Johann Trollmann and Romani Resistance to the Nazis by Jud Nirenberg

His harrowing story has now been told in a new book by Jud Nirenberg. One of the most remarkable of the tens of thousands who suffered and died in the Neuengamme camps was a young man called Johann Trollmann.

My cousin died soon after a surgical procedure had been performed on him without sterilised instruments, or any form of anaesthetic, in one of the camp huts. They had all refused to join the German war effort and were subsequently forced to work in the construction of an enormous fortified bunker that was designed to accommodate a new type of U-boat. He was one of thirty-two Irish seamen who had been captured on Allied merchant ships.

The 55,000 individuals who died or were murdered in the Neuengamme network of camps include Sergei Nabokov, the gay younger brother of the celebrated novelist Rein Boomsma, the Dutch Resistance leader and a former international soccer star and Fritz Pfeffer, a Jewish dentist who had hidden with Anne Frank and her family in an attic in Amsterdam.Ī relative of mine also died in one of Neuengamme’s sub-camps. There were also a small number who had been sent there for criminal offences. Those slaves had been imprisoned for a variety of reasons: for their political or religious beliefs for their ethnic or racial origins and for their sexual orientation. Neuengamme may not be the best known of the many concentration camps set up by the Nazi regime, but more than 100,000 slave workers were held there and in its eighty-seven sub-camps during the Second World War. Irena’s Children: The Extraordinary Story of the Woman Who Saved 2,500 Children from the Warsaw Ghetto by Tilar J.Johann Trollmann and Romani Resistance to the Nazis, by Jud Nirenberg, Win by KO Publications, 222 pp, $24.95, ISBN: 9780990370376 “As long as I reside in their minds and hearts, I will never truly be gone.”Ģ. “The characters behind the poems come from different religions, different professions, and different ideologies.Like all of us, they want to be heard. “WAR CRIES: UNHEARD STORIES, UNMARKED GRAVES provides a stage for the voices-many inspired by people present in Europe during World War II-to speak their truths. “By listening to the voices of those with stories to tell, we can grow in our appreciation of what it means to be human. Each tale underscores the uniqueness of human perception based upon personality and circumstances. These were people very much like ourselves-men, women, children, siblings, poets, soldiers, students, professionals, laborers, givers, takers, jokers, dancers, lovers, dreamers, cowards and brave. But only the stories of those whose lives were changed or lost, can convey the true horror of the war.

“The devastation caused by World War II is described by historians in terms of military strategies and battles, the toll on economics, and the numbers of dead.

Johann Trollmann and Romani Resistance to the Nazis by Jud Nirenberg