Christian Pfeil says ‘it’s important to remind society again and again that this actually happened’, especially at a time when right-wing extremism is growing across Europe. Holocaust survivor Christian Pfeil (80) came to Dublin this week. He was born in Lublin in Poland in January 1944. His family are Sinti, a Romani people. The entire family were deported from Trier in Germany to camps in German-occupied Poland in 1940. He spoke at Never Again: Recognition, Remembrance and Reflection on the Roma Genocide, an event held by Pavee Point Traveller and Roma Centre at the Mansion House on Wednesday. At least 500,000 Roma and Sinti people were killed by the Nazi regime (many historians consider this an underestimate) but they were not represented at the Nuremburg trials and Germany only officially recognised this genocide in 1982. It is often referred to as “the forgotten genocide”. Some Roma people call it “the Porajmos”, which means “the devouring”. (…) Anti-Roma and anti-Sinti persecution persisted after the war. It was a fact of life for Pfeil throughout his life, he says. To make matters worse, the trauma his family experienced wasn’t recognised. “Whenever someone talked about the Holocaust, it was always about Jewish victims, never about the experiences of Roma and Sinti, which made me quite angry. I knew how many people died, how many people were killed in the gas chambers. I knew the facts. I saw a lot of anti-Sinti, anti-Roma, prejudice and racism in Germany when I was growing up. And obviously those things are linked to what happened. German society wanted as fast as possible to both forget and to deny the Nazi period … And they, of course, didn’t want to hear about the Sinti and Roma during the Holocaust. Even though I am pretty sure that they know.”
via irish times: A Romani survivor of Nazi terror: ‘Young people, babies, infants, were beaten to death’