Without warning, on June 26, 1939, the police and the SS raided the Roma settlement in Oberwart. It marked the beginning of the first mass deportation in Burgenland. The men were transported via the Dachau concentration camp to Buchenwald. Among them was 17-year-old Michael Horvath. His family had lived in the region for generations; despite all the discrimination, he remembers a happy childhood. As “Gypsies,” he and the other men suffered under the harshest working conditions at Buchenwald and later at Mauthausen concentration camps. He was one of the few to return home and start a family. However, the discrimination never ended. A bomb attack killed two of his grandchildren in 1995.
