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|  | | Following Muscha – ein Sinti-Kind im Dritten Reich [Muscha - a Sinti-Child in the Third Reich] (1993, Erika Klopp Verlag), and Denk nicht, wir bleiben hier!“ Die Lebensgeschichte des Sinto Hugo Höllenreiner ["Don‘t think we’re staying here!" The biography of the Sinto Hugo Höllenreiner], which won the 2006 German Youth Literature Prize for non-fiction, Anja Tuckerman‘s third novel focuses on the fate of a Sinti-child during the Third Reich.
An eleven-year-old boy survives the concentration camps and death marches and is taken in by a group of liberated French prisoners of war. So begins a child’s long journey to France at war’s end in 1945, and the beginning of being handed from family to family, home to home. The helpful group warns him not to divulge his German identity as Germans not only are not welcome in France, they are hated. Thus, the boy forgets everything about his past, except for his name - Mano.
The reader is viscerally drawn into Mano‘s dismal and confusing situation. At war’s end, the boy finds himself on a country road in the middle of nowhere. Together with some of his cousins, he tries to find his way back home to Munich, but soon the small group of boys is torn apart. On his own, Mano is too weak to continue the journey alone. French ex-prisoners find him and take the sick, half-unconscious child with them. They warn him not to let anybody know he is German. This is how Mano, in a fever-induced delirium, and for fear of returning to the camp, forgets his German past. The only memento of his father, a photo with his home address on the back, is taken away and torn to pieces. From now on he is known only as Mano, a Jewish concentration camp survivor.
In Paris, he is taken in by the Fouqet family, who treat him like their own son. Nevertheless, Mano finds it difficult to settle in. He can’t figure out what country he is in, and doesn’t know the language. The reader is confronted with this foreign language and like Mano has to figure out the meaning. Mano’s new surroundings make him restless and he is constantly on guard. At night his fears are greatest and he is unable to sleep alone or get used to lying in a proper bed. His mood swings make him aggressive, and he refuses to allow anybody near him for fear of being sent away again. He continuously hears the French criticizing the Germans: "Sales Allemands! Sales Boches!"
Over time he opens up a bit, and talks about being imprisoned in Auschwitz, Ravensbrück and Sachsenhausen, reveals his number Z-3526, and that he was on the death march. He is emaciated and has serious health problems due to malnutrition, painful edema has formed in his feet and legs, and his body shows scars from abuse. Again and again, brief flashbacks reveal the traumas he experienced in the camps, but he keeps most of the stories to himself.
He is brought to a summer camp to recuperate with other children and the traces of his past become apparent: he’s terrified to go to the bathroom at night even though it is well-lit, because it was precisely this light that informed the SS when somebody left the barracks without permission- and that somebody could get shot, if worst came to worst.
Mano’s memory returns in the camp: he realizes where he is from and who his family is. Perhaps he had never really forgotten. He is German, not a Jew. He cannot tell anybody for fear of being shot. But his silence also means that he will never have the chance to return to his own family—assuming they are still alive. Moreover, he feels at home with the Fouqets, who have become a new family to him, and this dilemma leads Mano to keep silent for a very long time.
Because he is still aggressive and restless, Mano is taken to a psychiatric clinic to be examined before he starts school. They give him a new name: André Mano, thinking he wouldn’t be treated properly otherwise. They diagnose him incorrectly, and he is given electric shock treatments to calm him down. Naturally, the procedure produces the opposite effect: More and more memories of the concentration camps are awakened in him, and the little mental stability that he was able to attain at the Fouqet’s is destroyed. Mano is subsequently transferred to a home and put up for adoption.
Nonetheless Mano’s fate changes once again for the better: he is taken in by the Chevrier’s, a loving couple, who are teachers in the ruins of Le Havre, and they teach him to read and write. Gradually, Mano learns to trust them and tells them of his previous life in Germany, which he now begins to remember in detail. The Chevrier‘s embark on a journey in search of Mano Höllenreiner’s parents, and after much effort, the Gypsy family, originally from Hungary, is finally reunited in Munich in December 1946. Both parents, the sister, grandfather and the cousins survived the death camps.
Anja Tuckermann tells the story of Mano’s past through a kaleidoscope of historical documents scattered throughout the narrative. She includes letters and files starting in fall of 1945 from the Emergency Service for Displaced French Citizens, the Child Search and Registration UNRRA organization, the Concentration Camp Survivor Center in Munich and Mano’s parents. Tuckermann allows the reader viscerally to experience how complicated it was to bring families together that had been scattered and torn apart during the Nazi era.
During the research for „Denk nicht, wir bleiben hier!“, which tells the story of her grandfather, Anja Tuckermann stumbled upon the story of Mano Höllenreiner: From the outset she draws the reader into the poignant story of the deported boy, and allows us to witness the long journey through France, a journey accompanied by fears, doubts and horrific memories. The passages told from Mano‘s perspective gives the reader an insight into his traumatic experiences in the concentration camps, the death march, and how people were humiliated and murdered before his eyes.
Tuckermann knows better than to overly dramatize the agonizing and tender moments of the boy’s story. Mano’s emotionally riveting story is accompanied by documents and factual incidents of WWII, and is supplemented by photographs at the beginning and end of the book, so that through this individual story, readers better understand the precarious situation of Gypsies in and after the Second World War.
Anna Hein
January 2010
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