![]() ![]() At the same time, she struggled with the lack of official recognition of the victimisation of Sinti and Roma in the Holocaust and the lack of restitution. In the years that followed, she suffered from severe depression, repeated nightmares and an ever-returning sense of being in captivity. Aid was not readily available for Romani survivors, so Franz joined forces with other Sinti musicians to form a band, which toured the country and played for the liberating troops.ĭuring this period, she met Oskar Franz, whom she married and with whom she had five children. After the war, she discovered that most of her family had been murdered in the camps. After one failed attempt to escape from Ravensbrück, Franz succeeded in escaping from a camp near Wittenberge in 1945 and, with the help of a German farmer, managed to stay alive and hidden. This life of creativity and freedom ended in the late 1930s when her family’s passports and later their instruments were confiscated, and in 1943 Franz was deported to Auschwitz. ![]() She fondly remembers the highlights of this period such as performing at the Lido in Paris and the Winter Gardens in Berlin. ![]() As a young girl growing up in a Sinti family of musicians and performers with long-established roots in Germany, Franz sang and danced as a member of her family’s company. Philomena Franz, born in Biberach, Germany in 1922, was the first Romani woman to record in writing her experiences in the concentration camps under the Third Reich. ![]()
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