VALKENBURG 2024 – 80 years free

Point 18 – The forgotten Holocaust,

Memorial to the deportees

Bluma Meinhardt and Roger Moreno lit the first candle in Houthem church for the forgotten Holocaust.
They have known each other for a long time. On March 3, 2018, they participated in the unveiling of a memorial in Remscheid near Wuppertal in memory of the deportation of Bluma’s family and the Mettbach, Bamberger and Diesenberger families from the place where they lived. Ayia Corstanje-Uncu’s image below shows the moment in Auschwitz when her father Frido hides and thus survives.

Father accompanies on his violin the procession of prisoners (including his wife and seven children) to the gas chamber. Frido hides in the roadside.
Source: Errichtung eines Denkmals am Blaffertsberg für die von dort deportierten Remscheider Roma- und Sintifamilien ins KZ Auschwitz am 2. bzw. 3. März 1943 (Erection of a memorial on Blaffertsberg for the Roma and Sinti families deported from Remscheid to the Auschwitz concentration camp on March 2 and 3, 1943)
Memorial and Education Center Pferdestall Remscheid e.V. (Germany)

Prayer in Auschwitz
Our Father in Heaven, I never really learned a prayer because I wasn’t allowed to go to school, I’m just a Gypsy.
And yet my Father, I need to talk to you for a moment.
You know God, I was content. I have got my children, my dear wife, a horse and carriage and my violin, yes the one of my Father.
Until the moment the men with the black boots came.
The fear in my little daughter’s beautiful eyes, the train, which took her away.
“Tata help me” again and again I hear her scream in the cold wind. This place where they brought us, it’s raining fire here. We are hungry. All this smoke from the incinerators, colors our tears black. Father in Heaven, with all my love and respect, I pray You, I beg for them: put an end to this horror, let this war stop. And if that cannot be done Lord, give them eternal rest.

Reunited in a handful of ashes after many years

Bluma Meinhardt wrote the story of her family in the book Valkenburg 2024 - 80 Years of Liberation

“UNTERMENSCHEN are to be exterminated”.
So said the great Führer Adolf Hitler. And all Jews, gypsies, homosexuals and disabled people were deported. The whole Bamberger family, as my grandfather was called, had to line up for the big round-up in Remscheid. The group walked in a long column to the town’s train station and were transported in cattle wagons to what turned out to be the Auschwitz camp in Poland. Tata, my grandfather, had to work, and grandmother and all the children were taken to a women’s camp. Grandfather had to help build incinerators, and when they were finished, they were put into operation immediately. Women and children were transported away in a long line.
Grandfather had to accompany these columns each time with his violin.

Until one day he saw his wife passing by with the children. His music and his tears accompanied them on this last road. Grandma still had the power to push her son Friedel into a ditch in an unguarded moment. This is how he survived the camp and the subsequent death marches. Grandpa was never able to play the violin again.
Grandpa Bamberger and Friedel returned to Remscheid after many wanderings. Friedel married and in 1960 Bluma was born. The Family moved to the Netherlands. It seemed like the promised land. We were no longer scum, but just counted like everyone else. I was allowed to go to school and with the help of a pastor who took me under his wing, I was even enabled to finish journalism school in Tilburg. I broke a taboo and tell Grandpa’s story wherever I can: How he had to empty the gas chamber and haul his wife and seven of their children out of the incinerators and later scatter the ashes in a pool near the camp. When Tata died and was cremated, I took a handful of his ashes to Auschwitz and mixed them with the ashes from the death camp pool.

That’s how the family came together again after so many years.

See also: 1st candle, The forgotten Holocaust. Bluma Meinhardt and Roger Moreno