They were also, he says, stunningly naive. On one occasion, Winter's brother hit a guard over the head with a spade handle when he tried to rape a woman from his block; incredibly, he wasn't executed. And Winter himself confronted Mengele over the starvation rations being issued to the camp children. Mengele was temporarily charmed by his chutzpah and marginally increased the rations; but it did not save Winter's nieces.
He wakes up sometimes and thinks he is still in the camp. It has been hard on his wife, Marion, this compulsion of Winter's to talk about what happened.
She is 20 years younger than him, half-Sinti, half-Jewish, and, when I meet her husband, she is in hospital after a stroke. Winter tells me ruefully he is learning to cook for himself. He rolls up his sleeve in what I think is a gesture of domesticity. In the years after the war, unlike many Jewish survivors, the Winters went back to the area of Germany they had lived in before.
So did most Sinti survivors. You have to understand, he says, they were not sophisticated people; they didn't speak English; the idea of emigrating to America was just too wild to countenance. So they picked up their lives as best they could. Almost immediately on their return, they were accused by their neighbours of "stealing water".
Discrimination was no better than before the war, and, says Winter, the British soldiers stationed in Hamburg totally overlooked it. So it has pretty much continued over the years. In the s, Winter testified in a war crimes trial against Ernst Konig, an officer in the gypsy camp at Auschwitz, who committed suicide after being sentenced to life imprisonment.
Winter was shushed for his angry outbursts during the trial. I said, 'And who treated us fairly? These days, he says, "the neo-Nazis are more accepted than the Sinti in Germany". In protest, he has resigned his membership of the Social Democratic party. He has no quarrel with fellow survivors; they alone understand each other.
But he wishes the activist children of survivors - he is talking of the Jewish population - could be more inclusive of the Sinti; he believes they are still looked down on for being working class. Sinti in public positions are still loth to admit to their ethnicity. So Winter goes into schools and universities and tells his story. From his years on the carousel, he is a natural showman. He believes the story still needs to be told because there are plenty of people who, to various degrees, deny it.
A few years ago, Winter was on holiday in Gran Canaria when an elderly German couple asked what the number on his arm was. Braun survived forced labour service and incarceration in Auschwitz. In the s, he gave a testimony of his experiences, a copy of which is held by the Library.
In the early years following the war, compensation was often denied to Roma and Sinti victims on this basis, despite extensive evidence that they were in fact persecuted as part of a campaign of targeted and ultimately genocidal racism.
As part of the development of these ideas, Roma were subject to a massive programme of pseudo-scientific investigation. Margarete Kraus, in the photograph to the left , a Czech Roma survivor of Auschwitz, was a victim of forced medical experiments. In this post-war image, taken by German journalist Reimar Gilsenbach in the s, her camp number tattoo is just visible on her left forearm. He said:. The conditions were worse than in other camps … the route between the huts was ankle deep in mud and dirt.
The gypsies were still using the clothes that they had been given upon arrival … footwear was missing … The latrines were built in such a way that they were practically unusable for the gypsy children. At the outbreak of the war they were prohibited from leaving their places of residence, and in separate actions in and about 5, were deported to labor camps and ghettos in Poland. In the Czech lands incorporated into the Reich in , local gendarmes managed two concentration camps for Roma Lety and Hodonin , from which the inmates were deported to Auschwitz in For Sinti and Roma, Auschwitz involved particular kinds of trauma.
Before the camp was closed at the beginning of August , with the gassing of some 4, remaining prisoners, most had already died of disease, hunger or exhaustion, or been murdered by guards. Others were selected for slave labor and returned to Germany, often passing through three or four concentration camps and enduring death marches before the liberation. For many, Bergen Belsen was their last stop. Having to watch the misery and death of close family members, including small children about of whom were born in the camp was remembered by survivors of Auschwitz as particularly traumatic, as was the total reversal of the gender and generational norms and the brutal denial of the conditions for hygiene, mutual respect, and honor that defined traditional Romani family life.
Fascist regimes that were allies or clients of Nazi Germany implemented their own measures. Croatia is notorious for the Jasenovac concentration camp in which some 20, Roma were detained and murdered alongside Serbian and Jewish prisoners.
Romanian Roma commemorate the deportation of 25,—including the whole of the itinerant Roma population—to the eastern territory of Transnistria. There they were held under horrific conditions between and the fall of the Antonescu dictatorship in August ; nearly half died of cold, hunger, disease and at the hands of local police. A still unknown but relatively small number of Italian Roma fell into the hands of the Germans following the German occupation in In every country there were those who were able to avoid or evade internment, some through flight or in hiding and some because of loopholes in the regulations or gaps in the police net.
Families had suffered the death or disappearance of loved ones and whole communities had been destroyed. What happened next varied from country to country, as had the patterns of persecution. The majority of Romani survivors on German soil were themselves natives of Germany or of the Austrian and Czech territories incorporated into the Reich.
As such they were not far from home, although even before the war the German authorities had often questioned their German citizenship and many found themselves formally stateless after the war. These Roma and Sinti qualified as refugees, and would have a fight to reclaim their citizenship rights in the following years, but they had yet to learn that. German Sinti and Roma liberated from camps in Poland also made their way back to Germany as directly as they could.
Similarly, most Italian Roma, slowly released from internment after the fall of Mussolini in , simply fled to rebuild their lives on home soil. Moreover, a significant number of them had lived in Croatian border areas that were handed over to Yugoslavia after the war, and they were caught up in complicated arrangements for re-assigning citizenship and facilitating cross-border migration. For some of them, the changes made it possible to claim refugee status. Once the camps were opened, German Sinti and Roma typically set off for home as soon as they could.
Otto Rosenberg, aged 17 in , was one of the many liberated from Bergen Belsen who decided in the first days after the arrival of the British troops to leave the camp and make their way home; Rosenberg simply did not trust either the Germans or the liberators and could not bear to be surrounded by fences any longer.
Even if we have to walk all the way home. Once the shooting had ended, relations with the occupying troops had to be negotiated; they had the upper hand and their reactions to German civilians travelling across the country were unpredictable.
For women, like Lily Franz who had escaped from a death march and made her way to a refugee clearing centre in Czechoslovakia, the threat of sexual violence and exploitation was always in the background, irrespective of which army was in charge.
Many of those liberated in were very young, having been interned and deported as children. Barely able to walk and unable to remember his name or identity, he was taken under the wing of French prisoners, with whom he travelled to France where he was eventually placed with foster parents.
For his own protection, he had to hide all evidence that he was German, including his native language—a situation which left lasting psychological scars. Once he could remember his name and some details of his family, the Red Cross International Tracing Service ITS was able to return him to his parents at the beginning of Not all Romani families were reunited so swiftly, partly because in those early years they lacked the connections and the resources to mobilize agencies like the ITS.
What they did was to rely on old and new networks of fellow Romani survivors. Reinhard Florian, a Sinto from East Prussia, saw his first concentration camp in at the age of He was liberated from the seventh, Ebensee in Austria. He settled in Bavaria Southern Germany , because he had learned from other survivors where he could get help with housing and employment, and also that East Prussia was now occupied by the Russians. And he also assumed that none of his family had survived.
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