Exhibition Review: Forgotten Victims at Wiener Holocaust Library

Photograph of a Roma man, thought to be Jozef Kwiek, Belzec, German-occupied Poland, 1940

Source: Wiener Holocaust Library Collection

Deepali Foster reviews the newest exhibition at the Wiener Holocaust Library, Forgotten Victims: The Nazi Genocide of the Roma and Sinti.

There’s no faulting the Forgotten Victims exhibition currently at the Wiener Library, the world’s oldest Holocaust memorial institution. Insightful, provocative and moving, the exhibition not only deepens ones understanding of the genocide of Roma and Sinti communities during the Holocaust, it also provides an environment to reflect upon the continuing prejudice faced by those communities today.

The Wiener Library is a place for study and contemplation, rooted in a profound belief in the power of historical truth to confront and overturn anti-Semitism and racism. The Forgotten Victims exhibition confronts the lesser known persecution of Roma and Sinti before, during, and since the Holocaust. 

Forgotten Victims showcases important collections from the fifties and sixties. The collection of eye-witness accounts holds unparalleled power and authority; they are deeply touching and stress the importance of increasing the awareness of the “forgotten holocaust”, to ensure that the legacy of the genocide perpetrated against Europe’s Roma population is always remembered.

But who are the Roma and Sinti? The exhibition explains ‘Roma’ as a term to describe the diverse group of people who left northern India about one thousand years ago, arriving in central Europe by the fifteenth century. Historically, Germany has referred to Roma as ‘Zigeuner’, which derives from ‘untouchable’, reflecting the prejudice and discrimination faced by Roma in Europe. Sinti refers to a group of Roma mainly based in Germany, where the persecution against Roma started.

Roma or Sinti girl imprisoned in Auschwitz, pictures taken by the SS for their files

Source: Wiener Holocaust Library Collection

The skill of the exhibition’s curator, Dr Barbara Warnock, is evident in the use of gripping and insightful storytelling, which immerses visitors and encourages engagement with and empathy for such a dark yet untold period of history. When asked why society is largely uneducated about the Roma and Sinti persecution, Dr Warnock provided me with a number of reasons. Although the persecution of Roma communities was “appalling”, with up to half a million deaths, “the sheer scale of what happened to Jews in Europe means that it attracts more attention.” Six million Jews were killed as they were “at the heart of Nazi racial thinking and racial thinking was at the heart of Nazi ideology”.

However, she stressed the impact of the continued stigma against Roma communities: “post-war German authorities were quite resistant to the idea that they had been targeted in genocide. It was only recognised as a genocide against Roma by the German authorities in 1982.” Hans Braun’s testimony is a particular highlight of the exhibition. This account depicts the difficulty for Roma survivors to gain recognition and compensation in the initial post-war period. Braun’s first restitution claim failed, due to German criminal inspector, Inspector Dalheim, arguing that Braun wasn’t incarcerated in Auchwitz or Flossenburg for ‘racial’ or ‘political’ reasons, but due to criminal activity.

When asked which artefact interested her the most, Dr Barbara Warnock led me to Hermine Hovarth’s lengthy and detailed testimony, gathered by Wiener Library staff in Vienna in 1958. She found the Austrian Roma’s eyewitness account compelling. Dr Warnock noted it was “slightly unusual” for a female survivor accounting her experience at the time to avoid shying away from the widespread sexual violence at the hands of the Nazis - “the focus she has on the sexual violence is striking, unusual and quite brave.” In her testimony, Hovarth tells her story of an SS man in Austria in the late 1930s targeting her: “I noticed very quickly that this [local SS leader] did not worry at all about the Racial Problem when it came to a young Gypsy girl. He started to come after me…One day he was suddenly standing in front of me with a drawn pistol”. Her testimony is a prime example of the hard-hitting, heart-wrenching Roma stories that the Forgotten Victims exhibition makes known.

Dr Barbara Warnock additionally highlighted her interest in Heinrich Himmler’s 1944 document, which criticised the measures against “Poles, Jews and Gypsies” in the German Reich. Himmler argued against presenting these groups as equivalent “in the public eye” as “The Accomplished Evacuation and Isolation” of Jews and Gypsies in Germany meant these directives against them were no longer necessary. Warnock revealed she found the document “horrible to encounter” and “so chilling to refer to genocide in that bureaucratic language”, with “evacuating” and “isolation” meaning the vast majority of Jews, Sinti and Roma from Greater Germany had by this point been deported to ghettos and camps and murdered.

Unpublished accounts collected in the 1950s as part of The Wiener Library's project to gather eyewitness accounts of the Holocaust

Source: Wiener Holocaust Library Collection

 As well as the emotional challenges involved in the curating experience, Dr Warnock noted the practical difficulties, due to the limited amount of photographs available depicting Roma persecution. Additionally, she and the Wiener Library were “conscious and careful about how [they] wanted to tell the stories” of the Roma population; it was vital to represent Roma in an accurate and sensitive way, especially considering the untold nature of their stories. Therefore, they consulted the Roma Support Group organisation, who provided the library with photographs and a film from their own exhibition, available to watch when visiting the exhibition.

The Forgotten Victims exhibition is worth a visit. The few individual stories told “give [visitors] an insight into the effect [of Roma persecution during the Holocaust] on individuals and families”. It bravely confronts the continuing marginalisation of the 200,000 Gypsy, Roma and Travellers (GRT) who live in the UK today. They face significant discrimination and barriers to access in education, health and housing, shown by the Equality and Human Rights Commission, which revealed that just 14% of GRT achieved their minimum expected GCSE grades in 2012/13, compared to 60% of white children. 

Warnock hopes to successfully make “a small contribution to informing people about the tragic persecution of Roma throughout history, whether they visit the exhibition, read about it, or come to one of Wiener Library’s events.” Their moving exhibition does just this. 

Forgotten Victims: The Nazi Genocide of the Roma and Sinti is on at The Wiener Holocaust Library until 11th March 2020.