VICTIM                                                                          Amalie Schaich
When she was just nine years old, the Nazis took Amalie Schaich and her brothers and sisters away from their parents, and placed them in children's homes. Amalie's father was immediately sent to the concentration camp at Dachau and her mother was deported later. The Schaichs had done nothing wrong, they had committed no crime, but their family was torm apart as they became victims of the Nazis' racist campaign to fight what they called 'the Gypsy Menace'.

The people referred to simply as 'Gypsies' by their neighbours actually came from distinct peoples such as the Roma, Sinti, Lalleri and Medvashi. These groups had traditionalyy moved from place to place, following a nomadic lifestyle. Seen as outsiders by the majority of the population, they were often treated with suspicion and hostility and had been persecuted throughout Europe for centuries. The Nazis saw 'Gypsies' as racially inferior and believed the age-old lies that they were criminals.

For a while Amalie received letters from her parents, though many of the lines they had written had been crossed out by the Nazi censors so that they were unreadable. Then even these letters stopped and Amalie lost contact with her parents. In May 1944 Amalie and 40 or so other Sinti children were deported to Auschwitz from the children's home where she had lived for five years.

Some 25,700 'Gypsies' were sent to Auschwitz where about 2,700 were murdered in gas chambers as soon as they arrived. The others were placed in a section called the 'Gypsy Camp' where most died of illness or starvation or were later 'selected' for the gas chambers. Amalie was one of only 2,000 'Gypsies' sent to Auschwitz who survived the war. During the war the Nazis murdered at least 200,000 'Gypsies' from across Europe.