Hermann Höllenreiner, a Sinti German raised in Bavaria who survived the Nazis’ Auschwitz concentration camp as a child, has died aged 92.
Munich’s Hanser Verlag publisher and the International Auschwitz Committee said that he had passed away last Friday, October 16, in Mettenheim in Bavaria, surrounded by his family.
Höllenreiner, known as “Mano” to his large Bavarian Sinti family, spent time at the Auschwitz-Birkenau, Ravensbrück and Sachsenhausen camps as a child.
“Only later in his life did he start to tell his story and became a major witness of the era, who hauntingly reported on the horrors of Auschwitz, the perpetrators and the victims, and above all of the still-persistnent discrimination of Sinti and Roma in Europe,” Christioph Heubner, executive vice president of the International Auschwitz Committee, said.
“Mano Höllenreiner’s biography and tales of suffering were enough for more than one life. What he saw with his own eyes as a child in Auschwitz and what was done to him — for many decades he didn’t know how to speak out about it,” Heubner said, thanking Höllenreiner for his “courage and humanity” in ultimately telling his story.
Höllenriener managed to flee one of the so-called “death marches” fleeing extermination camps in as Allied armies approached.
Author Anja Tuckermann told his story in a book whose title roughly translates as: “Mano. The boy who didn’t know where he was.”
He was initially found on a roadside and rescued by liberated French prisoners, who took him home with them. In 1946, he was reunited with surviving relatives in Germany.
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