The British Army entered the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp on April 15, 1945, shortly after the Nazi SS had abandoned the camp. Photographers and cameramen in the Army’s Film and Photographic Unit1 were among these liberating troops and began to document what they uncovered. More than 60,000 of Bergen-Belsen’s prisoners were still alive, but many of them were seriously ill, starving, and without shelter. Thousands of corpses lay unburied throughout the camp.
A member of the Film and Photographic Unit took this photograph of Romani women in a barrack two days after the liberation of Bergen-Belsen.2 German authorities had persecuted and imprisoned Roma and Sinti as supposed “asocials” or “habitual criminals” for many years—long before the rise of Nazism.3 Soon after coming to power in 1933, the Nazi regime labeled Roma and Sinti as “racial outsiders” who could never be part of the Nazis’ so-called “national community” (Volksgemeinschaft). Officials began systematic mass deportations of Roma and Sinti from Nazi Germany in 1940.4 An unknown number of Roma and Sinti were also killed as part of mass shootings led by German forces in eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.
Romani prisoners of all nationalities were imprisoned together in Nazi concentration camps. In 1944–45, about 1,000 Roma and Sinti were transferred from Dachau, Ravensbrück, Mauthausen, and other camps to Bergen-Belsen. Some Romani people were held outside the camp due to overcrowding.5 Roma and Sinti prisoners—like Jews, Poles, and other people sent to concentration camps— did not have access to enough food, water, medicine, or basic sanitary needs. They also faced brutal mistreatment from SS guards, who sometimes targeted Romani women for torment and humiliation. At Auschwitz, for example, Romani women of all ages were often forced to walk naked through the camp as punishment.6 This degrading ritual was particularly painful for Romani women who observed Romani cultural traditions of female purity and modesty.7
Many Romani women also tried to maintain their traditional cultural roles as their families’ primary caretakers—even amid the impossible circumstances of starvation, disease, abuse, and neglect. A Romani survivor named Ceija Stojka recalled how her mother, Sidi, did whatever she could to keep her children alive in Bergen-Belsen.8 In her memoirs, Ceija describes the desperate hunger in Bergen-Belsen when they arrived in early 1945. Ceijia remembered that her mother brought the children to a tree with newly sprouted leaves that were covered with sap hardened by the sun. At Sidi’s insistence, the children ate the leaves, the sap, and the tree’s bark.
After their arrival at Belsen, British units struggled to feed, clothe, and meet the medical needs of thousands of prisoners like Ceijia, whose survival was not yet assured—more than 13,000 prisoners died from the effects of their imprisonment in the weeks after liberation.9 Why might the British Film and Photographic Unit have taken this photograph at that time? What might it tell us about Romani survivors’ experiences of liberation in Bergen-Belsen?10 What emotions can be seen in the women’s faces?