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‘Why did I survive when so many others did not?’

Otto was just nine years old when his family was captured in Berlin. All around him, Sinti and Roma families were being torn from their homes and broken up, many of them disappearing altogether.

When Otto arrived in Auschwitz, he, as so many others, suffered unimaginable humiliation and suffering, and witnessed horrific violence and dehumanisation of his fellow Sinti. He had a brush with Dr Mengele, got caught up in a riot and nearly lost his life an astonishing number of times. Somehow though, through luck, sheer human will to live, or both, he survived.

Deeply moving and unforgettable, A Gypsy in Auschwitz is the incredible true story of how a young Gypsy boy miraculously survived the unimaginable darkness of the Holocaust.

Review: This is Otto’s story of his time in the run up to, during and after the war. There aren’t that many books I have come across with regards to gypsies and how they were treated in the camps so I wanted to read it.

It is very saddening that there was so much prejudice for anyone who was “different” to Hitler’s ideal race. Otto had a big family with his mother and father splitting up and having children with different partners. So many of them lost their lives and whilst that wasn’t Otto’s doing, he very clearly suffered with survivor’s guilt that he made it and so many of his family and friends didn’t. You get a real sense of what Otto was like as a person and in the main, many seemed to like him and whilst he fell on his feet in getting certain jobs in the camps, he far from had it easy. He endured beatings as well as seeing things no human should ever have to see. It is no wonder he found it hard to talk about that time for so many years.

Whilst overall Otto’s story is simplistic in its telling, I did find parts confusing as he would be talking about his mother where she would be dead and then literally not much further on he would mention her again but she would be alive. It seems to be that he has written things down as they came to him but some haven’t been put in any type of order. Other than that this is an emotional and fairly quick read. It is a hard-hitting story through the eyes of Otto and one that needs to be learned if we ever want to live in peace.

Otto Rosenberg was born in East Prussia in 1927 and grew up in Berlin. He was 9 when he was sent to the Roma and Sinti camp in Marzahn, ahead of the 1936 Olympic Games, and 16 when he was sent to Auschwitz. He was then detained in Buchenwald and Bergen-Belsen concentration camps before being freed in 1945. In later years, Rosenberg was the chairman of the Regional Association of German Sinti and Romanies Berlin-Brandenburgand fathered seven children. He passed away in 2001.

The Holocaust,known in Hebrew as the Shoah, was the genocide of European Jews during World War II. From 1941 to 1945, Nazi Germany and its collaborators systematically murdered around six million Jews across German-occupied Europe, approximately two-thirds of Europe’s Jewish population. The murders were committed primarily through mass shootings across Eastern Europe and poison gas chambers in extermination camps, chiefly Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, Belzec, Sobibor, Chełmno and Majdanek death camps in occupied Poland. Concurrent Nazi persecutions killed millions of other non-Jewish civilians and prisoners of war (POWs); the term Holocaust is sometimes used to include the murder and persecution of non-Jewish groups, such as the Romani and Soviet POWs.

The Nazis developed their ideology based on racism and pursuit of “living space”, and seized power in early 1933. Meant to force all German Jews to emigrate, regardless of means, the regime passed anti-Jewish laws, encouraged violence, and orchestrated a nationwide pogrom known as Kristallnacht in November 1938. After Germany’s invasion of Poland in September 1939, occupation authorities began to establish ghettos to segregate Jews. Following the June 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union, 1.5 to 2 million Jews were murdered by German forces and local collaborators. The Nazis first targeted Jewish Red Army POWs and male civilians, but quickly escalated to murdering Jewish women and children.

By early 1942, following the Wannsee Conference presided by Reinhard Heydrich, the Nazis’ Final Solution was implemented to murder all Jews in Europe. Some historians note that Adolf Hitler frequently communicated major policy decisions verbally to Heinrich Himmler rather than through written directives. Victims were deported to extermination camps where those who had survived the trip were gassed, while others were sent to forced labor camps where many died from starvation, abuse, exhaustion, or being used as test subjects in experiments. Property belonging to murdered Jews was redistributed to the German occupiers and other non-Jews. The murder rate was most intense during Operation Reinhard from March 1942 to November 1943. Although the majority of Holocaust victims died in 1942, the mass murders continued until the end of the war in 1945.

Many Jewish survivors emigrated from Europe after the war. A few Holocaust perpetrators faced criminal trials. Billions of dollars in reparations have been paid, although falling short of the losses suffered by the European Jews. The Holocaust has also been commemorated in museums, memorials, and culture. It is considered to be the single deadliest genocide in human history, and has become central to Western historical consciousness as a symbol of the ultimate human evil.