Winter Time

Memoirs of a German Sinto who survived Auschwitz

Walter Winter (translated and annotated by Struan Robertson)

 

"One of the most unusual and moving war stories you’ll ever read"
Daily Express

Chosen as one of the Daily Express Literary Editor’s "Books of the Year 2004"

 

"This marvellous little book sets the record straight and is an absolute ‘must read’ for Romani and gorja alike. It is a book that the reader will find rather difficult to put down again until he has read it all"
Michael Veshengro Smith, International Romani Guild, Travellers’ Times

 

In this book German Sinto Walter Winter relates his remarkable wartime experience. One of nine children, he was conscripted into the German navy only to be discharged on ‘racial grounds’. In 1943, together with two siblings, he was deported to the ‘Gypsy Camp’ of Auschwitz-Birkenau. Over a year later, shortly before the extermination of the entire camp, he was deported to Ravensbrūck and from there to Sachsenhausen concentration camp. Grotesquely, before the war was over he was reconscripted and forced to fight against the Red Army on the Russian front.

Walter Winter recounts his memories of Nazi persecution with extraordinary courage and compassion. He does not flinch from recounting the dreadful crimes he witnessed in the camps and the cruel deaths of so many. The fate of Germany’s Sinti and Roma at the hands of the Nazis is still too little known and Winter Time makes an important contribution to righting that wrong. In this book, extensive notes throw valuable new light on the policy of the Third Reich and successive post-war governments towards the Sinti and Roma.

Walter Winter lives in Hamburg with his third wife. After the war he worked in the family circus and funfair and, although now retired, he is still to be found at the Hamburg fair almost daily.

 

ISBN-10 1-902806-38-7

ISBN-13 978-1-902806-38-9

October 2004, 192pp

Paperback £9.99 / US$19.95