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”.
The day before the event, I meet Pfeil in a small meeting room in Pavee Point in north Dublin, a room that happens to have some ornate-looking chairs. “The king’s room!” says Pfeil in English as we enter. He is wearing a jacket with an Irish flag on the lapel. He was a singer-songwriter and a restaurateur, which might explain a little of his easy warmth with strangers. “I was a singer. Now I’m too old. The last time I sang was in Krakow.” He was there at a commemoration for those who died in Auschwitz.
“It was incredible,” says Rebecca Fisch, his interpreter. “He says he’s too old but he has stage presence like a rock star.”
His English is good, but in order to better express himself he shifts into German and Fisch interprets for him. He stares at me intently as he answers my questions and then we both turn to Fisch so she can translate.
Pfeil is a witness to his family’s experience. He has no personal memories of the period, but he has strong memories of how the war affected his family afterwards and his siblings eventually told him about the hardship they experienced. His oldest sister Berta was 12 and his youngest brother Ludwig just three when they were first sent to Poland. The family was in a forced labour camp. Children helped work to build roads and dig trenches. There was constant cold and hunger. “They thought potato peel was a treat,” he says at the event. There was an ever-present fear of being beaten to death or shot.
When Christian was born his mother took him with her when she went to work and laid him in a cloth on the snow next to her rather than leave him where they slept. Babies who were left behind in the barracks were frequently murdered by SS men for crying, he says. She told him, years later, “It was better that you freeze to death than be beaten to death.”
Speaking about this is emotional for him. “What is there to tell?” he says. “We know people were hungry, people were cold, people were afraid to be beaten to death every single day. That was the reality, young people, young babies, infants, were beaten to death on an everyday basis.”
He only found out the full extent of the horror in his teens because his parents and siblings did not want to discuss it. “They wanted to forget about it.”
His immediate family survived. “God and the mother of God was with us,” was how his mother explained this. Many other family members ended up in Auschwitz and died in the gas chambers. “Every time I visit Auschwitz, it hurts to see the names on the memorials. It’s very hurtful every single time.”
Liberation didn’t end the hardship. After the war Pfeil’s family were in a Russian labour camp for six months. When they eventually returned to Trier, says Pfeil, they still lived in refugee camps for several years. They had been hugely physically and mentally affected by the malnutrition, brutality and violence. “They couldn’t work because they were so sick. It destroyed them completely. No one was able to function afterwards. And that also led to them being dependent on state support.”
In dealing with postwar German officialdom, they ran into many former Nazis. His father would take Christian to some of these meetings and he would point out specific people. “‘These are the Nazi guys that we remember. We know who these people are’. It always made him angry. He recognised people and didn’t understand how these people were still there and in these positions. They just continued working. And he had to go to these Nazis and beg for money. Can you understand the pain that that caused, and how much it hurt my family to have to beg from those people? They were still making decisions about the minority.”
It’s estimated that 50 per cent of the Roma people in Europe were killed by the Nazi regime (again some experts believe the figure is much higher) and they were killed with the co-operation of many German people. The survivors lived in fear of it happening again. “[My father] never went without a walking stick so, if something happened, he could defend himself. He was very angry ... [The family] didn’t want to be out in public. They were very cautious, trying to be less visible. For a long time, my father had very little contact with Germans in general, and he told his kids, ‘Be careful when you play with German kids. Just watch out.’ Even though, most of the German kids’ mothers would forbid them to play with Sinti kids. German society didn’t want to have anything to do with Sinti and Roma.”
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.”
So Pfeil spoke about it and he wrote songs about it. In the early 1990s he appeared on German television singing a song Nie Wieder (Never Again) he wrote about the genocide. He was subtitled in German but he sang in Romani “because in Romani, I could better articulate the anger, the hurt and pain.”
After this his restaurant was seriously vandalised twice. SS symbols were painted on his walls. He received death threats. “That was the immediate reaction to the song being on TV. The reaction was completely unexpected. Of course, I aimed to have some kind of public reaction, and I wanted people to talk about it and think about it. But this was completely on a different scale. People threatened my life. They demolished completely my restaurant.”
The family considered leaving the country. They were fearful, once more, of being seen in public. “It’s less scary with time. But in the beginning, it was very frightening.”
More recently Pfeil is alarmed by the growth in right-wing extremism across Europe. At the Pavee Point event, Lynn Jackson from Holocaust Education Ireland speaks of the official way in which the Nazis dehumanised the Roma and Jewish people in the 1930s and 40s. Much of this language is familiar to those who have encountered the rhetoric of Irish racists about Roma people, Jewish people and other minorities today.
Pavee Point’s Gabi Muntean talks about the increasing fear in the Irish Roma community in the wake of last year’s riots in Dublin. The fear is particularly acute among Roma women who have been targeted for abuse on the street. There are 16,000 Roma people living in Ireland and most, she says, report being subject to racism and discrimination. This is exactly why Pfeil thinks its important to keep talking about what happened to his family.
“It is important to tell the history of the Holocaust, because it was always denied,” says Pfeil. “As a survivor, it’s important to remind society again and again that this actually happened. The situation generally is not good. In three federal states [in Germany] the right-wing party AfD [Alternative for Germany] has gained a majority in the recent elections. There were also several attacks on Sinti and Roma and migrants in the last few years.” It all feels too familiar, he says. “We have a saying in Germany ‘the fear sits in our neck’. The fear sits in our neck.”
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