Nazi Germany
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 Memory Keeper of Kyiv
I’ve read countless books on the Holocaust, also known as the Shoah, both factual and fictionalised accounts, and we all know about the appalling acts by Nazi Germany that led to the extermination of millions of Jews and Romanys and others in the concentration camps, gas chambers and mass shootings, during World War II. So how come I hadn’t even heard of the Holomodor – death by hunger – in Ukraine? 
I have now, though, through the pages of a novel published in 2022: The Memory Keeper of Kyiv. And it will surely haunt me.
It’s the more powerful I suspect because of the images flashing onto our screens daily in the news, images of devastation in Ukraine as Russia attempts to subjugate this nation and destroy their culture. Vivid images of bodies left lying in the frozen ground, Ukrainian faces ravaged by despair, women lamenting their dead, the haunted eyes of orphaned children, snow falling over scenes of utter ruin, families ripped apart and displaced. All so redolent of the pictures author Erin Litteken describes in The Memory Keeper of Kyiv. Inhumanity and brutality on a scale it’s hard to comprehend or believe.
Litteken is the granddaughter of a Ukrainian refugee from World War II which instantly gives her credentials for telling this tale. The poignancy of the current conflict appalls her; the horror of terrible history repeating itself. Her novel is an attempt to imagine and recreate the 1930s when Stalin’s activists marched across the Soviet Union and created a man-made famine in Ukraine, exacting a toll of almost 4 million lives.
As one of her principal characters who lived through the atrocities said: Share my story, our story, with everyone, so what happened to us never happens again. If only. But she has gone some way to exposing this forgotten horror.
The tale is told in two time frames, the 1930s and the 2000s, and the alternating perspectives worked for me since I found the accounts of life through the Holodomor so harrowing it was a relief to move to the nearer present, even though that time too is wreathed in tragedy and sadness. The natural disasters are at least understandable and forgivable.
I’ll sketch the plot lightly so as not to spoil it for future readers of the book. But perhaps a warning is wise: there is only one attempt at the end to soften the blackness, and by then it seems rather contrived.
1929
Kateryna Viktorivna Shevchenko (Katya) is a boisterous feisty 16-year-old, newly in love with Pavlo, a boy she’s known all her life. When the peace of their rural life is shattered by the coming of Stalin’s activists in January 1930, everything changes. Arrests and deportations begin immediately, appropriation of properties starting with the wealthiest, religious icons replaced with the trappings of collectivisation and communism, rebels disappearing. Interventions are in vain and incur terrible penalties.
Agonising choices face those left behind. Stalin’s plan is to terrorise them into subservience, appropriating their produce and animals and possessions, brutalising people and property, so they will join his regime, and even when they do forcing them into starvation. Resistance and disobedience attract instant death or deportation. The threat of harsh punishments makes ordinarily peace-loving people do astonishing things, and there’s a particularly devastating sense of loss attached to locals who succumb to the blackmail, collaborate with the enemy, and betray their compatriot neighbours.
As the atrocities mount, Katya begins to record events on tiny scraps of paper, with the stub of an old pencil. Then, on the day before their wedding, tragedy comes to them personally: Pavlo and his parents are shot in cold blood, and her own father is deported by the invading activists. In the pervasive fear, even the opportunity to truly mourn their grievous loss has been taken from them.
Tragedy after tragedy follows, and no effort is made to sanitise or soften the horrors for the sake of finer sensibilities. Even when Katya acts to try to save her family, and performs deeds of immense heroism, she’s wracked by guilt for the consequences of her choices, a guilt which haunts her to her last breath.
2004
Newly widowed, Cassie, is clinging to the remnants of life before her husband was killed in a car accident, though the memories are increasingly stifling her, trapping her in the past. She’s merely going through the motions of a bare-bones existence. Her 5-year-old daughter, Birdie, hasn’t spoken in over fourteen months since the tragedy. But then they are persuaded by Cassie’s mum to move to her childhood home to help care for Cassie’s grandmother, Bobby, a Ukrainian widow who survived the Holodomor. The move forces her out of the spiral of sadness, and gradually Cassie sheds the hard outer shell of her grief. And despite her resistance, she even finds love again with their neighbour, Nick, grandson of another Ukrainian woman, Mina.
But Bobby is losing her grip on reality as dementia sets in. She reverts to old behaviours, burying food in strange places and wandering out of the house at night lamenting past deeds. Cassie and her mother are at a loss to understand why. Until that is, Cassie discovers Bobby’s journal and scraps of paper covered in spidery Cyrillic script tucked into odd places. In a lucid moment Bobbie gives her granddaughter permission to read this account of her experiences in the1930s; she simply cannot bring herself to talk about those appalling memories but they should be known. Nick speaks Ukrainian and he helps to translate the texts. It’s an account of Katya’s life. Pavlo had told her moments before his death: You must survive this and tell the people of the world what has happened here, so that it doesn’t happen again. Use your pencil and paper and weave your beautiful words to keep our memories alive. Don’t let me die in vain, Katya. She was true to her promise to him.
It’s a shocking account. But how sad that such courageous efforts were not enough to prevent history repeating the errors of the past for Ukraine. That we were not taught this evil alongside the Holocaust. That we did not know.
The philosophy of Katya’s father might well resonate for many in 2023 too: Just make it through today and hope that tomorrow will be better. But it ought not to be good enough for us who see what is happening. We surely can’t walk by on the other side. Not when we know.
Alone in Berlin
Having just read a book about the German side of the Second World War and posted a review last week, I segued smoothly into another one about German resistance to the Nazis, which I bought at the same time.This one is Alone in Berlin by Hans Fallada (translated by Michael Hofmann).
The author’s own biography reads like an exaggeration but he is generally accepted as one of the foremost German writers of the twentieth century. However, after allegedly writing this book in twenty-four days, he died before Alone in Berlin was published, the victim of his own abuse of alcohol and drugs, but not before he had informed several relatives that this was a ‘great novel’. It was in fact a reworking of a real-life case to which Fallada had been given access. His contention in the book is that morality under Nazi rule was not measured by the size of the effort made to stand up against tyranny and atrocity, but by doing something, rather than simply capitulating and accepting evil. But as the afterword explains, though ‘there was substantial and heroic resistance to the Nazi regime at all levels of German society, from aristocratic officers in the army to brutalized inmates of concentration camps … this resistance was unsuccessful, in the sense that the regime was destroyed by the foreign armies which conquered it rather than by internal rebels who overthrew it.’
The book recounts numerous small acts of defiance and rebellion on the part of many anti-Nazi dissidents, but the main story centres on the Quangels. Otto Quangel is an insignificant taciturn emotionally-stunted man working as a shop foreman in a furniture factory (now given over to producing coffins) and living with his wife Anna in a run-down tenement block in Berlin. When his only son is killed in battle during the invasion of France, he hatches a determined plan to fight back against this unjust war that has robbed them of their family and future: he will write and secretly distribute postcards, decrying the government, urging civil disobedience and workplace sabotage. It’s an unspectacular and unsophisticated effort, limited to a small area, but as Anna says, whether acts are big or small, no one could risk more than his life. The main thing was: you fought back in whatever way you could; tried to stay decent, have no part in the evil being perpetrated and promoted all around you. Otto tries to be vigilant, not get caught, firm in the conviction that the longer you could fight, the longer you were being effective against brutality; there was no value in dying early. Besides, he wanted to be there when the regime fell, to be able to say: we were there; we were fighting our own war.
Inspector Escherich of the Gestapo, immediately deduces the writer of the anonymous propaganda is a poorly educated workman who recently lost his only son. Give him time, and he’ll reveal more details about himself. It just requires patience and alertness and he will hunt down ‘the Hobgoblin’. But as the months go by he develops grudging admiration for this wily person whose postcards arrive in his office every week.
Two years on, 233 cards and 8 letters have reached the Gestapo. Escherich has been removed and tortured; Inspector Zott has taken over the investigation. Zott’s methodical approach leads him to very similar conclusions to his predecessor but he is convinced the postcard writer works with the city trams. This certainty allows the Quangels to avoid capture the first time they fall under suspicion, but then Otto makes a fatal mistake. And after a long patient vigil, the now-reinstated Inspector Escherich pounces, determined not to let any irregularities in procedure abort his moment of glory. By this time his painstaking mapping shows 259 cards have been handed in; and he is confident in his profiling of the sender.
But Quangel is appalled when he learns not only that a mere 18 cards have been left in circulation, but that his actions have terrorised the very people he wanted to free. ‘I never wanted that! I never thought that would happen! I wanted things to get better, I wanted people to learn the truth, so that the war would end sooner and the killing stop – that’s what I wanted! I didn’t mean to sow terror and dread, I didn’t want to make things worse than they are already! Those wretched people – and I made them even more wretched!’
The Inspector points out he didn’t stand a chance; he is a gnat pitting himself against an elephant. ‘You, an ordinary worker taking on the Führer, who is backed by the Party, the Wehrmacht, the SS, the SA. The Führer, who has already conquered half the world and will overcome the last of our enemies in another year or two? It’s ludicrous!’
Nevertheless, it’s Quangel who emerges the moral victor. When he points out to the Gestapo officer, ‘You’re working in the employ of a murderer, delivering ever new victims to him. You do it for money; perhaps you don’t even believe in the man. No, I’m certain you don’t believe in him’ – it’s the inspector’s gaze that is lowered. He has become Otto’s only convert.
As one dissident tells a rather complacent colleague who seems content in his personal happiness with his wife and coming baby, ‘You’re robbing mothers of their sons, wives of their husbands, girlfriends of their boyfriends, as long as you tolerate thousands being shot every day and don’t lift a finger to stop the killing. … your apathy made it possible.’ Real decency demands protest. And somehow the quiet dignity and courage of this ordinary couple, even under severe provocation in prison, convey a powerful message.
It’s a substantial tome and the English is a tribute to the translator. The rather unusual switching of tenses, points of view and perspectives, owes more to the author’s style than the translator’s, I suspect. But, to my surprise I found it held my attention effortlessly in spite of the slow pace, minimal action and limited plot. Oh, and I had to smile at Otto’s description of reading: ‘something superfluous that only high-up people went in for, people who did no proper work.’ Hmmm!