Northwest Center for Holocaust, Genocide and Ethnocide Education

Review

A Review of Shared Sorrows: A Gypsy Family Remembers the Holocaust

by Christopher Brosell

Sonneman, Toby. (2002) Shared sorrows: A gypsy family remembers the Holocaust. Hertfordshire, UK: University of Hertfordshire Press. 26 chapters. 283 pages including bibliography and index.

For many, the Holocaust and Hitler's regime are associated with the fate of the Jews in the period between 1933 and 1945. In Shared Sorrows: A Gypsy Family Remembers the Holocaust, author Toby Sonneman adds depth and perspective to this perception by focusing awareness on the fate of the Gypsy victims of the Holocaust. A review of the literature reveals that relatively few books have been written on this topic and most are very scholarly in nature. Sonneman’s work is far more accessible to the lay reader and will be a welcome addition for the high school educator in search of resource materials.

Sonneman, who earned her Master’s degree in English at Western Washington University, is the daughter of a Holocaust survivor. In Shared Sorrows, Sonneman weaves together a narrative of her father’s experiences in Nazi Germany with those of the Gypsies she interviews. For example, Ms. Sonneman uses the imagery of a spool of thread her father brought to America to illustrate this connection:

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.(Sonneman, 2002, pp. 247, 255)

As she follows the threads, Sonneman documents the shared sorrows of Gypsies and Jews documenting their shared common historical bond. Both groups had been ostracized by European society. In many locations, discriminatory laws were passed to limit the freedoms of Gypsies and Jews. In fact, laws requiring Gypsies to register themselves with local governments were passed even before Hitler rose to power in Germany (Sonneman, 2002, p. 105).

In Shared Sorrows Sonneman presents the history of Rosa and other members of the Mettabach-Hollenreiner family who survived the Holocaust. Traveling to Germany with Reili Mettabach, a family member who had emigrated to the United States many years before, Sonneman had the opportunity to interview ten members of the extended Mettabach-Hollenreiner family. Through careful weaving of the Gypsy family’s experiences during the Holocaust with those of her own family, Sonneman creates a compelling book that captures the human reality of the Holocaust.

Shared Sorrows is an ideal book for educators who are interested in learning and teaching about the experience of Gypsies during the Holocaust as it provides a very personal account of the Nazi treatment of Gypsies during the 1930s and World War II. The book may be appropriate for high school classes as it reads at a tenth to twelfth grade level according to the Fry Readability Graph. Wolpow’s Readability Checklist corroborates this finding. (For more information see our relevance of readability measures related to Holocaust materials.) Excerpts from the book could be used to provide 8th to 10th grade students with first hand accounts of Gypsy Holocaust survivors. In addition to use in a history class, the text is an excellent example of oral histories and could be used in a literature class. The book would also be an ideal selection for any class focusing on tolerance education and diversity.

In explaining her desire to write Shared Sorrows, Sonneman writes: “The memoirs I’d read by Jewish survivors had touched me powerfully, had given me the connection to imagine their lives as my own. I wanted to understand the Gypsy experiences as well on such a personal level” (Sonneman, 2002, p. 25). Sonneman does capture the personal experiences of the people she interviews and provides readers with a vivid account of the Mettabach-Hollenreiner family’s experience during the Holocaust and how their lives have since been affected. After completing the book, the reader is better able to understand the complex emotions voiced by the survivors; from the angst of Mano to the fear that Hugo feels when he tells Sonneman: “They all say you’re doing well and all, but there’s a fear there-- you never get rid of it” (Sonneman, 2002, p. 139). 

 

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