Auschwitz, Ravensbrück, Sachsenhausen: He survived three concentration camps: Now Hermann Höllenreiner has died at the age of 92

"I just screamed for my mom. And prayed that I would come home again. The Lord didn't help us either." Hermann Höllenreiner, called Mano by his family, experienced his third concentration camp in 1944. He is imprisoned in Sachsenhausen; before that he was in Auschwitz and Ravensbrück. He is all alone. The boy is just 11 years old. His “crime”: He is a German Sinto, labeled an “anti-social gypsy” by the Nazis and left to die.

But he survived. On Thursday last week, Höllenreiner died surrounded by his family in Upper Bavaria, three days before his 93rd birthday.

Over the last two decades, Hermann Höllenreiner had fought to ensure that the memory of injustice, persecution and the murder of Sinti and Roma was not forgotten. He gave lectures, was involved in the Central Council of Sinti and Roma, and gave interviews. Before that, the man with the Bavarian dialect remained silent for a long time about his suffering, like so many people who were racially persecuted. After all, injustice did not disappear after the war. He and his family were still insulted as “anti-social people” in the Federal Republic.

Höllenreiner comes from Munich. His father ran a haulage business on Deisenhofer Strasse and traded in horses. The family had once traveled across the country, but that was long gone. The Höllenreiners were German until the National Socialists revoked their citizenship. The father was expelled from the Wehrmacht in 1942 and had to do forced labor. Under the Nazis, Sinti and Roma like young Hermann were no longer allowed to go to the cinema or use the tram. They are registered and monitored. Anyone who is considered “asocial” is deported to concentration camps. At the end of December 1942, SS Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler ordered the deportation of the “Gypsies”.

In his old age, Hermann Höllenreiner could clearly remember the day in March 1943 when the Nazis came to their Munich apartment. "Everything was surrounded in the morning. Then the Gestapo came," he said in a 2016 ARD documentary. They meet other relatives and are crammed into a freight car. "30 to 40 people in the wagon, that was really bad. We had no water," said Höllenreiner. After about eight days they reach the Auschwitz concentration and extermination camp.

Hermann receives the prisoner number Z - 3526, which a Kapo tattoos on his arm. The family is sent to the “gypsy camp” where people are destroyed through forced labor in miserable living conditions. Thousands die. The roll call was at five in the morning, Höllenreiner remembered. The SS doctor Josef Mengele carried out human experiments on young Sinti and Roma, including Hermann: "It was a devil. We were given injections and blankets full of typhoid lice. That's how we got scabies and typhus," he told the journalist Thies Marsen. The mass murder in the neighboring extermination camp was an open secret among the prisoners. If the chimney smoked heavily again, the children would have said that people would be burned again.

In August 1944, the “Gypsy camp” in Auschwitz was closed and many inmates were murdered. The Höllenreiner family is sent to the Ravensbrück concentration camp, later Hermann is in Sachsenhausen. He survives a death march shortly before the end of the war. After the liberation, French fellow sufferers took him with them to France, where he was placed in a foster family. Only when the tattoo of his prisoner number is discovered on his arm does the search for his family begin. In December 1946 Hermann Höllenreiner returned to Bavaria. Well over 100 of his family members were murdered by the National Socialists.

In 1956 Hermann Höllenreiner met his wife Else, who was with him until his death along with their daughter.