"We're not coming out!" Prisoners in the "Gypsy Family Camp" in Auschwitz defied SS units. We remember Romani Resistance Day!
Today we remember Romani Resistance Day in memory of the prisoner uprising in the "Gypsy Family Camp" in Auschwitz by Romani prisoners who refused to voluntarily go to their deaths. While the uprising was first said to have happened on 16 May 1944, a 2018 study by the Polish historians Helen Kubicova and Piotr Setkiewicz has since pointed out that it could have transpired even a month earlier under different circumstances.
The dispute over the exact date does not change the fact that this was an exceptional event which we should remember. The Roma were not just passive victims of Nazi wrongdoing, but like many others, they frequently fought back.
What happened in Auschwitz in the spring of 1944? In the year 2015, historian Michal Schuster described the events in detail for news server Romea.cz:
“The Gypsy Family Camp” in the Auschwitz II-Birkenau Concentration Camp in 1944
The year 1944 can be called, with some simplification, the closing phase of what was called the “Final Solution to the Gypsy Question” in Nazi-occupied Europe and therefore also on the territory of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. After forcibly transporting all Roma in their custody to the Auschwitz complex during 1943, smaller such transports followed during 1944.
On 16 May 1944 the first attempt was made to “liquidate” the so-called “Gypsy Family Camp” in Auschwitz II-Birkenau, but it was prevented by an uprising of the prisoners. The next attempt, however, was successful in August 1944 and the prisoners were murdered.
The first attempt to liquidate the “Gypsy Family Camp” and the Romani prisoners’ subsequent uprising
Auschwitz commander Rudolf Höss ordered the acceleration in early 1944 of the work underway in part of Birkenau, chiefly, the construction of the ramps and rails of the three-track branch line off of the line from Auschwitz to Katowice; the branch line led to Crematorium II and Crematorium III. The commander of all the crematoria, SS Otto Moll, had one week to arrange for the repair of all the crematoria, to finish construction of the buildings already underway, to begin construction of new ones, and to build several rooms for the disrobing of the prisoners, both next to the repaired Bunker II and behind Crematorium V.
The prisoners were forced to dig two enormous pits for the burning of the corpses. All the preparations were undertaken in order to murder a transport of Jewish prisoners from Hungary.
Accommodation space was needed for the new prisoners who would be considered able-bodied during the selection process, so the SS high command in the main camp decided on 15 May 1944 to murder all the inhabitants of the “Gypsy Family Camp”. That would free up all of Camp B-II-e to house more of the Jewish prisoners from Hungary.
What was meant to be the final operation with the Romani prisoners was to have been performed on the evening of 16 May 1944, when the banging of the gong announced that all prisoners were confined to barracks (a process called the Lagersperre) and the camp was closed. A truck was parked in front of the camp gate and 50-60 members of the SS special forces jumped out of it and called on the prisoners to evacuate the housing blocks at once.
However, inside the blocks a tense silence predominated as the prisoners refused to leave, barricading the doors and desperately preparing to defend themselves with rocks and work tools. The SS members were startled by this refusal to obey and their commander decided to postpone the operation.
Romani survivor Hugo Höllenreiner (born 1933 in Munich), who had been deported to the Auschwitz Concentration Camp with his family in 1943, recalled the uprising as follows: “There were definitely seven or eight men at the gate outside. Dad started shouting. The entire barracks trembled as he yelled: ‘We’re not coming out! You come in! We’re waiting for you here! If you want something, you have to come in!'”
The entire event was described in a report by a former Polish political prisoner in the Auschwitz Concentration Camp who was forced to work as a bureaucrat (a report writer) in the “Gypsy Family Camp”, Tadeusz Joachimowski:
The last commander of the gypsy camp and the Rapportführer was Bonigut. He probably came from Yugoslavia. He disagreed with the approach and tactics of the SS. He was a very good person..
On 15 May 1944 he came to tell me that things looked bad for the gypsy camp. There was an order instructing that the gypsy camp be liquidated and rumor had it that the corresponding directive had already been issued by the political department through Dr. Mengele. The gypsy camp was to be liquidated and its population killed with gas. At the time there were roughly 6,500 Gypsies in the camp. Bonigut entrusted me with informing those Gypsies whom I trusted completely. He asked me to warn them not to go down like sheep. He also told me the signal for the start of the operation would be the Lagersperre and that the Gypsies should stay in their barracks.
Bonigut himself warned several Gypsies of this. I also (secretly) performed the task I was given.
The next day at about seven in the evening I heard the gong announcing the Lagersperre. Cars drove up in front of the gypsy camp and 50 to 60 SS-men stepped out of them armed with machine guns.
The SS immediately surrounded the barracks housing the Gypsies. Some SS members entered the living spaces shouting “Los, los!” [Get going!]. The barracks were totally calm. The Gypsies, armed with knives, shovels, handcuffs, and rocks, waited to see what would happen. They did not leave the barracks. The SS members were dismayed. They came out of the barracks. After briefly consulting with each other, they went to the Blockführerstube to see the commander of the operation. After some time I heard whistling. The SS-men who had surrounded the barracks left their positions, got into the cars, and drove away. The closure of the camp had been called off.
The next day (17 May 1944) Lagerführer Bonigut came to tell me the Gypsies had been spared for now…
Although there was not an open clash between the Romani prisoners and the SS members, this incident played a significant role. It was decidedly not usual in the concentration camps for prisoners to resist en masse a planned, prepared operation just before it was to be performed.
There is absolutely no doubt that the armed SS units could have suppressed this act of resistance, but they decided not to go into an open confrontation and preferred to achieve their aims by other means. The incident unequivocally had the nature of an uprising and deserves a place of significance in the tragic history of the Holocaust of the European Roma.
At the time there were about 6,500 prisoners in the “Gypsy Family Camp” in Birkenau, half of whom were then quarantined in the main camp, some in late May and early June, others at the start of August 1944. There were Czech, German, and Polish prisoners among them.
The liquidation of the “Gypsy Family Camp” in Birkenau
About 10,000 women from Hungary were imprisoned in the odd-numbered blocks of the “Gypsy Family Camp” which had been evacuated, while the Romani prisoners moved to the side with even numbers. They were then moved to the back half of the camp when men from Hungary were imprisoned in the front half.
In July 1944, Himmler decided to liquidate what remained of the “Gypsy Family Camp”. On the morning of 1 August all able-bodied prisoners were meant to report for transport.
The next day, 2 August 1944, the final transports to the Buchenwald and Ravensbrück Concentration Camps were put together of able bodied prisoners, male and female, from the “Gypsy Family Camp”. There were 918 boys and men on the Buchenwald transports, 151 of whom were from the Protectorate.
In the Buchenwald Concentration Camp, the transports from Auschwitz almost doubled the number of Roma and Sinti prisoners. The Ravensbrück transports totalled 490 female prisoners.
It is not possible to establish where the female prisoners on those final transports to Ravensbrück came from. Women from the Protectorate were certainly among them, though.
The male and female prisoners left Birkenau for good on six labor transports because the “Gypsy Family Camp” was to be liquidated and the fate of the remaining prisoners had been decided. After they left, only the elderly, fathers and mothers with young children who didn’t want to leave their families, and orphans remained in the “Gypsy Family Camp”.
In the late night hours of 2 August and early morning hours of 3 August, the blocks were closed (Blocksperre) and 2,897 children, the elderly and infirm, and women were forced onto trucks and transported to the courtyard of Crematorium V. Their unexpected resistance had to broken by their captors there once more, after which they were herded into the gas chambers.
Those horrible moments were described by a member of the so-called Special Section (Sonderkommando) Filip Müller (born 1922 in Sereď, Czechoslovakia): “The room for disrobing was full of people around midnight. The alarm grew greater minute by minute… Desperate shouts could be heard from every side, lamentations, reproaches, accusations. A chorus of voices clamored: ‘We are Reich Germans! We haven’t done anything wrong!’ Elsewhere could be heard: ‘We want to live! Why do you want to kill us?’… The liquidation proceeded as usual. Moll and his assistants released the safeties of their pistols and rifles and uncompromisingly called on the people who had taken off their clothes to leave the disrobing room, and they moved into the three gas chambers. On that final journey many wept with desperation… Intermittent calls and screams from the gas chambers could be heard for a long time afterward until the gas did its work and smothered the last voices.”
The bodies of the murdered, which included many prisoners from the Protectorate, were then burned in pits near the crematorium, as it was not yet in operation. Camp commander Rudolf Höss also recalled the liquidation of the “Gypsy Family Camp” in his memoirs: “They didn’t know what was in store for them until the last moment; they only realized it when they were brought into Crematorium no. V. It was not easy to get them into the chambers. I didn’t see it myself, but Schwarzhuber told me that liquidating the Jews was never as difficult as liquidating the Gypsies was.”
During the operation, the camp doctor, Josef Mengele, shot to death the Romani twin boys on whom he had been experimenting so he could use them for autopsies. The girl Romani twins were transported to the Hindenburg sub-camp.
Irma Valdová-Krausová survived with two of her sisters thanks to that transport, as she later recalled: “That day Dr. Mengele came to the camp at 18:30 to take away the remaining twins, including my two sisters Anna and Alžběta. Of our entire large family, I was their only relative who didn’t want to part from them, no matter the price. In the confusion they loaded me into the car with the twins, which spared me certain death.”
The mass murder was followed by the brutal killing of the male and female Romani prisoners who were returned to Auschwitz-Birkenau after they were no longer able-bodied due to exhaustion; they were also gassed to death.
European Roma Holocaust Memorial Day
The year 1944 and its place in Romani history remains alive, and what is important is that these tragic events of the Holocaust of the Roma have finally been given a secure place in the history of Europe and of the world. The date of 2 August has been declared European Holocaust Memorial Day for Sinti and Roma and is an important state holiday in Poland, for instance.
Annually on 2 August a commemorative gathering takes place in the former camp at Birkenau where diplomats, European Romani organizations, local municipalities, ministries, the Polish Government, relatives of the former prisoners, survivors, and witnesses come together to honor this history.
