28.11.2014 Award for Holocaust survivors Hugo Höllenreiner

Trebbin (2014) reports on the award for the German Rroma-Holocaust survivor Hugo Höllenreiner. Höllenreiner is one of three thousand survivors who survived the “gypsy camp” of Auschwitz-Birkenau. Most of the approximately 30,000 prisoners, including many women and children, were killed. In the 1990s, Höllenreiner began to break his silence about this traumatic experience and henceforth committed himself as a contemporary witness. He has reported on the Nazi atrocities at Auschwitz-Birkenau to thousands of German pupils: “How SS men launched sheep dogs on naked people before his eyes. How they drove people into the gas chambers. How he had to witness mass shootings and then had to help with filling in the graves with the bodies of the murdered. And how little Hugo was lying on the operating table of camp doctor Josef Mengele… […] 36 family members of the Höllenreiners perished in the Holocaust. Hugo’s parents and their six children survived with a lot of luck and great courage. However, his education after the war and the liberation was short-lived: the teachers put the “Gypsy boy” unceremoniously out the door. The discrimination continued. So Hugo Höllenreiner had to start his career with peddling.” For his commitment as a contemporary witness to the Holocaust, Höllenreiner has now been awarded with the medal “Munich shines”. West Germany did not recognise the genocide of the Rroma until 1982, when many of the survivors had already died. The Holocaust of the Rroma is often incorrectly referred to with the word “Porrajmos”. The term, which traces back to the verb “porravav”, meaning to “open wide”, is often used in the context of sexual activity and therefore is not appropriate to describe a genocide.