Herman “Mano” Hoellenreiner

Hermann Höllenreiner was born on 19th October 1933 in Hagen, to a family of German Sinti. His relatives nicknamed him “Mano.” His father and uncles were horse-sellers in Munich and his mother took care of the household. The Höllenreiner family was large: Mano hat a younger sister called Lili and many cousins. Before the war, the older children went to school.
After the Nuremberg Laws were passed in 1935, regulations were gradually introduced that discriminated Jewish, Sinti and Romani people, depriving them of their civil rights. Still, Mano’s family managed to stay undisturbed for some time. His father Johann had been a soldier of the German army during World War I and was respected as a veteran of war. Still, the family concealed their identity for reasons of security. When they were asked where they came from, they would always say: “Hungary.”

However, in March 1943, 9-year-old Mano, his parents and little sister were deported to KL Auschwitz, to the so-called “Gypsy camp” at Birkenau. Mano became inmate no. Z-3526 and was forced to perform labour which went beyond not only his physical strength, but also way beyond his mental powers as a child. He had to drag the bodies of dead people onto carriages that brought them away from the camp.

In 1944, Mano was transferred to KL Ravensbrück, where he miraculously escaped forced sterilisation, and then further on to KL Sachsenhausen. There, he was separated from his father who was forced to join Oskar Dirlewanger’s SS division and return to the front line. Mano was left with his older cousins. Together, they managed to escape from a death march, but Mano was so weak that he lost consciousness on his way back to Munich on foot.

He was taken care of by liberated French prisoners of war who took him to France with them. Mano recovered, but he was torn apart. On one hand, he wanted to go back home and look for his relatives. On the other hand though, he was afraid to confess who he really was and where he came from. He was convinced that “French people don’t like Germans” and that his new caretakers would send him back to a concentration camp if they found out the truth. Thus, he pretended to be Hungarian and to have forgotten his mother tongue due to his traumatic experience in the camps. For two years, he lived with several foster families in France, until the Höllenreiners managed to find him via his camp number from Auschwitz.

In the end of 1946, Mano returned to Munich to his sister, mum and dad – all four of them had survived the war. He grew up, started a family of his own and settled down in a quiet Bavarian village. He didn’t talk about his wartime experience to anyone, not even his wife and children. Still, his loved ones knew that his memories were haunting him: he’d often have nightmares and sometimes wake up screaming in the middle of the night. But Mano refused to confront his past. Only as an elderly man did he start to work on his trauma and tell the story of his family to the general public.

AUTHOR: Katarzyna Ciurapińska

Denial

This is a stage, occurring after every genocide. The perpetrators obliterate traces of the crime, hide evidence, and intimidate witnesses. They deny committing any crimes and often blame the victims for what happened. They block investigations and try to stay in power until they are forcibly forced to give it up or flee. Only fair and just trials and the imposition of punishment by courts or tribunals prevent the impunity of perpetrators and the progressive denial of crimes. Silence is one of the most common forms of denial. Silence following genocide perpetuates lack of awareness and denial.

How does this person’s story illustrate response to the particular stage of genocide in Dr. Stanton’s theory?

Mano Höllenreiner’s post-war history is a good example of the denial stage of genocide. The young boy had lived through a huge trauma, but he was so afraid to talk about it that he would rather stay with strangers in a foreign country than tell them the truth about himself. He had a bad conscience because he was German and thus a member of the “nation of perpetrators,” although he actually was a victim of the Nazis and not one of them. Moreover, he was afraid that he would once again be punished for his provenience – after all, he had already been sent to a concentration camp once just because he was a Sinto. Two long years went by before he gained enough trust in his caretakers to ask them to look for his family in Munich. Even after he returned to Germany, for many years he would not talk about his experience. Partly, this was also due to the fact that Sinti and Romani victims of concentration camps tended to be forgotten for a long time. Although they had been slaughtered just as brutally as Jewish people, this genocide – the Porajmos – was absent from history textbooks and the collective memory for many years after the war. Seeing how her husband was suffering from his long-suppressed trauma, Mano’s wife Else convinced him to start meeting young people and telling his story. As an elderly man, he met the German writer Anja Tuckermann and with her help, he wrote down his camp and post-war experience in a book called “Mano. Der Junge, der nicht wusste, wo er war” (“Mano. The boy who didn’t know where he was”). Currently, the book is a compulsory reading at school in several federal states of Germany, so that the history of Mano and the genocide of the Romani people is passed on to more and more young people.