The world remembers
Events are taking place at Auschwitz to commemorate the 65th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi death camp, as the world marks Holocaust Memorial Day.
Auschwitz survivors and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu are among those gathering in Poland, where the camp was built under German occupation.
World leaders have prepared special messages and Israel's president is addressing the German parliament. More than a million people were murdered by the Nazis at Auschwitz.
The victims were Jews, Poles, Romany Gypsies and Soviet prisoners of war. The camp was liberated by the Soviet Red Army on 27 January 1945, but for many Romany families the effects are still being felt. Meet the Bock family, a Czech Romany family living in Manchester:
“…At school we did learn about the war but not about the Holocaust - and who would be bothered about what happened to a Gypsy? ..." – Valeria Bockova
As many as 500,000 to 1.5 million Romany people were killed in the Porrajmos, the Romany word which means "devouring" which describes the murder of the Romanies and Sintis under the Nazi regime. In the Czech Protectorate, at most 600 Roma and Sinti were left alive at the end of the war. Across the Third Reich 70% of all Romany people were killed.
British Gypsies and Travellers were spared because the Nazi's never made it to mainland Britain, but the Nazi's are known to have collected the locations of British Gypsy and Traveller camps. Yet there are Romany families in Britain who did experience the holocaust directly. Meet the Bock family.
The Bocks were a German-speaking Sinti family of travelling horse dealers. In 1928 the extended family split in two, and one half moved into Czechoslovakia while the other half continued travelling in Germany. During the Second World War, 39 of the Bock family were incarcerated in Auschwitz, including 11 children. Three survived. The family continued working with horses up until 1958 when they were forcibly stopped from travelling by the Communist regime. Vilém Bock's father was known as František Bock and was born in 1932. After surviving Auschwitz as a young child, he became one of the first in his family to go to school. He later worked in a brush factory, making industrial-size brushes. František's parents - the paternal grandparents of our witness Vilém Bock - died in Auschwitz. Vilém's great-uncle Jan Entner joined the Partisans, and Vilém's maternal grandfather Antonín István died under Nazi occupation as a political prisoner. Antonín was overheard speaking out against Hitler, denounced to the authorities by a relative and executed in Prague's Pankrác prison. Within the next week Antonín's wife and children were taken to Hodonin, a Czech-run internment camp for Gypsies which was later closed and its inmates deported to Auschwitz. The extended family of 50, all Sinti travelling around Prostějov in South Moravia, were all sent to Hodonín. Older family members were then sent to Auschwitz.. Three of the Istváns' daughters managed to escape from the camp: Marie, Berta and Hilda Istvánová.
Vilém Bock: “The horse was sacred to us Sinti, we depended on it for everything. It could never be eaten. If anyone ate horse meat, they became “deges” - outcast - and no one would speak to them or know them. If someone committed a sexual offence, they were never allowed back into the community, even when they'd served their sentence in prison. In that way, we Sinti were stricter than the Czechs. We spoke Sinti Romani, including German words. We could use it as a kind of secret language even from other Roma. Our parents spoke about the way they were brought to Auschwitz from Ústí nad Orlicí. My father was seven or eight when he was deported. His brother and sister Josef and Róza survived with him. He told us how they looked through the window when their parents and elders were taken to the gas. Twenty-five members of their family were marched away - they turned back to say goodbye. This happened after they had been in the camp for some time. The 25 family members were taken to the gas chambers towards the end of the war. The Nazis were desperate to gas as many as possible, so that there wouldn't be any memorials or traces of what happened.” The Zigeunerlager (‘Gypsy Camp’) ' in Auschwitz-Birkenau was kept separate from the other buildings. Every one of the remaining 2897 inmates was exterminated on the night of August 2nd-3rd 1944; the date that Roma still visit Auschwitz today with flowers to remember their dead. Before the extermination many able-bodied prisoners were sent to other camps, including young boys and men to Buchenwald and young girls and women to Ravensbruck. In this way the Nazis hoped to remove those who could resist. But memoirs of Jewish survivors often recall the desperate fight and piercing cries that lasted all night from the Zigeunerlager. “After the war no-one spoke about it. There were no memorials. I only knew what had happened through my father. If my father hadn't told me I would never have known everyone carried on as normal. Dad told us all about his family, how much they had loved each other. He wanted us eight children all to love each other as they had.” There were two Czech-run camps for Roma, Hodonín and Lety. Both were used as transit camps for Auschwitz. Many inmates of these camps died of malnutrition before they could be deported. After the War, Lety became a pig farm and for 15 years after the Velvet Revolution the Czech government was extremely reluctant to close the farm or permit a small memorial to the dead. Vilém believes there were still 2,500 Sinti alive in Europe after the war. Historians have estimated the losses among Gypsies in the Czech lands are higher. “There were possibly 5,000 of us before the war, and half that afterwards. We are now intermarried and mixed. Our laws are not so strict any more, because the old people who insisted on the rules have died, and the younger people don't care so much.”
After the War four branches of the family went in four directions: one went to Ústí nad Labem, two went to Moravka, one went to Gottwaldov, now called Zlín.
“My mother and father went riding together. They met because their families worked together with horses, and they were in the same line of work. There were horse fairs in Litomyšl, Svitavy and Zábreh. In 1957 it all stopped.”
Travelling was forbidden and the wheels were knocked off the Bock family's wagons. Vilém's branch of the family first lived around Hrabušice and when they were settled they went to a village outside Šumperk. The official law to end nomadism and enforce settlement was passed in 1958 in the former Czechoslovakia. Vilém was four or five years old.
“The police and local authorities came up to us. They took our wagons and caravans and gave us a house, just like that. There were lots of empty houses at that time, after the expulsion of the Germans. We were given a nice big house to live together in Šanov, and I started to go to school there. I stayed for 2-3 years. We were used to moving. We went to Šumperk, in the village of Hrabešice."
For more information on the Holocaust and the work of the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust (HMDT) see:
Travellers Times and the HMDT would like to thank Zuzana Slobodova, David Chirico, Nidhi Trehan, Donald Kenrick, Amanda Sebestyen & the Bock Family for making their story available.