Why a street in Berlin was named after the son of a gypsy merchant and fortune teller

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

What is it like to live with the knowledge that only you survived from the whole family? Asking yourself why you are alive, waking up at night from nightmares. Only half a century after the horror he experienced, Otto Rosenberg, the son of a gypsy dealer and fortune-teller, decided to tell the world his story, looking at the path he had traveled as if through a magnifying glass.

The fascist genocide - one of the darkest pages in the recent history of the Roma - remained unrecognized for several decades. Despite the fact that in a number of countries the fascists destroyed up to 90% of the Roma population, the Roma did not testify at the Nuremberg trials and for a long time were not included by Germany in the reparation scheme. In 1950, during a hearing on restitution payments, the Württemberg Ministry of the Interior stated that "the Roma were persecuted not for any reason of race, but because of their criminal and antisocial inclinations." Researchers assign the most important role in the struggle for public recognition of the genocide of European Roma and creating a niche for them in German history to Roma memoirists and activists in Germany and Austria, among whom was one of the founders and chairman of the National Association of German Sinti and Roma, a former prisoner of concentration camps Otto Rosenberg.

We were all one big family

Rosenberg belonged to a gypsy family known in Germany since the 15th century. He was born in 1927 in East Prussia, in the territory that now belongs to the Kaliningrad region. The Rosenbergs lived in poverty that did not weigh on them. My father was a young lady with horses. Mother kept house, went to fortune-telling. From the age of two, Otto grew up with his grandmother in a gypsy ghetto near Berlin. He recalls living on leased plots of land that his family shared with the vans and homes of other members of the Sinti community: “We were all one big family here. Everyone knew each other. Women wondered, men wove baskets and furniture from the wilderness, planed wooden nails. All of this was later banned. Otto's mother's family was highly respected among the Sinti. The grandmother's brothers were literate, they read books. They built chapels and could decorate a whole camp of wagons with an ax and a knife with a vine.

In the 1930s, Roma and Sinti people in Germany and across Europe faced prejudice and discrimination. Otto was no exception, especially at school.

In 1936, the capital of the Third Reich hosted the XI Summer Olympic Games. Regular police raids against Roma began in Berlin and its environs under the pretext of fighting petty crime. During the next roundup, Otto was among several hundred arrested. In the summer of the same year, he, along with other Roma, was placed under police surveillance in the Berlin-Marzahn concentration camp, on the eastern outskirts of the city next to the cemetery. Sinti tried to adapt to life in a new place and follow the orders of the authorities. The adults worked, the children went to school and church. Here Otto, along with other prisoners, is examined by the "specialists" of the Research Center for Racial Hygiene.

Magnifying glass

In 1940, Rosenberg was mobilized to a military plant that produces shells for submarines. At first he liked the job, but in the spring of 1942 his ration was cut and he was forbidden to sit with the rest of the workers at breakfast. Someone felt sorry for the boy who was forced to have breakfast on a pile of firewood in the yard, someone didn't care. Once, holding up a magnifying glass he found, Otto was arrested on an unjust charge of sabotage and theft of Wehrmacht property. The boy was sent to Moabit prison, where he spent four months without trial. Later, it was this incident that gave the name to the book of his memoirs - "Magnifying Glass", published in 1998 and translated into several European languages (in English the book was published under the title "Gypsy in Auschwitz"),

A relative who visited Otto in prison said that his family had been transferred to Auschwitz. At the trial, Rosenberg was found guilty, but released after the expiration of his sentence. As soon as he left the gates of the prison, he was again arrested. And shortly before his 16th birthday he ended up in Auschwitz.

Corpses were part of our everyday life

From the first steps, Otto was faced with a "brilliant" organization of camp work. The sorted prisoners were examined by a doctor. Otto was told to roll up his sleeve, and a Pole named Bogdan tattooed the number Z 6084 on his wrist. A few days later, the young man was transferred to the gypsy camp Auschwitz-Birkenau, where many of his relatives were kept.

Otto started working in a bathhouse. While the SS men swam, he cleaned their shoes, including the infamous Dr. Mengele. For Rosenberg, the Angel of Death was a handsome and smiling man who once left him a pack of cigarettes. However, even then he knew that Mengele was conducting some kind of experiments, extracting organs from prisoners.

Daily life in the camp was unimaginable: beatings, deprivation, labor, illness and death. “I don’t know if I could have easily walked past the mountain of corpses today,” Rosenberg wrote, “but in Birkenau I’m used to it. Corpses were part of our everyday life. " The most terrible thing was the loss of human appearance: “People lose compassion for others. All that remains is to kick, beat and take away in order to survive. And when at the very end you take a closer look at a person, as I did, you will no longer see people, but animals, they have a facial expression that cannot be determined."

On May 16, 1944, the so-called Roma Uprising took place in Auschwitz. This date went down in history as the Day of the Roma Resistance. On that day, the Nazis planned to liquidate the "Gypsy family camp". However, the warned prisoners barricaded themselves in the barracks, armed with stones and stakes. The inmates' desperate attempt to save lives had an effect. The SS men retreated. The destruction action was suspended. After the uprising, the prisoners were sorted out. The most able-bodied were transferred to other camps, which subsequently saved the lives of many of them.

On August 2, 1944, Otto and about 1.5 people were loaded onto a train that went to Buchenwald. On the same evening, the "Gypsy family camp" was liquidated, 2897 people - women, children and the elderly - died in the gas chambers. European gypsies remember this event as Kali Thrash (Black Horror).

Most of Otto's family also perished: father, grandmother, ten brothers and sisters. Rosenberg himself managed to survive not only Auschwitz, but also imprisonment in the camps Buchenwald, Dora-Mittelbau, Bergen-Belsen, liberated by British troops in 1945. After his release, Otto ended up in the hospital and after a few weeks felt the same strength in himself. The fear receded. He looked around and found himself alive and safe.

Life after

Otto could not find an answer to the question of why he survived. The long-awaited freedom did not bring happiness. He missed his brothers and sisters and had nightmares. The melancholy intensified on holidays, when other families gathered together, and did not leave him for the rest of his life. Having grown a little stronger, Otto returned to Berlin in search of family, friends and what could be called home. Over time, he found his aunt and mother, who were in Ravensbrück. Having joined the work to rebuild the city, he slowly began to rebuild his life.

After the war, Rosenberg would pursue a career in politics. In 1970, he founded what is now known as the National Association of German Sinti and Roma in Berlin-Brandenburg, which he led until his death.

Rosenberg was a member of the Social Democratic Party of Germany, took part in public events, solving historical and political issues. Fought tirelessly for social equality for the Roma and their recognition as victims of National Socialism. In numerous interviews with witnesses of fascist crimes and in public discussions, Rosenberg called on society to rethink the events of the Second World War. And the fact that in 1982 West Germany finally officially recognized the Roma genocide is largely due to him.

In 1998, his book was published, in which Shinto "does not blame, does not report, does not bill", but tells about his life. In the same year, Rosenberg was awarded the 1st Class Cross of the Order of Merit for the Federal Republic of Germany for his outstanding contribution to the establishment of "understanding between the minority and the majority".

In February 2001, the already seriously ill Rosenberg participated in writing an article about the gypsy prisoners of the Maxglan transit camp, mobilized as extras for Leni Riefenstahl's film "The Valley". After the success of "Triumph of the Will" and "Olympia" Riefenstahl was not limited in funds. A costume painting on a Spanish theme was funded from the defense budget. The director personally selected the extras under the supervision of the SS. There is evidence that people who had hoped for a possible release turned to Riefenstahl for help, but the lady, carried away by the creative process, limited herself to promises. Most of the participants in those filming died in the camp. Later, Riefenstahl shared that she had a "special love for the Gypsies" … In the black-and-white shots of "The Valley" Otto recognized his uncle Balthasar Kretzmer, who had been deported to Auschwitz at the age of 52, from where he never returned.

Otto Rosenberg street

Despite many years of efforts, Otto Rosenberg never succeeded in erecting a memorial on the site of the Marzahn gypsy camp and opening a monument to European gypsies killed by the Nazis. He died on 4 July 2001 in Berlin.

And since December 2007, on the initiative of his daughter Petra Rosenberg, who headed the regional association of Roma, the street and square in the area where the Berlin-Marzahn concentration camp was once located have been named after Otto Rosenberg. Since 2011, a permanent exhibition has been organized here.