Toby Sonneman - Shared Sorrows: A Gypsy Family Remembers the Holocaust

Our ashes were mingled in the ovens

First published in Great Britain in 2002 by

University of Hertfordshire Press

Learning and Information Services

University of Hertfordshire

College Lane

Hatfield

Hertfordshire al10 9ab

Toby Sonneman 2002

The right of Toby Sonneman to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from University of Hertfordshire Press.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication-Data.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 1 902806 10 7

The symbol on the frontispiece is that of the Romany-Jewish Aliance (copyright Ian Hancock)

Front cover: Sophie Hllenreiner with her children in happier times with a picture of one of the womens barracks at Auschwitz

Back cover left: Rosa Mettbach in foreground with figures from the past, her sisiter who died at Chelmo and sister-in-law who died at Auschwitz

Back cover right: Toby Sonneman in foreground with her father as a young man and great aunt Else Sonneman, shot by the Einsatzkommando in Lithuania

Design by Geoff Green, Cambridge CB4 5RA.

Cover design by John Robertshaw, Harpenden al5 2JB

Printed in Great Britain by J.W. Arrowsmith Ltd. Bristol BS3 2NT

Index

Map showing the location of places and camps mentioned in the book.

The family trees of Emilie and Augusta Mettbach

I t has been called the forgotten Holocaust the Nazi persecution of the Gypsies. Though tens of thousands of books have been written about the Holocaust, perhaps only a couple dozen have fully considered that Gypsies, along with Jews, were victims of Nazi crimes against humanity. And of those couple dozen books, most take a scholarly approach, an approach which is essential and valuable but is not intended for the lay reader.

Today, seventy years after Hitler came to power, few readers know much about what happened to Gypsies under the Nazis, though interest in the topic is strong. So many years after these events occurred, this story still has not been told fully, still has not been adequately recognized. And this lack of recognition impacts not only how we understand the past, but also how we see the present. Without full acknowledgment that Gypsies were victims of the Holocaust, too little attention is paid to the current situation in Europe where Gypsies are frequently victims of prejudice and racially-motivated mob attacks.

I have always believed that real recognition is dependent upon caring, and that, in turn, is dependent upon making a personal connection. Works of scholarship, which detail Nazi policies toward Gypsies or debate whether policies toward Gypsies and Jews differed in philosophy, approach their subject in a necessarily cool and objective light and readers rarely forge a personal connection. These works have given me a vital historical context for understanding what happened to the Gypsies under the Nazis, but scholarly debates, while undeniably important, were not of great importance to me as I wrote this book. Instead, my premise was caring about the people, and my intent was to tell a very human story, the story of a family of Gypsies in Germany and how they were affected by the Nazi tyranny.

The idea for this book was born of my lifelong interest in Gypsies a feeling of connection to this people so innate to me that I cant even remember its origin and my own identity as the Jewish child of a Holocaust survivor. I was raised on my fathers stories of his life in Germany, before and during the Nazi rise to power, and of his escape from Germany to America.

I am steeped in my fathers stories, my personal history lesson. Long before I knew what Kristallnacht was, my father told me how he and his family hid in the attic on that night of destruction that marked the violent beginning of the Holocaust and how he walked the next morning through shards of broken glass and smoldering rubble for his long-awaited appointment at the American Consulate. Long before I understood why Jews were persecuted in Nazi Germany, I learned how my father had lost his job because of Nazi laws; how his aunts and uncles and cousin had been murdered in concentration camps; why he had decided to flee his homeland. And long before I understood the complexities of friendship and betrayal, I heard the story of how my fathers best friend had joined the Nazi Party and warned him, time and time again, to get out, telling him, Were going to bury the Jews.

Though I wasnt always eager to hear these stories when I was a child, as an adult I have grown to value them more and more. I find they have taught me truths about a time and a place that I would never have understood from history books. For example, from my fathers stories, I knew about the paradoxes of the Nazi government which, in 1933, forbade all youth organizations save for the Hitler Youth, yet issued my father a permit to be a qualified leader of the Jewish youth movement. I learned about the contradictions of a government that, in 1936, caused my father to lose his job because he was Jewish, yet immediately granted him unemployment compensation. I heard about my grandmothers sister, who was protected from Nazi anti-Semitic measures because she was married to a non-Jew from an important family; she was allowed to live freely in Germany while her siblings fled to America or were murdered by the Nazis.

As my father told me these real personal stories, including the paradoxes and contradictions of the time, I gained a view that predisposed me to understand something essential about the stories of Gypsy survivors too for the Nazi policies toward Gypsies were sometimes inconsistent or contradictory as well. In human terms, these contradictions didnt lessen the suffering, or the crime. The Nazis committed murder when they sent my great-aunt Frieda to the gas chamber in Auschwitz, and it was no less a crime because they had spared her sister, Rahel. Similarly, the Nazi crime against the Gypsy people could not be mitigated because some Gypsies had been spared.

If my fathers stories nurtured a kind of familiarity with Germany and the Holocaust, as well as encouraged a particular way of seeing history, it was my meeting with Reili Mettbach Herchmer that gave this idea its root and brought it to fruition. Reili was born a Sinti Gypsy in Germany in 1931 and had spent her childhood in hiding, on the run and in a concentration camp due to Hitlers racial policies toward Gypsies. The Nazis deprived her of education: at liberation, she was fourteen years old and had only two years of schooling. Her literacy skills were minimal but she knew she had an important story to tell and she felt strongly about telling it. People should know what the Nazis did to the Gypsies, just like the Jews, she said.