Forming the backbone of this exhibition are testimonies from victims and survivors. During the 1950s, researchers at The Wiener Library gathered over 1,000 accounts from witnesses to Nazi persecution and genocide, which included a number of testimonies from Roma and Sinti survivors. The Library also has possession of the Kenrick Collection, which contains a wealth of material relating to the persecution of the Roma and Sinti under the Nazis, collected and compiled in 1968.
Both of these collections sought to gather and preserve testimonies from the marginalised Roma and Sinti people soon after the end of the Second World War. The Library is committed to ensuring that the suffering and injustices that these communities suffered are not forgotten. These unique collections are available for users to access digitally in the Library’s Wolfson Reading Room.
The exhibition tells the stories of a number of individuals, including Margarethe Kraus. Margarethe was originally from Czechoslovakia but, along with her family, she was deported to Auschwitz sometime in 1943, when she was just a teenage. Whilst imprisoned in the concentration camp she was forced to endure maltreatment and extreme privations, and she contracted typhus. Margarethe was also subjected to medical experiments in Auschwitz. Her parents did not survive the Holocaust. In this photograph, taken by Reimar Gilsenbach in the 1960s in East Germany, her Auschwitz camp number tattoo is visible on her left forearm.
Other documents on display from the Library’s collections include this translation from the Nuremburg War Crimes trial. In this document, written during the later stages of the war, Heinrich Himmler, Head of the SS, notes that the measures taken within the German Reich against “Poles, Jews and Gypsies” have caused these groups to be presented as equivalent “in the public eye”. Himmler states that “the accomplished evacuation and isolation” of Jews and Gypsies means that directives against them are no longer necessary. “Evacuation” and “isolation” in this context meant that the vast majority of Jews, Sinti and Roma from greater Germany had by this point been deported to ghettos and camps and murdered.
The Wiener Holocaust Library is one of the world’s leading and most extensive archives on the Holocaust and Nazi era. Formed in 1933, the Library’s unique collection of over one million items includes published and unpublished works, press cuttings, photographs and eyewitness testimony. The Library provides a resource to oppose antisemitism and other forms of prejudice and intolerance by being a living memorial to the evils of the past.
Forgotten Victims: The Genocide of the Roma and Sinti will run from the 30th October 2019 until 11th March 2020. Admission is free. Open from Mon-Fri 10.00 – 17.30, Tues 10.00 – 19.30. For more information on The Wiener Library, and where to find them, visit their website.
Margarete Kraus, a Czech Roma, photographed after the war by Reimar Gilsenbach.