Shared Sorrows A Gypsy Family remembers the Holocaust

On the morning after Kristallnacht, Toby Sonneman's father walked through broken glass to apply for the visa that saved him from the fate of so many during the Third Reich. In examining her own family history, the author discovered the similarities between the fate of the Jews and the Gypsies in the Holocaust, both peoples selected on racial grounds for extermination by the Nazis.

She traveled with an American Gypsy survivor to Munich, where she stayed with the formidable Rosa Mettbach. This is the story of Rosa and other members of an extended family who survived the Holocaust. Shared Sorrows tells the story of a Gypsy family against the backdrop of a Jewish one, detailing and examining their shared sufferings under the Nazis.

"My father brought a spool of thread with him from Germany when he came to America in 1939. And another spool of thread, one in my imagination, unwinds slowly and unpredictably, sometimes fraying or tangling. It's a thin and delicate thread that leads me to the Gypsies, to the family that I meet in Germany, the country of so many tangled memories and emotions. And as I talk to them and I listen, following the threads of their stories backwards in time to the 1930s and 40s and before, their memories start to become mine as well."

Toby Sonneman is a writer, teacher, and the author of Fruit Fields in My Blood, a non-fiction book about fruit pickers in the American West. She has two children and lives in Bellingham, Washington.

REVIEWS

"Sonneman has assembled a contemporary portrait of one extended family of Gypsy survivors, individuals who have suffered greatly and do not believe their suffering matters to anyone else. As Mettbach remarks, 'No trust nobody no more, you know?' These oral testimonies are a powerful contribution to the understading of the Gypsy experience of the Holocaust." Na'mat Woman 2004, Spring, 21-2

"This book should be obligatory reading for historians of National Socialism in Germany. ... Toby Sonneman has not only thoroughly researched her subject but as a result of her Jewish roots this is a very personal account. ... She has a narrative talent which makes this documentary read more like a gripping detective story which is emotionall without being trivialised. ... This is a really important book which fills a gap in the literature."