Shared Sorrows: A Gypsy Family Remembers the Holocaust - Softcover

Sonneman, Toby

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1902806107 ISBN 13: 9781902806105

Publisher: University Of Hertfordshire Press, 2002

Synopsis

On the morning after Kristallnacht, Toby Sonneman’s father walked through broken glass to apply for the visa that saved him from the fate of so many during the Third Reich. In examining her own family history, the author discovered the similarities between the fate of the Jews and the Gypsies in the Holocaust, both peoples selected on racial grounds for extermination by the Nazis.

She traveled with an American Gypsy survivor to Munich, where she stayed with the formidable Rosa Mettbach. This is the story of Rosa and other members of an extended family who survived the Holocaust. Shared Sorrows tells the story of a Gypsy family against the backdrop of a Jewish one, detailing and examining their shared sufferings under the Nazis.


My father brought a spool of thread with him from Germany when he came to America in 1939. And another spool of thread, one in my imagination, unwinds slowly and unpredictably, sometimes fraying or tangling. It's a thin and delicate thread that leads me to the Gypsies, to the family that I meet in Germany, the country of so many tangled memories and emotions. And as I talk to them and I listen, following the threads of their stories backwards in time to the 1930s and 40s and before, their memories start to become mine as well.

About this title

About the Author

Toby Sonneman, a founding member of the Romani-Jewish Alliance, is the author of numerous articles on the fate of the Gypsies in the Holocaust as well as Fruit Fields in My Blood: Okie Migrants in the West.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Shared Sorrows

A Gypsy Family Remembers the Holocaust

By Toby Sonneman

University of Hertfordshire Press

Copyright © 2002 Toby Sonneman
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-902806-10-5

Contents

Map, Family tree, 
Prologue – In Human Terms, 
Chronology of Two Families, 
1 A bit of sweetness, 
2 A bitter root, 
3 The family album, 
4 Before and after, 
5 I can do nothing for you, 
6 The sky was grey, 
7 Stains on the table, 
8 I no like the German people, 
9 I never was a child, 
10 Inconsistencies, 
11 A matter of surviving, 
12 Then I realized ..., 
13 I cannot talk, 
14 Mano, the boy who was lost, 
15 Spiritually broken, 
16 A piece of bread, 
17 In the rain one sees no tears, 
18 Their ways and our ways, 
19 Homeland, 
20 Primitive people, 
21 The question of complicity, 
22 Run and run, 
23 No trust nobody no more, 
24 Nobody comes back from my people, 
25 Thorns in the garden, 
26 Friedhof/Judenfriedhof, 
Epilogue – A spool of thread, 
Acknowledgments, 
End notes, 
Bibliography, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

A bit of sweetness

* * *

Rosa examines the piece of cake carefully, testing its weight and texture with the tines of her fork. The golden yeast dough, its edges rose-hued with fruit syrup; the lush red-purple flesh of the juicy plums; the crumbly sand-colored streusel topping. Satisfied with what she sees, she lifts a forkful of cake to her mouth and chews it thoughtfully.

"I like this Kuchen," she says to me. "This is a good one."

Rosa is over seventy but the deep lines and bumps of her face make her look ten years older. She has walnut-brown skin lined with wrinkles and gleaming mahogany eyes under thick black eyebrows. You can see that her dark grey hair was once black. She pulls it back tightly in a bun but curly pewter wisps of it escape, softening her expression. I notice her hands because she brings a cigarette to her mouth almost continually – her fingers are slender and agile, her fingernails manicured.

Rosa is a Gypsy, though she prefers to identify herself more specifically. "My people are the Sinti," she says, the Sinti being a subclass of the ethnic Gypsy population who settled in northern Europe in the early 1400s. Rosa was born in Austria but now lives in Germany, in a two-bedroom high-rise apartment on the outskirts of Munich with her six-year old grandson. A tiny woman, she seems both frail and tough at the same time. Frail when she is in the grasp of one of her periodic spasms of coughing and her small thin frame seems too delicate to withstand the onslaught. Tough when she is angry and she scowls, her arched eyebrows lowering, dark eyes flashing as she barks harsh commands to her daughter and grandson. Then her voice and expressions seem too large, too intimidating for such a slight person. But now, pleased by the Kuchen, she smiles sweetly and her two gold teeth glimmer beside the white ones, echoing the gold and pearls of her necklaces and the small gold rings on her ears.

I am gratified that she likes the cake, a Zwetschgenkuchen that I chose from a neighborhood pastry shop, a Konditorei. I'd considered the extravagant glazed and whipped cream confections in the display case but had finally settled on this plainer cake because I knew how special it was. Baked only in the autumn when the tiny purple-blue plums are ripe, Zwetschgenkuchen evokes the golden October of the countryside, the lingering of the year's last harvest.

Edition details

• Publisher: University Of Hertfordshire Press
• Publication date: 2002
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1902806107
• ISBN 13: 9781902806105
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 296