For Janko Lauenberger, the school days in the GDR were a bad experience.
"Jew, Gypsy, Cuban, Arab, Turk, Kanak" - that was how his classmates insulted him in the East Berlin district of Lichtenberg.
The black-haired boy with the dark complexion became an outsider because his parents were Sinti.
One day an older classmate grabbed him and pushed his head under a faucet.
"If you say one more note, I'll forget you," he shouted scornfully.
Janko's parents protested, but no one apologized to their son.
The teachers even punished him instead of protecting him from further attacks.
"It's a shame you were born in the GDR," he heard.
Because of his origins, the boy was considered an uncomfortable troublemaker.
As the torture of his classmates increased, he struggled and struck.
Torn from the family
Thereupon he was forcibly taken to a children's home for difficult educators in Thuringia, far away from his parents.
The director of the home forwarded information about him to the Stasi.
Other Sinti who fell through the ideological grid of the socialist “workers and peasants state” were also discriminated against on a daily basis.
Only about 300 members of this people lived in the GDR.
They did not want to be lumped together with the Roma who had spread across Eastern Europe.
But even those who worked regularly were confronted with stubborn prejudices: in the eyes of many of their fellow citizens, they were considered lazy, dishonest and skillful trick thieves.
In contrast to the Sorbs, the Sinti were not recognized as an ethnic minority by the SED regime.
They were mostly refused entry to the West, where many of their relatives lived.
»Synonym for rabble and assis«
"For us, Gypsies was a synonym for rabble and Assis." Such prejudices struck the Quedlinburg-born author Simone Trieder when she was researching a book about the Sinti in the GDR.
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Title: Sinti in the GDR: Everyday Life of a Minority (Edition Zeit-Geschichte (n), Vol. 7)
Publisher: Mitteldeutscher Verlag
Number of pages: 144
Author: Markus Hawlik-Abramowitz, Simone Trieder
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For some people, however, the myth of the »traveling people« also had a fascination - a counter-image to life in the GDR.
"A life that had a lot to do with fear, with regulation down to the private sphere," writes Trieder.
"On the other hand, there was a longing for independence, for colors and, on the other hand, defiance towards authorities."
"One sees us day thieves, we call us gypsy brood and yet one sings and plays our ways," complained a Sintiza in 1965 in a letter to the editor to the newspaper "Die Wochenpost", which was very popular at the time.
The photographer Markus Hawlik-Abramowitz came closer to the Sinti than many others.
For his diploma thesis, he photographed several families in Brandenburg, Saxony-Anhalt and Thuringia in the early 1980s.
Exotics in everyday life in the GDR
He portrayed the women, men and children in their immediate surroundings.
Many of the black and white images reflect the dreariness of typical suburban settlements.
But their unusual clothing alone differentiated these people from the uniform gray of the GDR.
“I first came into contact with a family who lived in a house on the outskirts of Halle.
We soon became friends, and the initial skepticism quickly disappeared, ”says Hawlik-Abramowitz.
In his photos you can see how strong the family ties were.
Young and old move together, hug, sometimes laugh at the camera.
The Sinti he met did not correspond to the stereotype of unsteady nomads.
They had a permanent residence, but also owned trailers and horses.
Showman and scissor grinder
They drove them to fairs, where they operated carousels as showmen, let children ride ponies and baked waffles.
Or they parked in a field where people stood in line to sharpen their scissors and knives.
»They did not live completely excluded, even if they were completely different from the average GDR citizen.
As long as they conformed, there was no tension.
At least that's how I experienced it, ”he said.
"Only when they resisted, as Janko Lauenberger did, did they run into problems."
During the GDR era, the photographer had no way of publishing these pictures.
The public interest was too little.
Most of the recordings in the book that he worked on with Simone Trieder had not been published anywhere before.
An elderly woman appears in his photos who was in a concentration camp during the Nazi era.
Hawlik-Abramowitz learned of the persecution of the "Gypsies" in the "Third Reich" through his own family.
During the Night of the Pogroms in 1938, the photographer's father and other Jews were deported from Halle to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, where Sinti were also imprisoned.
From 1936, their children were no longer allowed to go to school in Germany.
Many of them were forcibly sterilized.
Forced sterilization in the »Third Reich«
The Sinto Josef Muscha Müller describes in his book "And I may not cry either" how he was hidden from the Gestapo by the Social Democrats in a garden in Halle during the war.
He had been operated on in the hospital shortly before, allegedly having had his appendix removed.
He learned the bitter truth much later.
In the GDR, Müller was able to attract Erich Honecker's attention.
The then board member of the Association of Victims of the Nazi Regime enabled him to train as a home educator as "compensation".
However, this individual case did not change the fact that the suffering of the Sinti under the »Third Reich« was largely hushed up in the GDR.
As Trieder explains using many examples, as concentration camp survivors they often fought in vain for reparations.
If they managed to be recognized as victims of fascism, even minor crimes were enough to have their status deprived.
Many members of the jazz musician Janko Lauenberger were also murdered by the Nazis.
One of them was Erna Lauenburger, his grandmother's cousin, who died in Auschwitz in 1944.
Grete Weiskopf alias Alex Wedding set her a literary monument in her children's book »Ede und Unku« in 1931.
more on the subject
Children's book classic "Ede und Unku": What became of UnkuBy Juliane von Wedemeyer
The book about the friendship between a working-class boy and a "gypsy" girl, which was banned under the Hitler regime, was later declared compulsory reading in schools in the GDR.
The old prejudices remained, however.
In the book "Ede und Unku: The True Story", published in 2018, which he wrote together with the journalist Juliane von Wedemeyer, Janko Lauenberger links the fate of his ancestors with his own experiences.
In the victim ranking behind communists and Jews
In the hierarchy of the victims of the Nazi regime, the Communists and Social Democrats in the GDR came first, ahead of the Jews and the Sinti persecuted for "racial reasons".
The latter were alleged to have been imprisoned not because of their political convictions, but because of an "anti-social way of life".
The Sinto Ewald Hanstein believed for a long time that he had achieved something in the GDR.
His parents and siblings perished in the Nazi camps.
After the war he joined the SED and became a people's policeman in Magdeburg.
"Policeman is probably the job that is furthest removed from the Sinto mentality", Trieder quotes from Hanstein's 2005 book "Meine Hundred Leben" (My Hundred Lives).
"The state has always faced us as an enemy."
Hanstein could not avoid this fate either.
In 1951 his career was suddenly over.
He was placed in solitary confinement for ten months following a false accusation by a colleague.
He was thrown out of the party and was no longer allowed to return to his profession.
He then moved with his family to the Federal Republic.
The writer and environmental activist Reimar Gilsenbach worked tirelessly for decades for the rights of the Sinti in the GDR.
But he was rarely able to do anything against the authorities.
During the SED rule he did not succeed in publishing his meticulous research in book form.
Twenty years after he had met two distant relatives of "Unku", Gilsenbach was able to publish an article about the Sinti girl in the "Wochenpost" in 1986.
Late commemoration
In the same year, a memorial stone was inaugurated at the Marzahn cemetery in Berlin, which was to commemorate the nearby Nazi forced camp for Sinti and Roma.
Apparently this was an indirect reaction to a long letter Gilsenbach had sent to State Council Chairman Honecker in 1985.
However, nothing is known about a statement by Honecker.
Gilsenbach was not invited to the ceremony.
Only in 1990 was a marble slab attached to the cemetery on which the murder of Sinti in Auschwitz is mentioned.
The Federal Republic officially recognized the Nazi mass murder of the Sinti and Roma in 1982.
After Gilsenbach's death in 2001, his widow handed over a hundred files to the Documentation Center for Sinti and Roma in Heidelberg.
Much of this material has not yet been evaluated.
