inhumanity
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.
The Tattooist of Auschwitz
Ludwig Eisenberg was born on 28 October 1916 in Krompachy, Slovakia. He was transported to Auschwitz on 23 April 1942 and tattooed with the number 32407. The Tattooist of Auschwitz is his story, a salutary reminder that ‘every one of the unimaginably large number of Holocaust victims was an individual with a unique story …’ ; another window on one of the most barbaric events in human history.
It took the author Heather Morris three years to untangle, as she built up a special friendship with this extraordinary man, now Lale Sokolov. Trust took time to establish. For him, memory and history were closely intertwined, and overlaid with a burden of guilt lest he be seen as a collaborator in these crimes. And Morris has captured his truth: he did what he did in order simply to survive, and in so doing, found little ways to bring compassion and humanity into the lives of others.
When he’s first assigned the task of tattooing numbers on each new batch of inmates, he recoils from the prospect of defiling hundreds of innocent people, but he quickly realises that he could put soul into the task, hurt them less than someone with no sensitivity for their pain and degradation.
And being the Tätowierer brings privileges – a room to himself, freedom to circulate, extra food rations – benefits he’s determined to share with his previous bunk mates and his assistant. He becomes a conduit for goods in both directions – jewels, medicines, food, luxuries – smuggling necessities to those who fall ill, bribing guards in order to gain advantages for others. And as he stealthily does what he can, he witnesses many other examples of courage and humanity and selflessness, even in the face of brutality of incomprehensible proportions.
One of the most sinister and chilling sections relates to Lale’s encounters with Herr Doktor Josef Mengele whose ‘soul is colder than his scalpel’. Watching the tattooist at work, the doctor stands before the parades of young women prisoners queueing to be assigned a number, deciding their fate with a flick of his hand – right, left, right, right, left, left, right – no obvious logic since they’re all in the prime of their lives, fit and healthy. And by and by his eye falls on Lale’s young assistant, Leon. He is whisked away, returned some time later without his testicles, cut off in the name of Mengele’s infamous medical experiments.
As Lale sinks deeper and deeper into scenes of unparalleled inhumanity, he feels he is drowning in hell. Even the walls seem to be weeping for those who leave a room in the morning and do not return at night. He befriends a whole consignment of Romani people who share his block of rooms, only to see every last one of them rounded up and reduced to ash.
At one point he’s called to the very centre of the horror, to one of the ovens in the Crematorium, to identify the correct owner of a given number when two corpses appear to bear the same one. He steps into a cavernous room …
‘Bodies, hundreds of naked bodies, fill the room. They are piled up on each other, their limbs distorted. Dead eyes stare. Men, young and old; children at the bottom. Blood, vomit, urine, faeces. The smell of death pervades the entire space.’
The SS officer with him teases him that he’s probably the only Jew who ever walked into an oven and then walked out again, but for Lale, this is one step farther into the abyss.
As a privileged person himself, Lale is also personally vulnerable – he must be wary of people’s motives for befriending him, for confiding in him, alert to the threat of backstabbing and false accusations, of being seen to be collaborating with the enemy. And again and again he asks himself, what has he been saved for?
‘Choosing to live is an act of defiance, a form of heroism … I have been given the choice of participating in the destruction of our people, and I have chosen to do so in order to survive. I can only hope I am not one day judged as a perpetrator or a collaborator.’
Nor is he free from the constant fear of his own death or degradation. His personal safety is at the whim of the armed guard assigned to monitor him, his mood, his thirst for disposable fodder. When someone betrays Lale for the stash of gems (bargaining chips) under his mattress, he undergoes severe torture and starvation, now reliant on others to rally to his support and cherish him. And falling in love with prisoner 34902, Gita, renders him vulnerable in many new and delicate ways.
Originally a screenplay, this debut novel often reads like a script for actors, or the descriptive overlays on TV programmes designed for those with hearing- or visual-impairment. I wanted to edit it severely!! But what it lacks in literary merit it makes up for in the poignancy of a life lived in the face of inhumanity beyond reason. A sobering lesson for us all.
When his Romani friends were summarily cremated, Lale sank into a deep depression, but Gita told him ‘you will honour them by staying alive, surviving this place and telling the world what happened here‘. He has indeed honoured them. The cost to him can only be dimly imagined. No one could possibly survive such an experience without being terribly traumatised. In his case ‘everything and everyone he cared for is now only visible to him through glasses darkened by suffering and loss.’
Let us never forget.