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Photograph of Romani Women at Bergen-Belsen

Romani women in a barracks at the liberation of Bergen Belsen
US Holocaust Memorial Museum, Courtesy of the Imperial War Museum

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? 

To learn more about the British Army Film and Photography Unit at Bergen-Belsen, see Mark Celinscak, Distance from the Belsen Heap: Allied Forces and the Liberation of a Nazi Concentration Camp, (Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press, 2015) 116–159. For more photographs, see the Imperial War Museum's collections.

The term Roma refers to a diverse European ethnic group whose ancestors originated in modern-day India and Pakistan. Many Romani people have different names for themselves, such as Kalderashi, Lalleri, and Sinti. Most Romani people in German-speaking lands are Sinti. Although widely used in the past, the English term “Gypsy” is now widely considered a racial or ethnic slur by most Romani people. Scholars and institutions instead tend to utilize the umbrella terms Roma and Romani.

Roma and Sinti were among several groups identified by the Nazi regime for exclusion from the German "national community" ("Volksgemeinschaft"). Persecution of Roma as "social outsiders" in the Nazi era built on decades of anti-Roma prejudice and policies, common in Germany and across Europe. For more details, see the related Experiencing History collection, Roma and Sinti in Nazi Germany.

Romani peoples were deported to concentration camps in Poland, the Soviet Union, and other territories occupied by Nazi Germany during World War II. For more on the deportations of Roma and Sinti from Germany, see the related items in Experiencing History, Photo of Deportation of Sinti People in Asperg, Germany and Photo of Romani Section of Lodz Ghetto. As many as 500,000 Romani people were murdered during the Nazi-led genocide of Roma and Sinti during World War II

 

For more on Romani prisoners’ experiences in Auschwitz, see the related items in Experiencing History, Letter from Otto Rosenberg and Electric Insulator from Auschwitz. See also Otto Rosenberg’s memoir, A Gypsy in Auschwitz: How I Survived the 'Forgotten Holocaust,' translated by Maisie Musgrave (London: Monoray, 2022), 152–158.

See Walter Winter, Memoirs of a German Sinto Who Survived Auschwitz, translated by Struan Robertson (Hertfordshire: University of Hertfordshire Press, 2004), 50–51.

Michelle Kelso, "Roma Women and the Holocaust: Testimonies of Sexual Violence in Romanian-Controlled Transnistria," in Women and Genocide: Gendered Experiences of Violence, Survival, and Resistance, edited by Donna Gosbee & Joann DiGeorgio-Lutz (Toronto: Canadian Scholars' Press, 2016), 48–50.

To learn more about Ceija Stojka, see The Memoirs of Ceija Stojka: Child Survivor of the Romani Holocaust, translated by Lorely E. French (Rochester: Camden House, 2022).

See The USHMM Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933–1945, Vol I: Early Camps, Youth Camps, and Concentration Camps and Subcamps under the SS-Business Administration Main Office, edited by Geoffrey P. Megargee (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009), 260.

Roughly 2,000 Roma and Sinti are thought to have been liberated from Bergen-Belsen. For more on the experiences of Romani survivors of the camp, see this related film.

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Archival Information for This Item

Source (Credit)
US Holocaust Memorial Museum, Courtesy of the Imperial War Museum
Source Number 63055
Date Created
April 17, 1945
Photographer / Creator
Sergeant Morris, No. 5 Army Film and Photo Section, Army Film and Photographic Unit
Location
Bergen-Belsen, Germany
Still Image Type Photograph
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