Christian Pfeil, an 80-year-old survivor of the Holocaust, visited Dublin recently. Born in January 1944 in Lublin, Poland, Pfeil is of Sinti descent, a Romani ethnic group. The entire Pfeil family were forcefully moved from Trier in Germany to concentration camps in Nazi-occupied Poland in 1940. His trip to Dublin included a speech at “Never Again: Recognition, Remembrance and Reflection on the Roma Genocide”, an event organised by the Pavee Point Traveller and Roma Centre held at the Mansion House.
It’s estimated that the Nazi regime exterminated at least half a million Roma and Sinti people, although many academics believe the real number is likely higher. Despite the magnitude of this atrocity, the Nuremberg trials excluded their representation, and it took until 1982 for Germany to officially acknowledge the genocide. The event is often dubbed as the “forgotten genocide”, whilst some within the Roma community refer to it as “the Porajmos”, translating to “the devouring”.
Before the aforementioned event, Pfeil was interviewed in a small room at Pavee Point in north Dublin, resplendent with decorative chairs. He cheerfully referred to it as “the king’s room” on entering. Dressed in a jacket adorned with an Irish flag on the lapel, Pfeil, a former singer-songwriter and restaurant owner, had an instantly welcoming demeanor. Despite insisting he’s too old to perform, he confessed to singing in Krakow at an event honouring the victims of Auschwitz.
Rebecca Fisch, Pfeil’s interpreter, described his stage presence as akin to a rockstar, despite his insistence otherwise. While Pfeil’s command of English is impressive, he prefers to articulate more complex thoughts in German, his native language, leaving Fisch to translate for the audience.
Pfeil bears witness to his kin’s sufferings despite lacking personal recollection of the period. He holds vivid accounts of his family’s post-war trauma, related to him by his older siblings who had encountered the tribulations firsthand. His eldest sister, Berta, was 12 and his youngest brother, Ludwig, merely three when they were first escorted to Poland. Their family was compelled into a labour camp, where even the children were put to task to build roads and dig trenches. Their lives were a constant battle against freezing temperatures and starvation. Pfeil recalls them considering potato peel a delicacy. Looming over them was the risk of being either shot to death or beaten.
His birth saw his mother carry him to her workplace, wrapping him in a cloth and placing him in the snow beside her rather than abandoning him where they were housed. He tells of how infants left alone in the barracks often succumbed to death at the hands of SS men infuriated by their crying. Decades later, his mother explained to him that freezing to death was a more merciful end than being beaten. Conversations revolving around this subject are emotionally charged for him. He asserts that fear of death loomed large every day, and it wasn’t uncommon for young ones to be beaten to death.
The full horror of their ordeal was only revealed to him in his teens since his family deliberately sought to erase those memories. According to him, they were desperate to purge those horrifying episodes from their minds.
Miraculously, his immediate family escaped death. His mother credited their survival to divine intervention. However, many extended family members weren’t as fortunate, succumbing to the gas chambers of Auschwitz. Pfeil admits that every visit to Auschwitz rips apart old wounds as the names on the memorials painfully remind him of lost relatives.
However, their liberation was not an immediate ticket to easier times. Following the conflict, Pfeil’s family was interned in a Russian labour camp for half a year. On their return to Trier, they continued to inhabit refugee camps for a considerable duration. The malnutrition, brutality, and violence they had endured had left them in a state of physical and mental ruin. They were incapacitated to the point of being unable to work. The family was entirely dependent on state aid, a testament to the calamity they had experienced.
In their dealings with German authorities following the war, they encountered numerous ex-Nazis. Christian was often taken to these meetings by his father, who would identify specific individuals as previous members of the Nazi group. The fact that these individuals retained their positions, seemingly without interruption, greatly incensed Christian’s father. He was baffled at the continuation of their roles, frequently finding himself having to beseech these ex-Nazis for aid, a process which induced great distress for their family, particularly under circumstances where decisions about minorities were still managed by these individuals.
Approximately half of Europe’s Roma population is believed to have been annihilated by the Nazi regime, a figure speculated to be understated by some experts. This colossal loss was facilitated by the complicit behaviour of a large number of Germans. The surviving Roma lived under perpetual dread of a resurgence of such atrocities. Christian’s father was never without a walking stick for self-defense in case of danger. His lingering resentment is clearly visible. Perpetual apprehension led them to adopt a low profile, public appearances kept to a minimum. Distancing himself from Germans was a coping strategy adopted by his father, and he urged his children to exercise the utmost caution while interacting with German children. The German mothers, however, made this easier for them by forbidding their own children from playing with the Sinti youngsters. This was reflective of the German society’s aversion towards Sinti and Roma.
Post-war Germany continued to imprison anti-Sinti and anti-Roma sentiments. This constituted a constant reality of Pfeil’s life. The traumatic experiences faced by his family were largely unacknowledged. In his perception, discussions about the Holocaust predominantly referenced Jewish victims, with the plight of the Roma and Sinti communities often overlooked. In cognisance of the brutality suffered by his people and trained in his upbringing, he was deeply angered by this lack of recognition. His awareness of pervasive anti-Sinti and anti-Roma discrimination in Germany during his childhood further solidified his understanding of the deep-rooted implications of the Nazi era. The inability of the German society to acknowledge this grim period in history or to recognise the ethnic minority groups impacted by it, specifically the Sinti and Roma, remained a point of strong contention for him. Pfeil had no doubts, however, that this shared history was a matter widely known among the German population.
In the early nineties, Pfeil’s public display of emotions regarding the genocide through a song titled Nie Wieder (Never Again), which he performed on German TV, led to severe reactions. He chose to sing in Romani for its effective expression of his pain, anger and hurt. Nevertheless, the impact was extreme with his eatery being vandalised twice, SS symbols defacing the walls, and he even had death threats. The consequence of his song going on air was unforeseen and enormous, not merely prompting public conversation as he had hoped, but threatening his life and devastating his business.
Feeling constantly threatened, Pfeil and his family seriously considered leaving the country due to their fear of being recognised in public. However, with the progression of time, their fear has somewhat subsided.
Regrettably, recent years have seen Pfeil agitated by the surge in far-right extremism sweeping Europe. At an event organised by Pavee Point, Lynn Jackson, a representative from Holocaust Education Ireland, spoke about the Nazi party’s systematic dehumanisation of the Roma and the Jews in the 1930s and 1940s, which bears striking resemblance to the rhetoric of present-day Irish racist comments about the Roma, the Jews, and other ethnic minorities.
Concurrently, Gabi Muntean from Pavee Point elaborates on the growing fear in the Roma community in Ireland, following last year’s riots in Dublin. The Roma women, particularly, feel threatened by street abuse. According to Muntean, the country is home to about 16,000 Roma people, most of whom report racial discrimination. This is exactly the reason why Pfeil believes it is crucial to continue spreading awareness about his family’s experiences.
Pfeil, a Holocaust survivor, underscores the importance of retelling the harrowing tales of the Holocaust, given how its occurrence has been frequently denied over time. It is crucial, he adds, to constantly jog the memory of society that these events in history truly unfolded. However, he comments on the generally worrying state of affairs. Recently, the right-wing AfD (Alternative for Germany) party has risen to power in three German federal states and the past few years have seen repeated attacks on Sinti and Roma communities and immigrants. These circumstances bear a disconcerting resemblance to the past, notes Pfeil. In forthcoming words, he shares a German saying about fear being a constant, lurking presence, it’s “sitting in our necks”.