German Sintiza Philomena Franz died at the age of 100. Persecuted by the Nazi regime, she survived the Auschwitz concentration camp. After 1945 she became a contemporary witness and campaigned for reconciliation.
Philomena Franz (1922-2022)
Turning one hundred years old is almost a miracle. Surviving the concentration camps of Auschwitz-Birkenau and Ravensbrück all the more. Philomena Franz was born in 1922 in Biberach an der Riss, her mother a Jewess, her father a Sinto from Tours, near France. Her family was racially persecuted by our ancestors as “the others”. Sinti came to Europe 600 years ago and so also to Germany, just as Roma came to us 250 years ago. They are Germans, but the Nazi Germans excluded, persecuted and murdered them. And many citizens in Germany still stigmatize them.
Many of Philomena Franz's family did not survive. Like about six million Jews and 500,000 Sinti and Roma. But she managed to resist with everything she was capable of: through faith in God and through song. Because she sang in the concentration camp to encourage herself and others. Her trained soprano, her song saved her when she was lost to the world.
Philomena Franz, the “Woman of Europe” in 2001, awarded the Federal Cross of Merit and the Order of Merit of North Rhine-Westphalia and honorary citizen of the district town of Bergisch Gladbach, read from her impressive book “Between Love and Hatred” for many decades. At home and abroad, in schools and universities, she spread the message of her life: “If we hate, we lose. If we love, we become rich.”
A triad determined their self-image: Sintiza, God, Germany. And so she ignited a light for all of us in the dark tunnel of Auschwitz. And so we can accept this horror without despairing of being German. We all have the Holocaust tattooed on our memorial skin. We know what genocide is and know Celan's verse “Death is a master from Germany”. This is where our responsibility comes from. The authors of the anthology “Heaven over Philomena/Auschwitz looks at us” (Pop Verlag, Ludwigsburg 2022) faced this question, which was published on the occasion of the Philomena-Franz-Forum e.V. was published on July 21, 2022 in the city of Rösrath.
It was soldiers of the Red Army who liberated the SS death camp in Auschwitz almost 78 years ago. On January 27, 1945, an unimaginable horror revealed itself to them. This day has only been a national day of remembrance in Germany since 1996. Not a few want to rant about the genocide of Jews, Sinti and Roma today, they don't want these people in the middle of our state.
Soon, on Holocaust Remembrance Day on January 27, 2023, the dead, who rose in the smoke from the incinerators of Auschwitz and the other death camps in Europe, will speak to us again. “The memory of Auschwitz is part of our national identity,” politicians often say. But what does that mean in the cities of Germany? As a Sintiza and a Jew, Philomena Franz was in the place that is the word of terror in Germany. Achieving identity can only succeed on the tracks of memory. Only it leads to us as a state and nation – and we cannot escape both terms and dispose of them in Europe.
And so we also have to face up to our failure to prosecute the concentration camp murders under criminal law: over 20,000 SS personnel were employed as guards in the concentration camps. And there were over 1600 concentration camps in Europe with all the subcamps. An unimaginable number.
Since the Nuremberg trials before the founding of the Federal Republic in the years 1946 to 1949, when the “major war criminals” stood before the court, we Germans have been shaped by the closing line mentality.
And what's left after all? despair and disgust? no Germany is a civil country, one that also has spirit, strength and courage. We are all citizens. The millions of Auschwitz remain close to us, like all those who have gone up in smoke and who want to speak to us. Let's finally listen to them!
Philomena Franz remains as a great woman, as Sintiza, Jewess and German in the midst of our search for identity as a people and state. Her life is a handout, her life was a song with which she could drive away the demons for a moment in a few verses. When is a school, university or former Adolf Hitler Square named after her? Without the continued impact of Philomena Franz's life's work, Germany would be a mistake.
Matthias Buth (born 1951) is a German lawyer, poet and writer. In 2021 he founded the “Philomena-Franz-Forum” together with the namesake. Buth has been writing political feuilletons for German-language media in Europe since 2016.