Beyond the candle: reflections for the sector on Roma Genocide Remembrance Day

On the 2nd of August 1944, the guards at Auschwitz-Birkenau liquidated the Zigeunerlager, the section the Nazis called the “Gypsy family camp”.

Nearly 3,000 Roma, Sinti and Traveller people were killed in the gas chambers that night. Most were women, children and the elderly.

Of the roughly 23,000 Roma, Sinti and Travellers held in that camp, more than 20,000 were murdered before the war ended.

So today, the 2nd of August is marked across Europe as Roma Genocide Remembrance Day. We light candles, we lay wreaths and we utter the words ‘na bister’ (don’t forget).

But do we really remember? If our remembrance stops on August 3rd, it has failed. For a profession like ours, built on assessment, recording and the power to step into a family’s life, remembrance has to be a practice discipline and not a ceremony.

The Roma genocide did not run only on soldiers and camps. It ran on welfare offices, children’s homes and foster placements. It ran on trusted professionals who filled in forms, made assessments and collected children. That’s the part we rarely remember on 2nd August, and it’s the part our profession most needs to hear.

The machinery was people that looked like us

Eva Justin trained as a nurse and became a racial researcher under Robert Ritter. She had trusted access to a residential home, St Josefspflege, where she developed relationships with the Roma and Sinti children living there. Many of the children had arrived at care homes across Germany after their parents had been arrested and sent to concentration camps throughout Europe.

Eva nurtured their trust at St Josefspflege and used that trust to study 39 of them as subjects for her doctorate. Even learning a little Romanes, becoming affectionately nicknamed by the children ‘Lolitschai’ (from loli ‘red’ and ‘chai’ girl) because of her red hair.

She won the children over, gave them sweets and played games with them to measure their intelligence and dexterity.

To them she was a friendly adult who took an interest, but all the while her research was arguing that they were racially inferior, could not be assimilated, and should not be educated.

Their deportation was delayed so she could finish her study, but in May 1944 (shortly after her dissertation was awarded) she reported that she no longer needed her ‘examination goods’, the children were sent to Auschwitz.

Only four of the thirty-nine survived.

She was trained and in the language of her time, assessing vulnerable children in care. She used her access and relationship, the trust from the children, to study them and then hand them over for extermination.

Another case, often absent from official commemorations, is that of Sidonie Adlersburg. Sidonie was a Roma girl who had been in state care since infancy, likely due to her biological family’s financial hardship. Her initial care placement fell through due to her carer’s husband not wanting to take a child with such dark skin into his family. But, she was adopted again by a working-class Austrian family in 1933, who loved her as their own.

Antigypsyism followed Sidonie throughout her childhood, doctors refusing to treat her and children in her neighbourhood routinely bullying her with slurs like “gypsy” or “black thing”.

After the Nazi deportations of Roma and Sinti began to Auschwitz, Sidonie’s local welfare office conducted an assessment as to whether she had to be returned to her biological mother. Despite overwhelming positive statements about her care placement, the racist idea that the good behavior of a “gypsy child” would inevitably turn negative in the long term dominated. So in March 1943, an employee of the youth welfare office was sent to collect her. The removal was framed as being in her interests, a matter of returning her to her birth mother and authorities described it as “family reunification”.

But the true purpose behind Sidonie’s ‘reunification’ – was the joint deportation.

Alongside her Mother and extended family, Sidonie was sent to Auschwitz on the 3rd April. After arriving there on the morning of April 5th, Sidonie was tattooed with the prisoner number Z 6672. Sidonie died in Auschwitz-Birkenau on August 6th, 1943, at the age of just ten.

Her biological brother Joschi survived the Holocaust, he reported after the war that Sidonie had died not solely from contacting an illness at the camp, but also from a “broken heart” caused by the longing for her lost family.

No soldier appeared to collect Sidonie, the person at the door was a welfare worker doing a welfare task, certain they understood what was best for the child.

How the Sector Resisted

Those stories are horrible to bear, but I want to share the stories of two others. These individuals had the same access as the practitioners we’ve spoken about, but used it to resist.

The Social Worker

When the war broke out, Irena Sendler was a 29 year old social worker in the Warsaw welfare department. Her official job was to inspect the sanitary conditions of the sealed Jewish ghetto for typhus (a contagious disease that the Nazis feared could spread throughout Poland). Witnessing the horrific conditions of the ghetto, as well as knowing that this was a temporary measure ahead of residents being sent to extermination camps, like Treblinka and Auschwitz, Irena took action.

Her statutory role, permit and the authority of the welfare system carried through that gate, and she used every bit of it to smuggle around 2,500 Jewish children out and hide them with families, orphanages and convents.

She recorded their real names, alongside their placement addresses in code and buried the lists in jars, so the children might one day be found again. She was arrested, tortured and sentenced to death, but she never gave up their names.

Narrowly escaping her death sentence, after German officials were bribed by resistance members, she was released in February 1944. Despite knowing that authorities were watching her closely, she never gave up her actions to support the Polish resistance and the children she’d rescued.

The Foster Carer

Another story often omitted from how our sector remembers, is that of Emil Matulat. He and his wife fostered Else Schmidt, a little girl in Hamburg whose birth mother the authorities had classified as a “gypsy”.

In March 1943 the police came for Else, Matulat intervened and got her returned. However they came back and she was seized again and deported, first to Auschwitz, then (narrowly escaping the liquidation of the 2nd of August) transferred to Ravensbrück, but Emil never gave up.

At real risk to himself he wrote petition after petition to the authorities until, in September 1944, he secured her release. Before Else was allowed to leave the camp she was made to sign a non-disclosure agreement, she was not to tell her experience in the concentration camps to anyone.

But in an act of defiance, she went on to become a witness to the genocide, publish books and interviews so that the horrific reality of the camps are never forgotten.

Sendler, Sidonie’s welfare officer and Matulat were not in the same role, and none shared Justin’s job. But all four inhabited the same time, they each made choices that meant the difference between a child being carried to safety or a child losing their life. What decided the difference was not the power they held, but it was what they did with it.

What does remembrance mean for practice?

So when we remember the Roma, Sinti and Travellers murdered in the genocide. We should also remember how the machinery worked, because that is the part our profession is placed to learn from.

When a Roma or Traveller family meets you today; a social worker, an assessor, someone with power over their children, they do not meet you as a blank slate. They carry a collective memory, and part of that memory are people like Eva Justin and the welfare officer at Sidonie’s door.

When a family is wary of you, that wariness is not them being ‘difficult’ or ‘non-engaging’, it’s a survival response built on memory. The system you represent is, in the long view, connected to the system that did the harm. This is what makes it systemic rather than personal. We inherit how authority is seen, and alter that perception is part of the job.

So on the 2nd of August, make ‘never forget’ a practice, and not empty words. Notice the moment your pen turns a culture into a concern, notice when a family’s caution tells you more about their history than about their risk. Notice your own certainty, and treat it as a warning light for professional curiosity.

But above all, remember the cases when people did the right thing, they saw the person behind what the hatred and stigma wanted them to see.

That’s what remembrance looks like when it lives in practice. Not a candle once a year, it’s truly seeing someone and questioning what we don’t know.

‘Dikh he na Bister’ – Look and don’t forget.

Sources and further reading

• Documentation and Cultural Centre of German Sinti and Roma, records on the children of St Josefspflege (Mulfingen) and on Else Baker (née Schmidt)
• Documentation and Cultural Centre of German Sinti and Roma, ‘Sidonie Adlersburg “Family reunification” in Auschwitz’
• Erich Hackl, *Farewell Sidonia* (Abschied von Sidonie), on Sidonie Adlersburg
• Benedict, S., Shields, L., Holmes, C. and Kurth, J. (2018) “A nurse working for the Third Reich: Eva Justin, RN, PhD” Journal of Medical Biography
• Yad Vashem and the Jewish Women’s Archive, records on Irena Sendler
• Roma, Sinti and Traveller survivor testimonies
• Alliance against Antigypsyism (2016) ‘Antigypsyism: A Reference Paper’