The Wiener Holocaust Library’s upcoming exhibition Forgotten Victims: The Nazi Genocide of the Roma and Sinti,  opens to the public on Wednesday 30 October 2019 and draws upon the Library’s collections to uncover the story of this little known aspect of Nazi persecution. Their archives hold a wide range of relevant materials, including eyewitness accounts, photographs, documents and books.

The genocide carried out against the Roma and Sinti communities of Europe by the Nazis and their collaborators during the Second World War – the persecution and murder of as many as 500,000 people – has been referred to as the ‘forgotten Holocaust’. An important element of our exhibition are accounts from the victims and survivors. Since the 1950s, the Library has collected documents about the persecution of the Roma and Sinti communities, including eyewitness accounts and documents from the earliest systematic research project into the genocide, undertaken in the 1960s, by Donald Kenrick and Grattan Puxon.

The exhibition tells the stories of a number of individuals, including Margarethe Kraus. Margarethe was originally from Czechoslovakia but, along with her family, she was deported to Auschwitz sometime in 1943, when she was just a teenage. Whilst imprisoned in the concentration camp she was forced to endure maltreatment and extreme privations, and she contracted typhus. Margarethe was also subjected to medical experiments in Auschwitz. Her parents did not survive the Holocaust. In the photograph above, taken by Reimar Gilsenbach in the 1960s in East Germany, her Auschwitz camp number tattoo is visible on her left forearm.

The Wiener Holocaust Library is located in London. For more details visit here.