Auschwitz survivor's testimony is a valuable resource on the history of Romani victims of the Holocaust

No Romani prisoners were liberated on 27 January 1945, though. More than 4,000 of them had been sent to the gas chambers several months prior, at the beginning of August 1944.

That event was the horrific culmination of the Nazis’ “Final Solution to the Gypsy Question”, which cost several hundreds of thousands of Romani people their lives in Europe. The testimony of survivor Tadeusz Joachimowski brings us closer to the history and tragic fate of the prisoners in the “Gypsy Family Camp“.

In the Czech Republic, 27 January has been the Day of Remembrance of Holocaust Victims and Prevention of Crimes Against Humanity since 2004. In 2005, 27 January was declared International Holocaust Remembrance Day by the United Nations.

In the year 1960, the Polish historian and researcher Danuta Czech met with Tadeusz Joachimowski, a Holocaust survivor who had been imprisoned in the Auschwitz II-Birkenau concentration camp, to record his testimony at what was by then the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum. His testimony was archived there and a Czech translation of it was published in 2022 in the Romano džaniben journal of Romani Studies, Charles University.

Joachimowski was born on 25 June 1908 in Znin, Poland. At the close of the year 1940 he was forcibly taken to the Auschwitz Concentration Camp as a political prisoner, and as of March 1943 he became the clerk processing the list of prisoners in the “Gypsy Family Camp” operating in the Birkenau section labeled B IIe from the spring of 1943 until the summer of 1944.

According to Joachimowski’s testimony, he also played an important role in the uprising in the “Gypsy Family Camp” on 16 May 1944. Just before that part of Auschwitz-Birkenau was demolished in July 1944, he managed to steal and thereby conserve its two main lists of prisoners; together with Ireneusz Pietrzyk and Henryk Porebski, he wrapped them up in pieces of men’s clothing and stored them in a zinc bucket with a wooden cover.

The bucket with the books was then buried by these three prisoners on the grounds of the “Gypsy Family Camp” near the fence. On 13 January 1949 they dug it up.

The books were quite wet, so their first few pages had been damaged and were illegible. However, they are still a very essential information source on the Roma and Sinti imprisoned at Auschwitz II-Birkenau.

The prisoner list is incomplete and cannot be considered an absolutely exact information source, as due to the state of its preservation, the records on the first people imprisoned at the “Gypsy Family Camp” are illegible, and they also do not include the approximately 1,700 Polish Roma from Białystok who were never on the camp’s prisoner list because they were sent straight to the gas chamber upon arrival on suspicion of being infected with typhoid. Joachimowski said that as of March 1940 he was transferred to the “Gypsy Family Camp” at Birkenau, where he was tasked with creating a list of the Roma and Sinti prisoners.

There were more than 10,000 Roma and Sinti, including children and women, imprisoned. Joachimowski and another clerk completed the list of the Roma and Sinti prisoners within three days: “We began work every day after the morning roll call and ended after the evening roll call, i.e., before 17:00. We undertook the survey gradually, housing bloc by housing bloc. We were working outside. We had tables where we sat to write the lists and we moved them from one housing bloc to the next. All the Gypsies, except those from Białystok, stood out in front of their housing blocs from the morning roll call until the evening one.”

The official books recorded names, surnames, birthdates, professions, and where the Roma or Sinti prisoners were from. They also recorded their camp numbers, which began with the letter Z for Zigeuner (in Germany, “Gypsy”) and were tattooed on the left forearm of each prisoner.

Joachimowski also testified as to the fate of the Białystok Roma: On the third day after his own arrival, all of the children, men and women from Blocs 20 and 22 were supposedly taken “for delousing”. In reality, they were taken to the gas chambers and gassed to death.

Those prisoners were never listed anywhere or given camp numbers. Joachimowski also briefly testified as to how the “Gypsy Family Camp” looked and operated.

There were a total of 38 barracks on both sides of the street. Prisoners were housed in 32 of them.

There were also buildings in the camp with lavatories, toilets, and what was called the “sauna”, a room where prisoners were brought upon arriving at the camp and forced to strip, undergo disinfection, be tattooed and registered. It has been generally described as the location of the prisoners’ dehumanization.

There were also two kitchens in the camp. Because there were about 11,000 children imprisoned there during the course of its existence, of which approximately 9,500 were under 15, Josef Mengele ordered the establishment of a day care facility in that section where parents were forced to leave their children during the day so they could go to work.

Mengele performed his pseudo-medical experiments on these children in particular. The catastrophic hygienic conditions there soon led to the spread of infectious diseases, including typhoid.

Bloc No. 29 was designated for nursing infants. Approximately 378 children were born in the “Gypsy Family Camp” during its existence.

Joachimowski also said the camp guards frequently stole the groceries intended for those children. The most essential part of his testimony, though, is his description of the events around the demolition of the “Gypsy Family Camp” in 1944.

He first described the uprising in the “Gypsy Family Camp”: “On 15 May 1944, he told me things looked bad for the gypsy camp . The decision had been made to demolish the gypsy camp. Through Dr. Mengele, the order had come from the political department to gas to death all the Gypsies who were still living. There were about 6,500 Gypsies in the camp at the time. [Lagerführer – Camp Commander] Bonigut ordered me to inform the Gypsies whom I fully trusted of this decision. He asked me to warn them ‘not to let themselves be slaughtered like sheep’. He also told me that the signal for starting the action would be the ‘Lagersperre’ [a gong announcing lockdown] and that the Gypsies must not leave their barracks.”

Joachimowski then described how he secretly carried out the task that had been entrusted to him. On the next day, 16 May 1944, “The SS surrounded the Gypsy barracks. Several SS men entered one of the barracks shouting ‘Los, los!’ [Come on!] The barracks were absolutely silent. Inside there was an assembly of Gypsies armed with knives, shovels, pieces of iron, crowbars and rocks, waiting to see how the situation developed. They did not leave the barracks. The SS men were overwhelmed. They left the barracks. After a brief consultation, they went to the ‘Blockführerstube’ [bloc leader’s office] to see the commander of the operation. After some time, I heard the whistle. The SS men who had surrounded the barracks left their places, got into their cars, and drove off. The ‘Lagersperre’ was rescinded. The next day (17 May 1944) Lagerführer Bonigut told me the Gypsies had been saved for now.“

Joachimowski then described how on 2 August 1944 a long cargo train was parked at the railway ramp. The Roma and Sinti who had been designated through the survey for transport to the Buchenwald and Ravensbrück concentration camps were assembled by the train and said goodbye through the fence to those remaining in the camp.

He described the heart-rending farewells and how some prisoners threw themselves onto the barbed wire. “When almost all the Gypsies had been ‘stuffed’ into the cargo wagons parked at the ramp, Dr. Mengele rushed into the Gypsy Family Camp shouting and ordering the prison functionaries to get away from the fence so the Gypsies could say goodbye to each other. The entire scene, from the parking of the train at the ramp to the appearance of Dr. Mengele, was expediently, flamboyantly performed. It was meant to calm the Gypsies left in the camp and to convince them that they, too, would be sent to a labor camp.”

At about 19:00, the train drove off and the guards prepared the final destruction of the Roma and Sinti in the camp. Members of the Sonderkommando [work units made up of German Nazi death camp prisoners] entered the housing blocs and drove all the prisoners out.

Joachimowski and others were tasked with counting each prisoner again: “The Gypsies understood they would be taken away to the gas chambers, where they would be gassed to death. They were unable to actively resist, however, because most of them were children, elders, and women. They left their barracks shouting, weeping and wailing. […] The Gypsies were pushed out of the Gypsy Family Camp and driven into the gas chambers, where they were gassed to death that night.”

The counts of the prisoners were then compared, but they were unable to produce a final number. Today experts are of the opinion that more than 4,200 prisoners died that night in the gas chambers, most of them children, elders, and women.

Joachimowski also described how Mengele ordered a Romani woman to be gassed who had been hidden by a Kapo on that fateful night, and how he removed Romani children who were twins ahead of time so they would not be sent to the gas chambers and he could perform his experiments on them: “The children were not received [author’s note: at the Auschwitz I Concentration Camp], so he drove them back and shot them to death in the gas chamber himself. He then performed autopsies on them that had the ‘character of scientific research’.“

Joachimowski’s testimony represents a unique, very valuable source of information on the fates of the prisoners of the “Gypsy Family Camp” and on this history. Vlasta Kladivová used this information when writing her book Poslední stanice Auschwitz [“Last Stop, Auschwitz”] and Ctibor Nečas cites it in his research into the fates of the Romani prisoners at the Auschwitz Concentration Camp.

The author is an historian at the Museum of Romani Culture, Brno, Czech Republic.