On 16 May, 1944, as the first full trainloads of Hungarian Jews trundled towards Auschwitz, the SS decided to clear out the area known as the ‘Gypsy family camp’ to make room for the new arrivals. The family camp housed several thousand Roma and Sinti (Roma with German roots) people. Like the Jews, they were classified as racially inferior and enemies of the Third Reich. But while Jewish arrivals were immediately removed from their loved ones, Roma families were often allowed to stay together. Their numbers were much smaller and they refused to be separated.
Claimant 3102250 finally received the standard compensation for her ordeal
That day, the Roma and Sinti inmates, well aware of their likely fate, also refused to follow the SS’s orders. In one of the least known but most courageous episodes of the Holocaust, they fought back with their bare hands, pieces of wood, shovels, iron pipes, anything they could find to turn into a makeshift weapon. They launched themselves at the Nazis, hitting, kicking and punching. The SS officers, shocked at their unexpected resistance, retreated. Preparations were well advanced for the coming extermination of hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews. That was the priority. A few thousand Gypsies, the camp commanders decided, could wait.
Eighty years ago this week, on 2 August, 1944, after the deportations from Hungary had stopped, the SS moved in again. This time they were prepared. In scenes of great terror and brutality, the Auschwitz family camp was liquidated. The men were rounded up and sent to Buchenwald, a concentration camp in Germany. The remaining women, children and elderly, numbering several thousand, were gassed.
Around 23,000 Roma and Sinti people passed through Auschwitz. Many died of disease, harsh labour and starvation. Others perished in hideous experiments carried out by Dr Josef Mengele, the notorious Nazi medic, who was fascinated both by the Roma and by twins. Mengele once sewed two Roma siblings together back to back, trying to create a set of Siamese twins by connecting their blood vessels and internal organs.
The Roma have several words for their genocide, but the one used most often is Porrajmos (devouring). Nobody knows how many Roma and Sinti people were killed by the Nazis during world war two. Himmler ordered the deportation of Roma and Sinti people from across the Reich in 1942. As with the legislation governing the status of Jews, there were certain exceptions for those who were considered to be ‘integrated’ into German society, such as serving soldiers. Such laws were often ignored and Roma soldiers serving in the Wehrmacht were even arrested while on leave and deported.
The United States Holocaust Museum estimates that at least 250,000 Roma were murdered, but the number may be as high at 500,000 or even more. Tens of thousands were shot alongside Jews and Communists by the Einsatzgruppen, the SS extermination squads, on the eastern front. The Nazis’ allies, such the puppet regimes in Serbia and Croatia, enthusiastically killed tens of thousands. Roma people were also sent to the Warsaw and Lodz ghettos, where they lived in separate apartment blocks, before being deported with their Jewish neighbours to the Chelmno and Treblinka extermination camps.
A comparatively weak literary tradition, the sparsity of survivors’ stories (in comparison to Jewish accounts) together with still evolving communal and international organisations means that our knowledge of the genocide of the Roma and Sinti people remains limited. The fate of many Roma was never recorded and will never be known or told. Endemic discrimination against survivors continued after the war. Incredibly – or perhaps not, considering how many Nazi members of the judiciary and civil service continued in their posts – it was not until 1965 that most Roma in Germany could hope for compensation. The new state of West Germany initially regarded the Nazi-era laws against the Roma as restrictions on criminality, rather than race. A second opportunity arose after 1999 when the Swiss banks, which provided extensive financial services to Nazi Germany, reached a settlement over Holocaust-era assets.
Some of the claimants’ accounts were recorded by the Claims Resolution Tribunal, which oversaw compensation under the Swiss settlement, and made publicly available. The dry language belies almost unimaginable suffering. One unnamed Romani woman born in 1923, recorded as Claimant 3102250, worked as a slave labourer in Auschwitz, Ravensbruck, Flossenbürg and Lety u Pisku, a concentration camp for Romani people in Czechoslovakia. She escaped, had a daughter, and was then recaptured and sent to Auschwitz where her daughter was killed. There she worked in the camp infirmary where Dr Mengele experimented on her, injecting her with typhoid and other substances. From Auschwitz she was sent to Germany and somehow survived a death march. After the war she had another child, who was mentally handicapped as a result of Mengele’s experiments. More than 55 years later, Claimant 3102250 finally received the standard compensation for her ordeal: $1,450.
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