Otto Rosenberg is 9 and living in Berlin, poor but happy, when his family are first detained. All around them, Sinti and Roma families are being torn from their homes by Nazis , leaving behind schools, jobs, friends, and businesses to live in forced encampments outside the city. One by one, families are broken up, adults and children disappear or are ‘sent East’.
Otto arrives in Auschwitz aged 15 and is later transferred to Buchenwald and Bergen-Belsen. He works, scrounges food whenever he can, witnesses and suffers horrific violence and is driven close to death by illness more than once. Unbelievably, he also joins an armed revolt of prisoners who, facing the SS and certain death, refuse to back down. Somehow, through luck, sheer human will to live, or both, he survives.
The stories of Sinti and Roma suffering in Nazi Germany are all too often lost or untold. In this haunting account, Otto shares his story with a remarkable simplicity. Deeply moving, A Gypsy in Auschwitz is the incredible story of how a young Sinti boy miraculously survived unimaginable darkness of the Holocaust.
I'm honoured to be hosting the blog tour for A Gypsy in Auschwitz by Otto Rosenberg today. Many thanks to Octopus Books and to Anne Cater from Random Things Tours for inviting me and for sending me a copy of the novel.
It is thought that around 500,000 Roma and Sinti people – at least a quarter of their population at the time – were murdered in Nazi-occupied Europe. Although in recent years, there has been some recognition of this genocide, the Porajmos (the 'Devouring' in Romani) is still not widely known about. Meanwhile, Roma and Sinti communities still face racially-motivated harassment and discrimination across Europe. Otto Rosenberg's family were Sinti and this candid account of his own ordeal at the hands of the Nazis is a harrowing read. While the numbers are shocking, they are an abstract figure whereas a memoir such as this which focuses on one person gives us a starkly affecting insight into the terrible persecution of Roma and Sinti people during WW2 and beyond.
Otto told his story to Ulrich Enzenberger and the result is a memoir which feels very personal; the translation by Maisie Musgrave ensures his voice comes across clearly throughout. He begins by remembering a time when his family were poor but happy before the gradual eradication of their rights, the arrest of Sinti and Roma just prior to the 1936 Olympic Games and their forced move to the Berlin-Marzahn labour camp. There are some truly heinous crimes against humanity described here which should horrify anybody reading this book. Otto lays bare the brutal cruelty of the Nazis and while the appalling conditions in concentration camps like Auschwitz-Birkenau are well-known these days, it's still difficult to contemplate the scale of suffering and calculated, systemic murder of people they deemed to be racially inferior.
This is a strikingly honest book and Otto painfully discloses how the constant exposure to violence and death dehumanised everybody in the concentration camp, prisoners and guards alike. The strict order of hierarchy resulted in people becoming brutalised and beatings were commonplace. His explanation of the way in which people became numbly apathetic to the sheer scale of horror that surrounded them is desperately poignant. He remembers Dr Josef Mengele's visits to Auschwitz and although he recalls an affable man and says he never witnessed him giving anybody a lethal injection, he also notes that Mengele later became known as the Angel of Death. Mengele conducted scores of experiments on Roma and Sinti children and in just a few paragraphs it's chilling to note how he won their trust; Otto himself acknowledges that he only heard about his experiments after 1945 and at the time would never have believed he had such evil intent.
There are a few occasions where genuine kindness is recounted too and it was perhaps one of these brief moments of benevolence which helped Otto survive when so many others perished. There was an element of luck too, of course and throughout the book there are times when it is evident just how close to death he became. From the wretched living conditions which saw prisoners racked with illness and plagued by lice as they were beaten, starved and worked to death to the planned mass murder of his people, Otto barely survived but still lost so much. There are times when he recounts the loss of his family members in just a few words because what else can be said; many were amongst the Sinti and Roma occupants gassed on August 2nd 1944 when the Romani camp at Auschwitz was finally liquidated.
Even though Otto somehow survived the genocide, his suffering continued after the war. His survivor's guilt is palpable throughout and although he only shared his memories many years afterwards, it's obvious how they continued to haunt him right up until his own death. Years of being denied the hygiene and honour that defined traditional Romani family life and the reversal of gender and generational conventions was obviously enduringly traumatic to the survivors. Perhaps one of the most sobering aspects of his account comes after the camps were finally liberated when he still faced barriers accessing the help and support he should have been entitled to. From the early post-war period when he was once more forced to work and faced demands to show his papers, despite them having been taken from him, through to his long fight for reparations and recognition of the genocide committed by the Nazis against the Sinti and Roma and then ongoing civil rights issues, his struggle is powerfully expressed.
The informal tone of this extraordinarily moving memoir means that although the subject matter is difficult, the words flow in a conversational style which is very readable. Otto Rosenberg passed away in 2001 but through his tireless campaigning for equality afterwards and his lifelong mission to bear witness to the crimes perpetrated against his people, his legacy will live on. This is an important addition to the stories told by Holocaust victims and survivors, particularly at a time when far-right populism is on the rise across Europe and anti-Roma prejudice is too often ignored or overlooked.
A Gypsy in Auschwitz is published by Monoray, purchasing links can be found here but please support independent bookshops whenever possible.
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About the Author
Otto’s daughter, Petra Rosenberg, is the current Director of the Central Council of German Sinti and Roma Berlin-Brandenburg.
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