Germany mourns Holocaust dead and opens new museum (Roundup)

Jan 27, 2011, 12:40 GMT

Berlin - A gypsy survivor of the Holocaust recalled as guest speaker in the German parliament Thursday how his parents and siblings were dragged away by the Nazis in the Netherlands and taken to the Auschwitz death camp to be killed.

Tears welled up in the eyes of many parliamentarians as Zoni Weisz, 73, spoke on Holocaust Day of the family's 'deportation' in May 1944 and deaths, and his own escape thanks to a friendly Dutch policeman. He survived the rest of the Second World War in hiding.

He was the first gypsy to give the keynote address after many years where Jewish survivors took the role at the Berlin ceremony.

'The genocide of the Sinti and Roma remains a forgotten Holocaust to this day,' he said. 'I have heard dozens of Holocaust speeches in recent years where the fate of the Sinti and Roma was not remembered in any way at all.'

The speaker of the German parliament Norbert Lammert, said during the solemn ceremony that the horrors perpetrated by Nazi Germany must never be forgotten.

Of the Sinti and Roma, Lammert said, 'To this day, the biggest minority in Europe is probably its most discriminated-against minority too.'

Weisz agreed, saying that society had learned 'almost nothing' or else 'they would treat us more responsibly.'

Weisz told his own story, of growing up in a happy family in Zutphen in the Netherlands, where his father had a shop selling musical instruments. The boy escaped on railway platform where the Nazis were loading prisoners on cattle trucks for Auschwitz.

The survivor, who is a leading Dutch florist, said a policeman quietly pointed to a train leaving from the opposite track.

The boy ran and boarded it unnoticed, and later found refuge with relations.

Historians estimate the Nazis murdered up to 500,000 Sinti and Roma during their rule, while between 5 million and 6 million Jews lost their lives. Disabled people and political and religious dissidents were also among the groups systematically killed.

Germany meanwhile added to its dozens of monuments and museums marking the years of persecution with a new museum in the eastern city of Erfurt in an office building where the Auschwitz death camp crematorium was designed by a private contractor.

The memorial at the former Topf und Soehne engineering plant was to be inaugurated in the evening. The company supplied furnaces to the Nazis in 1942 to burn the bodies of up to 1 million dead more efficiently at Auschwitz, now in modern-day Poland.

The memorial joins the Holocaust Monument in the heart of Berlin and preserved concentration camps all over the country as visible reminders of the genocide that continued till the Nazis' defeat.

January 27, the anniversary of the Red Army's liberation of Auschwitz in 1945, is marked as Holocaust Day internationally.

Topf und Soehne went out of business years ago and only its office building is left. It has been refurbished as an information centre to teach schoolchildren and tourists about the Holocaust.

German President Christian Wulff was in Poland to attend ceremonies on the site of Auschwitz itself.

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