The Romany Holocaust Museum (Heidelberg, Part II)

Heidelberg Part 1

As I was walking from the Castle, I saw a building for the Sinti und Roma Holocaust Museum. I knew that it wasn't just Jews who died in the holocaust, but also the Romany - i.e. gypsies, though I learnt here that they don't like to be called that - but hadn't seen anything on this other than a couple of lines in history books. I looked at my watch, shrugged, and went in.

There was an old lady there. She looked at me skeptically. (It was shortly after this that I decided to buy new shoes. I was wearing my last serviceable pair of shoes. The hole in the right one has been there for a year now.) "I should warn you," she said, "that the tour will take two hours if you listen to it in full". Maybe she figured from my Chicago t-shirt that I lived in the US, and had an American attention span. Or she knew that Indians had shorter attention spans. In any case, she was right, as I hadn't thought of staying more than half an hour.

"I'll listen to a lot of it", I said. "I'll be here an hour."

Mollified somewhat - "nice but firm" is a good way of describing her - kinda like many New Yorkers and certain mothers - she gave me an English audio guide (all the exhibit text is in Deutsch), and showed me how to use it.

It's a very well-designed exhibit, going through two floors of the building. I should have taken more photographs. I listened to about three-quarters of it, and stayed 90 minutes.

Family photographs of some of the Romany deported to Auschwitz

Romany children in their last summer.



Sinti is what the Romany are called in Germany, Roma what they are called in some other central European countries. They are really several groups of them, but most (all?) have their origins in India - linguistically, Romany has roots in Sanskrit. I knew that before, but what really brought it home was seeing that half the people in the photographs had ethnically Indian features. That, I have to admit, made it more personal for me. I'm not fond of being part of the Indian diaspora (I wouldn't mind being one or the other, but both...) but somehow it's different when considering people far higher on the diasporan scale than you.

The word "killed" is also rarely used, if ever. It's always "murdered". This is good. "Killed" somehow implies a lack of responsibility by the cause of death, e.g. "killed by the tsunami". "Murdered" means a crime.

There is an understandable sense in the exhibit of "hey, it wasn't just Jews who were killed - so were we". Like comments by Nazi officials that no distinction was made between Romany and Jews, and that the aim was the extermination of the entire race.

Half a million Romany were killed across Europe.

Names of thousands of the dead.

When I finished the exhibit, I talked to the old woman at the front desk. I had been the only visitor in the museum at the time (bar an old friend of hers who came in to see what I was doing about 20 minutes after I'd started - he must have reported to her that I was going through it very slowly) and asked if there were normally more people here. She said more people came in in the afternoons, and during the week, when there were schoolgroups.

It's a good, simple museum - more people should come here.

Link to the Sinti und Roma Museum: German, English. (The English site isn't as up-to-date as the German site yet.)