'We had the same pain' (Gypsies and the Holocaust)

[IndianaGreen]

Jews were not the only ones that the Nazis wanted to exterminate. Gypsies, homosexuals, and the physical and mentally impaired were also targets of the Holocaust.

'We had the same pain'

Most people know about the millions of Jews murdered in Hitler's death camps; less is known about the 500,000 Gypsies who also died. Walter Winter is determined that this must change

Emma Brockes
Monday November 29, 2004
The Guardian

For many years, Walter Winter did not speak of the events that took place in his life between the ages of 20 and 25. After the war he put his head down and worked: in his family's funfair business and on the business of marriage, to Marion, with whom he raised six children in the corner of north-east Germany where the Winters had lived for as long as he could remember. At 84, he lives there still. "We are tough," he says, referring to his storm-battered family and, more generally, to the race to which it belongs. "We are tough because we have had to be."
Herr Winter and his wife live in a flat decorated with reminders of a world that has long since ceased to exist. There is a grandfather clock and a case displaying a china tea-set and, mounted on the wall, a violin surrounded by paintings of Roma scenes of yore: old-fashioned tubular caravans with horses out front and children tumbling over each other on the steps at the back. This way of life was still just about in evidence when Winter grew up, one of nine children, in the years before what he calls "the forgotten Holocaust". In 1943, Winter and two of his siblings were transported to the "Gypsy" camp at Auschwitz. His sister Maria's eight-year-old twin daughters died at the hands of Josef Mengele; Winter's wife, Anna, whom he met in the camp, and their new-born baby died after being transported to Ravensbruck. His brother Erich was sterilised.

"They want it to be forgotten," he says. "Ja. There is a tradition of persecuting the Sinti. Always, always."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/secondworldwar/story/0,14058,1361751,00.html

[cavanaghjam]

1. You can also include

union leaders, at least those who didn't want to "go along to get along."

[Maeve]

2. Thank you for posting this

More than half of the German-occupied territory Roma were killed--a horrible lose for a culture that was always "fringe".

I'll have to see if his book is available here in the states.

on edit--Amazon has it scheduled for release this month