Her name was Brunhilde Witt and she was born on 12th April 1933 in Minden.

Roxanna described the how the stories of her grandmother and other survivors are preserved in her family, through the descendents alive today:

My childhood was filled with the tales my grandmother told me. For all her life, the trauma of the Holocaust has dominated the memory of her childhood, making it hard for her to trust other people, suffering from severe psychological and psychosomatic consequences until she died. The stories she told mostly focused on how she and her family had to hide from the Nazis in the cellars of neighbours or in the forest, suffering from hunger and fearing for their lives with her father being amongst the Sinti who were deported.

When the liberation happened, my grandmother would tell me about this day and when the American and British soldiers came.

She remembered how she and her siblings ran out of the forest and how the streets were full of military forces and how they would give them chocolate, throwing goods and sweets into the arms of the liberated.

My family has always been grateful to the people who saved their lives by putting their own in danger, no matter if they were the German neighbours that would hide them in their cellar, putting their own lives at risk, or the British and Americans who came to liberate us from the Nazis.

Brunhilde’s family had been living in Minden for a long time before the war started. They were well established in the community and the local graves of her family date back to the 1800s. Before the war her family were middle-class citizens of the town. The area is well-known for its Sinti population, and over generations Brunhilde’s family helped to build up the town and wider area as an integrated part of the community. As the Nazis grew in power, things got worse for her family.

One day Brunhilde and her younger sister were walking in the marketplace with their mother, who was pregnant at the time. They were stopped by SS soldiers who began to beat their mother in the middle of the marketplace. They repeatedly kicked her pregnant stomach in front of her two children until she eventually lost the baby.

While Brunhilde managed to evade capture by the Nazis, others in her family were not so lucky. Her father was deported to Auschwitz near the end of the war. Her cousin was also sent to the death camp where she was a victim of Nazi experimentation, including one occasion when SS doctors cut her open and sewed a living cat inside her belly. She fainted and when neither she nor the cat inside her were moving anymore, the SS threw her onto the pile of corpses in the camp. A Jewish doctor, who was a prisoner as well, noticed that her limbs were still moving slightly and secretly saved her. She returned home but was heavily traumatized for the rest of her life. Her trauma affected the whole family for generations. The story of what the Nazis did to her was one of Roxanna’s “childhood tales”, alongside vivid memories of the scent of burning human flesh.

After the war, like many others, Brunhilde’s family was left with nothing but the vivid memory of hunger. They had almost no documents to claim back what was originally theirs. Many of her family were left to live in devastating poverty for decades after the war had finished. The family’s memory of the position they once held in society, and how it was taken away from them, has continued to affect their mentality. All of the survivors of the Holocaust urged their children to finish school, undergo training, or complete further education.

Brunhilde was always proud of Roxanna attending school and being able to read and write, having never had the opportunity to do these things herself as a child. Roxanna’s mother and grandfather taught her reading and writing when she was very little, long before school started, so she could write her name and read the newspapers already when others were still in kindergarten. Whenever Brunhilde had a visit from relatives or family friends, she would ask 5 year old Roxanna to read aloud in front of all of them because she was so proud.

Because of the urgings of Brunhilde and other survivors in the family, most of Roxanna’s cousins have finished school or vocational training and she is the first in her family to complete a university degree.

I think it is part of a mentality that runs in our family, that we never were subhumans like the nazis wanted to make us believe. We have been striving to prove them wrong ever since.