Buchenwald
A Gypsy in Auschwitz
We know so much about the massacre of Jews by the Nazis but rarely hear of the murder of 500,000 Sinti and Roma people in the same frenzy of racial hatred. 
A Gypsy in Auschwitz by Otto Rosenberg is the story of one of the few survivors, a tale told with remarkable simplicity, made the more real by photos of the author’s family members.
Otto Rosenberg was born in East Prussia in 1927 to a German Sinti family. His parents separated shortly after his birth, and at the age of 2-3 months he was sent to live with his grandmother in Berlin, followed shortly afterwards by his older sister and brother. Though they lived in a caravan and moved from site to site, they did not travel in the way most Sinti families did.
The women made a living peddling goods and telling fortunes, while the men wove baskets, crafted tables and chairs from root timber and decorated cabinets.
Most Sinti men worked busking or selling goods from panniers or in hard construction jobs. Many were gifted musicians – singing, playing guitars, violins, double bass, accordions, zithers, and Otto grew up revelling in the wonderful stories told around the camp fire. His mother’s family were highly respected among their kind, avid readers who could write beautifully – the go-to experts if anyone needed information or documentation.
It was genuinely a very peaceful existence.
They moved into an apartment in Sandbacher Weg in the Altglienicke-Bonsdorf district, retaining their covered wagon, and for the first time the children went to school. Otto experienced his share of discrimination as ‘dirty gypsy scum’ (though in reality they were always clean and clad albeit in darned and mended clothes and rough-hewn clogs) but he fought back valiantly. Even as a youngster he appreciated kindness – handouts by the Quakers or better-off children or local nuns. And for his part he always tried to be industrious and helpful – which reaped its own rewards.
Then in 1936, the Nazis began to tear the travelling people from their homes.
Morning after morning, they went to certain huts or caravans and took people away, never to be seen again.
Otto was just 9 when Stormtroopers and police loaded his family into trucks and carted them off to Berlin-Marzahn concentration camp on a scorched site surrounded by a sewage farm which stank permanently.
More and more people arrived constantly and were crowded together in hastily assembled shacks with corrugated iron roofs, Infections and diseases were rife. Severe limits were placed on their freedoms, police guarded the entrance, and Otto was obliged to help with basic chores of subsistence, though the local people got to know them and did what they could to offer small extras.
Then came the race researchers. They went systematically from hut to hut, caravan to caravan, interviewing as to background, family pedigree and provenance. Otto was selected as a research subject for tests and experiments.
In 1938 the young men were transported to other camps; few returned. Otto himself seemed to be popular as a lad and applied himself to the hard work demanded of him, but at the age of 15 he was sent to prison for ‘theft of Wehrmacht property‘ and ‘sabotage‘. He spent 4 months in solitary confinement – 16 weeks all alone at age 15! On his release he was immediately re-arrested and sent to Auschwitz.
Ill health and an appeal saw him transferred to the gypsy camp where his beloved grandmother was, and he worked there until July 1944, when he was transferred to Buchenwald. There he discovered a few hitherto unknown relatives, none of whom subsequently survived the incarceration. Otto though, had a distinct advantage over those inmates who were newly off the trains – he knew exactly what was going on and was able to take preventative action. At one point he even managed to bring his skeletal weight up to near-normal by dint of eating dog food.
He was moved once more, this time to Bergen-Belsen, and it was from there that he was eventually rescued by allied forces.
In the book, he repeatedly laments the loss of humanity in the camps – not just the brutality of the Nazis but perhaps harder to bear, the self-serving behaviour of the victims incarcerated in the camps.
The camp stripped us of any sense of right and wrong. Our minds were destroyed and our nerves so tattered that we stopped seeing anyone else at all. If an inmate saw an opportunity to strike someone dead, they would seize it; there was no longer any inner voice stopping them … We’re not talking about humans any more.
Occasional acts of kindness fill him with joy – it’s like the sun coming out from behind clouds. But the biggest question that haunts him is: Why did I survive?
I keep coming back to a single question: why did I survive? And I simply don’t have the answer. Out of my whole family, including all my siblings and everyone dear to me, not a single one stood a chance of survival. And that’s in spite of the fact that my brothers were much bigger and stronger than me – I was the smallest of the lot! I can’t get my head around it … all I can think about is my brothers and sisters, and how they were taken, and even now it’s hard to find joy in this world.
As the years since this atrocity go on, the thousands of persecuted Roma and Sinti must not be allowed to be forgotten or overlooked.
Man’s inhumanity
I’ve read a lot of books about the Holocaust and personally visited places where these terrible events happened and are remembered or commemorated. And wept. I read Night just before Christmas and was horrified and moved and guilt-ridden and humbled all over again.
It’s a first hand account of Eliezer Wiesel‘s experiences (translated from the original French into English by his wife Marion), through the ghettos, deportation, the concentration camps – Birkenau, Auschwitz, Buna and Buchenwald – and eventual liberation. Elie was a teenager during the Hitler years.
Personal, poignant, honest, painful, it’s a slim volume – a mere 115 pages – but an immensely powerful story. As he says, eyes that have seen babies and children thrown into the flames, witnessed unimaginable humiliation and cruelty, seen young boys hung inexpertly, watched hundreds of men die of starvation or suffocation or cold or a bullet, can never forget. Their brains will for ever be deprived of sleep and rest.
Then and afterwards he just could not reconcile the barbarity he witnessed with life in the 1940s. ‘I could not believe that human beings were being burned in our times; the world would never tolerate such crimes.’ Even when the persecution began, when thousands were corralled and removed, the Jews themselves would not, could not, believe the ugly rumours of man’s inhumanity to man. It was inconceivable.
But gradually reality drove home, and the horrors shattered his strong faith. Standing in his ill-fitting prison garb, stinking of disinfectant, a bald, starving 14-year-old, he recalls realising he was forever changed: ‘the student of the Talmud, the child I was, had been consumed by the flames. All that was left was the shape that resembled me. My soul had been invaded – and devoured – by a black flame.’
One can’t help but be moved by his desire to protect his father in spite of his ambivalence. He relates with impressive honesty his secret relief at the thought of being freed from filial responsibility; his enormous guilt about not intervening when his father was beaten brutally on his death bed. Bearing the shame for such thoughts and inaction for the rest of his life.
He doesn’t shrink from the question: Where was God? He has his own answers.
He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986 and the committee’s statement called him a ‘messenger to mankind‘, rising above his struggle to come to terms with ‘his own personal experience of total humiliation and of the utter contempt for humanity shown in Hitler’s death camps’, to deliver a powerful message ‘of peace, atonement and human dignity’. And indeed, Elie Weisel dedicated the rest of his life to ensuring the world did not forget its own capacity for evil. As he said in his acceptance speech: ‘If we forget, we are guilty, we are accomplices.’ … ‘Human suffering anywhere concerns men and women everywhere.’ … ‘What all victims need above all is to know that they are not alone; that we are not forgetting them, that when their voices are stifled we shall lend them ours, that while their freedom depends on ours, the quality of our freedom depends on theirs.’
Stumbling stones in the pavement commemorating the Jews from that house who were deported and murdered
Challenging words for us all, the more powerful when they are spoken by a man who has himself lived through hell, who has never allowed himself to forget. Are we listening to the voices of victims today? Really listening. Remembering. Lending our voices to theirs. Or are we accomplices to evil?
As Oprah Winfrey said, this book ‘should be required reading for all humanity.’