Flossenbürg (exhibition) • NA BISTER

Historical background

See: Flossenbürg (camp)

Description of commemoration

The permanent exhibition “Flossenbürg Concentration Camp1938-1945” is housed in a former camp bath / laundry building. The Roma and Sinti appear on the main exhibition three times. Firstly, in the general section downstairs, among other nationalities, Roma and Sini are listed on a separate information board along with very brief information about their qualification by the Nuremberg Laws as representatives of the ‘alien race’ (the exact wording on the board (!)); further on, there is information about deportations and mass death, e.g. in KL Auschwitz-Birkenau.

The same exhibit presents the story of Stojan Lassisch, a Bosnian Roma whose family emigrated to Germany during World War I. On March 2, 1943, he and his whole family were deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where most of the family died of diseases or was killed in gas chambers. Stojan found himself in a group of Roma and Sinti qualified as “able to work” and was transferred from Auschwitz to Flossenbürg on May 27, 1944. He died seven months later.

The second mention of the Roma and Sinti Secondly is in a separate space near the exhibit devoted to Stojan Lassisch, where you can sit and study the history of representatives of individual nations imprisoned in the camp. On the “Remembrance Bookcase”, there are books devoted to selected prisoners known from their names and stories, assembled by nationality. In the section related to the Roma, we find the stories of the survivors: Jacob “John” Bamberger (boxer; one of 44 Sinti on whom medical experiments were carried out in KL Dachau), Hermann Herzberg (one of the activists who went on hunger strike in Dachau in 1980), Luise Mai (one of 39 Gypsy children who were deported from the orphanage in Mulfingen 1938-44; only four, among them Luise – survived) and Anna Mettbach.

The third element related to the Roma and Sinti is a documentary film about the hunger strike, which Sinti and the Roma carried out on the grounds of the former Dachau camp in 1980. Several Gypsy activists, including Rudko Kawczyński (a Polish Roma), Hermann Herzberg (prisoner of the Flossenbürg, Dachau, Bergen-Belsen camps), Romani Rose (leader of Dokumentations- Kulturzentrum Deutscher Sinti und Roma, the most important German Gypsy organisation ———— —— www.sintiundroma.de/), demanded that the Roma and Sinti be officially recognised as victims of National Socialism. This event is treated today by researchers specialising in the topic as the first act of commemorating the Roma and Sinti victims of World War II, as well as one of the first and most important moments in building a modern Roma identity.