained in a camp, this time British. When he, his wife Valeria and their 10-year-old daughter Marie arrived at Stansted Airport on 1 March, Villem was interviewed for three days before being detained at Tinsley House, near Gatwick.

Back in the Czech Republic, Valeria's brother, Daniel, had been murdered by racists. Valeria and Villem had, in turn, been forced out of their jobs and then from their homes. 'They were beating people up in the streets,' Valeria says. 'They burned down Roma houses. They did everything they could to make life harder. We moved to a new town and the people told us we had to leave.' So they did. 'I couldn't help but be worried for my children.'

Their journey took them to Canada, which they left when Villem's mother, still in the Czech Republic, was diagnosed with cancer. They left two teenage daughters behind, who now have refugee status in Canada. As soon as they arrived back in the Czech Republic they realised conditions were no better. They got out, first to Norway and then to the Netherlands, each country refusing their application. Villem was released from Tinsley House, on payment of a surety by a supporter of the Roma cause. All the family care about now is that they are not returned to the Czech Republic. 'The Roma are still being attacked,' Villem says. 'It feels as if it will soon be the same as when Hitler was in power. The skinhead movement is too strong.

'Everybody has forgotten about the Roma. The concentration camps were for the Jews and the Gypsies but nobody remembers the Gypsies.' There are no museums to the Gypsy dead of the Holocaust, he says. At Lety, in the Czech Republic, a concentration camp for Gypsies was established during the Second World War. There are no memorials there of the sort established at Auschwitz or Dachau. The land is now a pig farm. 'They did it because they think of us as pigs.'

For the Bock family and the Daniel family the Holocaust is not part of a history that must be remembered for the sake of remembrance. It is part of their present, the brutality of their family's past echoing down the years.

The judges in the Lords might like to listen to those echoes as they reach their judgment this week.

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