Category Archives: Media

Plan to remove Sinti-Roma memorial causes outrage

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A new train tunnel running under the memorial has been described as ‘macabre’ given how many Sinti and Roma were deported by rail to their deaths
Derek Scally in Berlin
Fri Aug 02 2024

“This is a symbolic grave for all those who lost their lives, and it is a shame if it is up to this minority to defend it,” said Alexandra Senfft, co-author of Great Uncle Paul’s Violin Bow, a memoir about Romeo Franz and his family. “This is also a memorial for the German people and it is our responsibility, as the majority in the society, to save it.”

>> to article, Irish Times 2/24

Foto: Alexandra Senfft

Sinti

Holocaust horror can yield deeper insight into dealing with other dilemmas of history

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Sympathy for victims and survivors of atrocity only goes so far: we must empathise with people who need help now

Derek Scally, The Irish Times, October 31, 2022

“Through her pioneering work, Senfft explores questions of identity and trauma among perpetrator descendants. That work has brought her into contact with survivors and their families and she has appeared in two documentaries with Tomi Reichental…

“I bear no guilt but have taken on the responsibility to face the past,” she says. “We must break the silence in order to restore the victim and survivors’ dignity and to break the spell of the victimisers.”
>> read

John Boyne: ‘Would The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas be published today?

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“Only in the last years have grandchildren of Nazi perpetrators begun to break the silence on their family history in a way their parents could not. Leading the way is Alexandra Senfft – a close friend of this reporter’s – whose grandfather Hanns Ludin was Nazi governor in occupied Slovakia”
by Derek Scally, The Irish Times, September 20, 2022
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The German model for America

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The long and public reckoning that followed the Holocaust shows a path forward for a United States that desperately needs to confront its racist past.

“In her [Senfft’s] estimation, even now, the Nazis have been “othered,” as if the evil hadn’t taken root in Germans’ own families and neighborhoods. Those who did confront the crimes of their ancestors could not have been prepared for what that realization would feel like…
In American textbooks and schools and families, the same phenomenon that Senfft described of Nazism is true.”
By Mattie Khan, Vox.com
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Negacionismo

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“Alexandra Senfft from Germany says to “The Clinic”: “Human Rights are universal and should be globally recognized. If we don’t acknowledge the crimes of the past and remain silent or worse, deny what has happened, new injustice will be done. Denial makes us accomplices of crime. It is our duty to stop denial in order to protect people and to safeguard moral and legal standards.”
In: De qué hablamos cuando hablamos de negacionismo?, Catalina Llantén The Clinic, Chile, 31.1.2020
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