Germany and Its Gypsies: A Post-Auschwitz Ordeal, and: Shared Sorrows: A Gypsy Family Remembers the Holocaust (review)

Germany and Its Gypsies: A Post-Auschwitz Ordeal, Gilad Margalit (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002), xviii + 285 pp., cloth $45.00, pbk. $19.95.

Shared Sorrows: A Gypsy Family Remembers the Holocaust, Toby Sonneman (Hatfield, UK: University of Hertfordshire Press, 2002), vi + 283 pp., $19.95.

One controversy at the periphery of Holocaust studies involves the fate of the Roma, or Gypsies. While no one has questioned their victimization, the ideological basis of their persecution and their actual fate have still not been documented adequately. Gypsy activists have long promoted the idea that 500,000 to a million European Gypsies died during the Holocaust. To underscore the uniqueness of this tragedy, some have begun to use a Romani phrase, O Baro Porrajmos (the "great devouring" of the human race). Others have equated, at least in terms of percentages, the scope of Gypsy losses with Jewish losses.¹ Unfortunately, little serious historical research on this topic has appeared in English, at least until recently, to give us any sense of the numbers of Gypsies who lost their lives. And assertions by respected historians such as Henry Friedlander that the Gypsies, like the Jews, suffered "a final solution" have been challenged by Guenter Lewy, who argued in his controversial, prizewinning book, The Nazi Persecution of the Gypsies (2000), that while the Gypsies were persecuted by the Nazis, they were not victims of genocide as were the Jews.²

The reason for this controversy is the lack of adequate research in what should be a storehouse of information scattered in archives throughout Europe. Moreover, after the war, Gypsies were discouraged from filing compensation claims, a factor that has robbed us of the kinds of memoir accounts that have been so important in documenting the Jewish tragedy during the Holocaust. The two books under review should help put a more human face on what happened to the Gypsies during the Holocaust and open up new opportunities to research further their fate.

Any serious effort to document what happened to the Gypsies should begin in Germany. In Shared Sorrows, Toby Sonneman poignantly balances a touching account of the life of one extended German Gypsy family during and after the Holocaust with her own family's experiences during the Shoah. She is careful, though, not to let her personal story get in the way of this look into the lives of the Mettbach-Höllenreiner-Strossinger family.

For several years Sonneman worked with Ian Hancock, a prominent American Gypsy activist and scholar, to build bridges between the American Jewish and Gypsy communities. Over time, Sonneman realized that to better understand what happened to the Gypsies during the Holocaust she would need to talk to Gypsy survivors. Hancock put her in contact with Reili Mettbach Herchmer, a German Gypsy who lived in Denver, and over time, the two women became close friends. In 1993, they went to Munich for two weeks to talk with Herchmer's extended family, many of whom were Holocaust survivors.

These interviews are the basis of this well-written, sensitive collection of Gypsy Holocaust testimonies. In Germany and Its Gypsies, Gilad Margalit examines the problems centering on the "facelessness" of the Gypsy Holocaust discussion in postwar Germany. Sonneman puts a human face on the experiences of the Mettbach- Höllenreiner-Strossinger families during and after the Porrajmos. They are faces etched with painful memories of brutality, forced sterilization, and death.

Herchmer's extended family made a point of letting Sonneman know that they were Sinti, Gypsies who traced their German ancestry back to the fifteenth century. Sonneman was surprised and disappointed by the families' strong dislike of the Roma, the Central and East European Gypsies who had come to Germany in the nineteenth century. Such clan distinctions have traditionally been strong among European Gypsies, underscoring the fact that they should not be regarded as a monolithic group. Particularly between the Sinti and Roma in Germany, as Margalit has pointed out...