A Gypsy in Auschwitz: How I Survived the Horrors of the "Forgotten Holocaust"

Author: Otto Rosenberg

Otto Rosenberg is nine and living in Berlin, poor but happy, when his family are first detained. All around them, Sinti and Roma families are being torn from their homes by Nazis, leaving behind schools, jobs, friends, and businesses to live in forced encampments outside the city. One by one, families are broken up, adults and children disappear or are ”sent East.”

Otto arrives in Auschwitz at age 16 and is later transferred to Buchenwald and Bergen-Belsen. He works, scrounges for food whenever he can, witnesses and suffers horrific violence, and is driven close to death by illness more than once. Otto joins an armed revolt of prisoners, who, facing the SS and certain death, refuse to back down. Somehow, he survives.

The stories of Sinti and Roma suffering in Nazi Germany are all too often lost or untold. Otto shares his story with a remarkable simplicity. Deeply moving, A Gypsy in Auschwitz is the story of how a young Sinti boy survived the darkness of the Holocaust.

Paperback

224 pages