FACT-CHECKING:
Auschwitz Lullaby
Teresa Wontor-Cichy
Mario Escobar is a Spanish writer, a graduate of historical studies, author of many books and articles on the Inquisition era, the Catholic Church, the Reformation and religious sects, the history of the discoveries and colonisations of North and South America, as we read in the note at the end of the book.
He published the book devoted to Auschwitz in 2015 under the title "Canción de cuna de Auschwitz". The English version of "Auschwitz Lullaby" was published in 2018, while the Polish translation of the book was published in the first months of 2019.
In the preface, the author writes about his visit to the former Auschwitz camp, which deeply etched into his memory. Presumably, during his stay, he became acquainted with the place where the tragic fate of the Sinti and Roma unfolded; the family camp called Zigeunerlager in Birkenau. As a consequence of delving into the successive stages of the tragedy of the prisoners of the Birkenau camp, he described the history of Helena Hannemann, a German nurse who was imprisoned in the Birkenau camp along with her Roma husband and five children.
The reader should start reading the book from the chapter "Historical explanations" on pages 219 to 222. The author decided, albeit partially, to explain what is untrue in the book. It turns out to be quite a lot. He changed the names of the children; one of the sons was not murdered in the gas chamber, but "was given the opportunity to escape". As the author admits, Heinrich Himmler never visited the Roma camp in Birkenau; it is uncertain whether Helene Hannemann kept a diary, or the author decided that it could be a solid foundation for the narrative that he presents in the first person.
The storyline of the novel begins in May 1943 in Berlin and transfers to Auschwitz in the same month (Chapter 3). The events of the next 6 chapters take place in May 1943, and only chapter 9 begins in June 1943. The book ends with the liquidation of the camp in August 1944. After the epilogue, the author publishes "Historical Explanations", the "Calendar of the Gypsy Camp at Auschwitz", the "Glossary", the "Acknowledgements", information about the author, the drawing of the Gypsy camp - without providing the source - and it was done by a former prisoner and the writer of the Roma family camp - Tadeusz Joachimowski. The book is 235 pages long.
Let us take a closer look at a few excerpts from the book.
The story begins with the "Prologue" which took place in Buenos Aires in 1956. A man on a plane to Switzerland is carrying reports from genetic tests he had conducted in Auschwitz and old notebooks from the Zigeunerlager preschool, i.e. the journals of a German woman he met in Auschwitz, Helena Hannemann, the director of a Gypsy preschool in the camp. As the author puts it, this man was once known as Dr Mengele.
The peaceful life of a Berlin family was interrupted by the events of May 1943, when Helena Hennemann's husband, Johann, who was a Roma, and five children were arrested. The police informed the mother of the children, who was not a Roma woman that the arrest warrant did not apply to her; however, she decided to stay with her family. While leaving the apartment, Helena hummed the favourite lullaby of her children, written by Johannes Brahms, to calm the children down and at the same time become a symbolic transition from safe family life to camp tragedy.