The Roma population was among the groups persecuted by the Nazi regime for racial reasons. The Roma suffered internment, deportation and forced labor, and were also sent to extermination camps. The “Death Squads” (Einsatzgruppen) also killed hundreds of thousands of Roma in the eastern territories occupied by the Germans. For this reason, the fate of the Roma is closely comparable to that of the Jews. Porajmos or Porrajmos, which can be translated as “great devouring” or “devastation”, is the term that has been used for several decades to indicate the extermination of the Romani populations (Rom, Sinti, Manush, Kalé and others with different self-denominations) perpetrated by Nazi Germany and the Axis countries during the Second World War. It is estimated that this massacre caused the death of 500,000 of these people. The term, initially popularized by the English linguist Ian Hancock, one of the greatest scholars of the genocide, is today being questioned by the Romani communities themselves, because many consider it inappropriate. The term Samudaripen (Samudaripen = sa+mudaripen = all+killing = killing of all = extermination, genocide) is increasingly used and considered more appropriate.
The Nazis would never have imagined it.
The Nazis would never have imagined that she would outlive them. The almost one hundred-year-old Philomena Franz, who had escaped certain death several times, in an extermination camp and four concentration camps, delivers these words to the director, producer and film actor Detlev Buck, who was meeting her in her Berlin home to arrange an interview. It was 2020, and Buck had decided to make a documentary on the Holocaust for the Arte TV network. Until then he had never dared create a film about the Nazi persecutions. It was the survivors who encouraged him. They feared that future generations would forget what happened. Among them was Philomena Franz, a Sinti, who was born in 1922 and died a hundred years later, on December 28, 2022.
These are words spoken in a joking tone, but with a depth that transmits shivers and intense vitality. At ninety-eight years old – in front of Buck’s lens – she is capable of humor, even when she recalls the fascist plan to exterminate the Romani ethnic groups, the Porrajmos. The Nazis were convinced that they could annihilate the people and peoples they hated so much. They discriminated against, deported, depersonalized, dehumanized, and exterminated millions of human beings. First, they deprived them of their dignity, then of their life.
Philomena was also their victim: she suffered their violence, but she survived without ever losing her vital drive, which she held on to until her last years of life. This, the Nazis had not foreseen.
Philomena did not have an easy life, just as the life of her family of origin was not easy, a family of musicians like her, once appreciated. Her father, Johann Köhler, was a cellist, her mother a singer. Her grandfather, Johannes Haag, had played the cello at court, in a string quartet that in 1906 won an international competition and was awarded the “Goldene Rose”, the Golden Rose, personally presented by Wilhelm II of Württenberg.
Johannes Haag, who died in 1937, understood that the advent of Nazism would be followed by a dark period for those who did not align themselves with the regime. For his family, this was exactly the case. Until 1938, the musicians performed in famous theaters in various European cities, such as the Liederhalle Stuttgart in Stuttgart, the Lido in Paris, and the Wintergarten in Berlin. Then things changed. They lost everything: the imposing Horch sedan, the horses, their musical instruments. Philomena had to leave school. Even traveling was forbidden to them, so they could no longer practice their profession. They were required to do forced labor.
Philomena went to work for the Haga company. In Detlev Buck’s documentary, she says that the company Director saved her from the Nazis as long as was possible. But one day the Gestapo came looking for her, and she was deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau. She was assigned the number Z-10550, and it was tattooed on her arm, a number that would never disappear from her skin.
At a moment when you know you have no escape, when it would normally feel like the world is falling apart, Philomena didn’t lose her lucidity. Her thoughts went first of all to her mother, who she was very worried about. She told Buck that she had promised the Director that she would come back and see him, and after the war she actually did.
It happened that, while she was in the Lager, they asked her to sing. She even had to do it on the occasion of a visit to the camp by Himmler, for an inspection. The hierarch had all the prisoners who knew how to play instruments and sing perform. “Das war eine total verrückte Regierung. But eine mörderische ”, a completely mad, but murderous government.
In such a desperate condition she did not lose her awareness. She escaped twice. She knew fully well that she would die anyway, but she was determined to avoid – at all costs – that happening in an extermination camp. She wanted to die outside of that place. The first time she was found, but the second time she was successful. On that occasion too, there was a man who helped her, welcoming her into his home and hiding her until the Allies arrived.
Many of her loved ones lost their lives. There was no trace of her father.
Philomena was luckier: she continued to live, but experiences like these leave their mark. She suffered from depression and was hospitalized for months. However, she overcame it, and during her recovery she began to write about her experiences.
In the difficult phases of her life, she never lacked the strength to react. Like the time when her eldest son was insulted at school in the early 1960s. Some classmates called him “Du dreckiger Zigeuner ”, dirty gypsy. The experience moved something inside her, and she began to dedicate herself to the theme of gypsy fairy tales, the “Zigeunermärchen”, which she went and talked about in schools. Zigeunermärchen was in fact the title of her first book, published in 1982. A book of fairy tales for children, narrated by Franz also to make people aware of her people’s customs, to bring the reader closer to an ethnic group perceived as foreign and to foster greater understanding of it.
As a survivor of the Lagers, she felt called to spread her testimony. She actively participated in initiatives of educational institutions, in television and radio broadcasts, and she visited schools and universities.
Her positivity stands out in the documentary Die Musik verteilt den Schmerz. Ein Besuch bei Philomena Franz by Detlev Buck. Philomena is put at ease during the interview – the director brings a bouquet of her favorite flowers. She recounts her atrocious experience without trivializing it and at the same time without losing her sense of humor, and prompted by the interviewer, off-screen she sings songs from the repertoire of those times. A legacy to treasure, that of Philomena Franz. She passed away two years ago, but her message remains intact and clear in Zigeunermärchen, Zwischen Liebe und Hass (published in Italian in 2024 by Upre Roma with the title Z-10550. Tra amore e odio. Vita da zingara), Tragen wir einen Blütenzweig im Herzen, so wird sich immer wieder ein Singvogel darauf niederlassen, as well as in radio broadcasts and documentaries.
Human beings – and this is the lesson of her works – are endowed with an unsuspected strength, which can allow them to overcome the most desperate situations.
L’articolo Z-10550. In Memory of Philomena Franz proviene da ytali..
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