Kurt Ansin - A Sinto from the Magdeburg Holzweg camp

Self-appointed “gypsy researchers” took this colour photo of Kurt Ansin in the Magdeburg internment camp for Sinti. The Magdeburg police had already registered all Sinti in the manner of criminals. Ansin was sixteen, had seven siblings and worked as a farmhand when he was arbitrarily arrested in 1938 and deported to Buchenwald. He was detained there for just under a year and then released. In 1943, he and the rest of his family were deported to Auschwitz. Later the SS sent him to Buchenwald once again to perform slave labour. He survived the heavy labour in the Ellrich  subcamp. When he returned home, nearly all of his relatives were dead. He married, started a family, and eventually had eight children and twenty-one grandchildren.