Otto Rosenberg

Sinti, Rom-families, WW2, Germany, holocaust, nonfiction, memoir, memories, prison, family, survivors, 1930s, kindness, photos, victimization, survival, survivor's-guilt, genocide, historical-figures, historical-places-events, historical-setting, history-and-culture, personal-abasement, PTSD *****

From family fun in a Gypsy camp in Germany to survival in a Berlin labor camp to Auschwitz at age 15 to Buchenwald and later Bergen-Belsen, Otto tells his personal story of great loss and heartless privation in a matter-of-fact way to Ulrich Enzenberger (with translation by Maisie Musgrave). The German racial cleansing program started earlier than war, and there are only rare accounts for the deaths of the many Roma, Sinti, homosexual or other non-desirable minorities.
His narrative goes on, including much of his life after the end of the war (he lived 1927-2001) and his work toward establishing civil rights and holocaust recognition for the Sinti and Roma people.
His daughter, Petra, adds more to his story after the war in an epilogue and provides meaningful endnotes.
I requested and received a free e-book copy from Octopus Publishing US/Monoray via NetGalley. Thank you!
NEVER AGAIN… (más)

This book, the portuguese translation of the german original Das Brennglas, is a rare first hand testimony of the life of a german gipsy under the Nazi regime. The author, born in 1927, was not only very young at the time of the events he describes, but was also quite poor and had only had a very basic education. So this book is certainly not a kind of a gipsy Klemperer Diaries. Nevertheless it is a moving portrait of the life of a gipsy child and youth under the nazis, as he remembers it some five decades later. A life in an environment ever more thight and repressive; his emprisionment and deportation to Auschwitz in 1943; the life in the camp; the transfer to other camps in the final stages of the war, and a brief description of the imediate post-war years, with "the nazis seated behind the same desks where they had been seated before" (pg 115). Very short (126 pages) and with some twenty photographs, this book helps bring to the fore an almost forgotten aspect of the holocaust that should be more often remembered.… (más)