Sinti

Mm.

Um, and that includes the targeting of Jews in Europe, but also includes the targeting of Communist Party members, ethnic Poles, Slavs, uh, the Roma and Sinti peoples, uh, those who have severe cognitive disabilities in Germany, political opponents of the regime, prisoners of war, and so on.

And so what you get, um, after this policy state is enacted, um, is you get a, a machine inside the Nazi government that gets really, really good at the logistics of moving lots of people from wherever they currently are toward concentration camps.

And then as those concentration camps fill up and as the war progresses forward and the Nazi Party radicalizes itself even further during war, we see the, the KL, the Konzentrationslager, shift from being a place of special confinement and abuse toward being this facilitating ground for mass murder.

... by the Nazis, um, including, uh, the, the number that I think everyone's probably most familiar with, the 6 million Jewish victims.

Mm-hmm.

Uh, and then you also get 3 million Russian prisoners of war, something in, like, the 2 million range of ethnic Poles, several hundred thousand Roma and Sinti, hundreds of thousands of people with disabilities, thousands of political opponents inside of Germany, and so on.

Jeez.

And with the photographer, I was also planning another one which deals not with the Jewish topic.

It's dealing with the Sinti and Roma topic, which was also a huge problem back then because they have kind of the same pressure issues sounds there they are also uh killed by nazis back then so it's it's so weird that i use so simple words but um you know what i'm talking about

yeah yeah for sure do you have any um thoughts about maybe doing another solo gallery show at some point

Right now, I'm still thinking of bringing my visual aesthetic in line, because I know where I want to go, but I'm not there yet.

Yeah.

Yeah, like Sinti, like

gypsies moving around Europe.

Yeah.

Everyone come play.

And that's because I think, you know, it's music from the Sinti tradition.

And they pass on the tradition orally by sitting and playing together.

And that's very part of the discipline today.

It's sort of pushed aside.

Many people who've been killed in the Holocaust, including Sinti and Romnia and black people, they didn't really get properly acknowledged and compensated.

Just the same as in the U.S., the victims of the transatlantic slave trade.

There have not been reparations paid only to the people that were the slave enslavement owners, which is obviously total crazy.

I don't offer my memory because you need to be like me and do what I do, or because the past was a better place.

I open my dance because I have found among many other Roma and Sinti, we tend to remember who did what, where they did it, how, and why they started moving that way.

This certainly covers dance, but also how people comport themselves in their communities.

What do they value, and how does their language, business, and pleasure reflect that? We remember what used to matter, and that's helpful when Shashipe goes into hiding and Hohanipe stalks the land, when lying becomes culture, the nation, and the self.

I am biased, but I think Romi and Sinti dance is very good at getting through disaster, especially that which is caused by greed and deceit.

Growing up, calamity was already assumed to have arrived, and our eyes were always open.

So there wasn't even a sense that, oh, crisis is here and we need to act, or a sense that everyone was going to care about our struggles, although I am stubborn and keep believing that people will.

Indigenous roads of the world weren't just on land.

Her family wasn't communist.

She wasn't Roma or Sinti or gay or mentally or physically disabled, so none of this impacted her life.

Also, she was just too busy with a new pet interest to think about politics because she had just started dancing, and she loved it.

Her little sister, Inge, was actually so good at dancing, definitely better than Traudl.