Book review: A Gypsy In Auschwitz: How I Survived the Horrors of the Forgotten Holocaust

A Gypsy In Auschwitz: How I Survived the Horrors of the Forgotten Holocaust (Monoray, $32.99, August 2) by Otto Rosenberg is a deeply touching memoir of a child's survival in the Roma and Sinti holocaust.

While Jews were the Holocaust's main victims, Gypsies were also killed.

Otto, one of 11 siblings in a German Gypsy family that had settled in Berlin, was the only one in his immediate family, besides his mother, to survive the war. Most were annihilated at Auschwitz.

Otto is 9 and living in Berlin, poor but happy, when his family are first detained.

All around them, Sinti and Roma families are being torn from their homes by Nazis , leaving behind schools, jobs, friends, and businesses to live in forced encampments outside the city. One by one, families are broken up, adults and children disappear or are 'sent East'.

Otto arrives in Auschwitz aged 15 and is later transferred to Buechenwald and Bergen-Belsen. He works, scrounges food whenever he can, witnesses and suffers horrific violence and is driven close to death by illness more than once.

Unbelievably, he also joins an armed revolt of prisoners who, facing the SS and certain death, refuse to back down. Somehow, through luck, sheer human will to live, or both, he survives.

The stories of Sinti and Roma suffering in Nazi Germany are all too often lost or untold. In this haunting account, Otto shares his story with a remarkable simplicity. Deeply moving, A Gypsy in Auschwitz is the incredible story of how a young Sinti boy miraculously survived the unimaginable darkness of the Holocaust.

His memoirs, written in collaboration with Ulrich Enzensberger, were published in English in 1999 in Britain after appearing in German in 1998.

Rosenberg died in 2001.