In 1944 when I was just an eight year old girl, I was taken from my home in Hamburg and deported to the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp. Since my biological mother was a Sintiza the Nazis considered me a gypsy and imprisoned me together with thousands of other Sinti and Roma in the so called gypsy camp. Almost ninety per cent of a total of 23,000 inmates at the ‘gypsy camp’ were murdered.
Horrible as it was -- the extermination camp Auschwitz was just one site of the genocide committed against Sinti and Roma. All over Nazi occupied Europe Sinti and Roma were murdered in camps or shot by execution squads. Today we know that around 500.000 Sinti and Roma became victims of a campaign of systematic extermination.
In Auschwitz I witnessed mass murder. There were long cues of people in front of the mass murder facilities like the gas chambers and crematoria which were not far from our camp's electrified fences. And then the ear splitting screams started. Orders to stay inside our barracks with doors locked were disobeyed. And we saw a large area of open fires blazing. I as an 8 year old girl overheard adult conversations like; they must have run out of gas and are burning people alive now.
You might be interested to know, that only 6 months ago I was here at the Auschwitz memorial commemorating an event that took place there on the 2nd of August 1944. Almost 4.300 men, women and children from our camp; after one of those Nazi selection processes, were condemned to be murdered that very night. I was among those the Nazis selected to be put into cattle trains and to be transported to Ravensbrück concentration camp.
Even today it is extremely difficult for me to come back to the place of the former concentration camp Auschwitz. I experienced first hand the effects of Antigypsyism, Antisemitism and Racism. I myself survived Auschwitz through sheer luck and the selfless acts of some of my fellow inmates.
For decades after 1945 the genocide committed against Sinti and Roma was largely ignored. It took a private initiative by Vinzenz Rose, one of the early activists of the Sinti and Roma civil rights movement, to erect a modest memorial on the site of the former camp to commemorate the Sinti and Roma murdered at Auschwitz. Today it is the setting for memorial services like the one I attended last August.
Those that were murdered and those that survived the camps must never be forgotten. Hopefully this memorial site and museum will remain here for many years to come as a warning to people not to let racism and insane ideologies, backed by wrong sciences like for example, Eugenics, gain power again.