DEFENDING THE ROMANIES IN ROSTOCK

SUMMER 1992. THOUSANDS of Romanian and ex-Yugoslavian Romanies were at risk of being expelled by the Germans to Romania, where they were persecuted at the time, and to Serbia, which was ravaged by war. They were being unjustly denied their right to political asylum.

A conflict had arisen in the east of Germany, where the local government and the xenophobic public were readying themselves to strike at these people who, half a century earlier, had shared the fate of the Jewish people. If we, as the children of Jewish deportees, did not defend them, it would, we believed, be a desertion from the battlefield of memory.

Our association of Sons and Daughters made public its intention to protest in Rostock, where immigrants were being attacked in August and September 1992. Welcome centers were burned down, the police were reluctant to get involved, and most of the local population remained indifferent.

Together with a Romany delegation, we fixed a plaque to the façade of the city hall, commemorating the suffering of the Romanies and calling on Germany to put an end to its xenophobic brutality. Meanwhile, Arno led a group of young people inside the building and hung a banner from the Christian Democrats’ window, reading: KEIN ANSWEISUNG DER ROMA AUS DEUTSCHLAND (No to the deportation of Romanies from Germany).

This was the first Jewish gathering in Rostock since Kristallnacht. Now we were not being marched toward the concentration camps; we were showing the German people the right path to take to avoid walking in the footsteps of Nazi boots.

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IN A GYMNASIUM in Rostock, I witnessed a parody of judicial procedure. I saw an army of policemen bullying protesters. I saw identifications that were completely against the rules. Only the intervention of the French consul in Hamburg enabled some semblance of calm and reason, with the elderly and sick being allowed to leave that icy-cold sports hall, with its macabre echo of the Vélodrome d’Hiver.

The plaque that we put on Rostock’s city hall was removed soon afterward. But twenty years later, in 2012, it was restored, officially this time. It bears these words (the original is in German):

In this town, in August 1992, men again committed acts of racist violence against innocent families, children, women, and men.

We remember the millions of children, women, and men who, because they were Jewish, Sinti, or Romany, were victims of the Nazi genocide.

In one single night of unforgettable horror, on August 2, 1944, the last surviving three thousand Romanies in the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp were gassed.

These experiences and these historical commitments must remain present in the memory of the German people in order to ensure that contempt for our fellow man and violence are never reproduced.