After the two minutes of silence on the evening of May 4, Lalla Weiss was given the floor for three and a half minutes. On Dam Square in Amsterdam she will talk about what was done to the Roma and Sinti by the Nazis. How they were isolated, deported to Westerbork and ultimately murdered in Auschwitz. Half a million Roma and Sinti from Europe, 245 from the Netherlands, most of them under 16 years old.
She had already asked the National Committee to speak on 4 and 5 May a few times before. Not that she necessarily wanted to be on that stage herself, the point was that 81 years after the Second World War, someone “from our people” would speak for once. In 2025, Femke Halsema, the mayor of Amsterdam, in her annual Dam Square speech, first mentioned the Sinti and Roma as victims of the genocide in the Second World War, followed only by Jews, homosexuals and the physically or mentally disabled. Dick Schoof, the Prime Minister, on the other hand, had not said a word about them in his speech. Lalla Weiss had a letter sent to him, drawn up by a lawyer friend, and then she was invited to his ministry and he apologized to her.
It is obvious that she will now have the floor. Since 1989, she has been the spokesperson on behalf of the Sinti when it comes to the war past, also on behalf of the Roma. She did it together with her father Hannes until his death in 2011. They managed to also lay a wreath during Remembrance Day on Dam Square. For the first time in 1996, they did it together for a few years, she says. “After that my father couldn’t bear it anymore. The walk from the Nieuwe Kerk to the monument, between all those soldiers, the uniforms, the weapons.” Twenty-two members of her father’s family were murdered, twenty-four on her mother’s side. Her father hated uniforms, she says. “He couldn’t even tolerate the postman.”
Lalla Weiss (64) lives in Best, in a house. She wanted to give her four children a better chance in life, she says, and it helps if your address is not “Terraweg”, the location of the caravan center. She removed the fence doors at the back of the garden. Unobstructed view of the water and the dike behind it.
She alternates filter cigarettes with her own and sighs deeply when asked what she wants to talk about in her three and a half minutes. Will it be about the suffering of her people, that of her father, or does she dare to say after all these years that it has also become her suffering? “I don’t know yet.”
‘We are not liberated’
Singer Ali B. wrote a liberation song in 2015, “when he was not yet infected”, inspired by the war years of Hannes Weiss. He was fifteen years old when the hunt for ‘gypsies’ in the Netherlands began on May 16, 1944. His father had already died, his older brother was sick, he was the man at home. With his mother, five brothers and sisters plus a nephew who was staying with them, they went into hiding in a barn of a farmer in Zutphen. “The children got hungry and he went out to organize food.” He was arrested, tortured and detained in the police station. His mother became so worried that she and her children turned themselves in to the police.
One good police officer saved the family. “At the station in Assen he told them not to get on the full train to Westerbork, but on the one on the other side of the platform.” Until the end of the war they hid in a dairy factory in Vorden.
“My father always said: ‘We have not been liberated’.” Caravans had been destroyed, the camps had been cleared and there was no Dutch agency where Roma or Sinti could turn for help. “Our people stayed in the woods.” The Veluwe especially. Her parents met in the 1950s, traveling between the camps that were gradually being re-formed. They had seven children, Lalla (Zielwa is her Sinti name) is the youngest and she became her father’s “outlet”.
He told her what had happened to ‘their people’ in the concentration camps. A separate place had been set aside for them, right next to the gas chambers. Men, women, children together – that was an exception. “That photo of children near the barbed wire, with that one girl showing her forearm? Sinti children.” The girl with a headscarf looking between the doors of the freight wagon on the way to Auschwitz? Settela Steinbach – “also a Sintezza,” says Weiss. “Our Anne Frank.”
The Sinti and Roma in Auschwitz were not immediately murdered, that happened when there was an urgent need to make way for a transport of Hungarian Jews in 1944. Until then they were subjected to measurements and medical experiments; the Nazi research provided evidence that the origins of Sinti and Roma lie in India and that their languages (Sinti-Romanesque and Romani) are related to Sanskrit.
The aversion to traveling population groups had existed for centuries before the war. In 1420, when they were first spotted in the Netherlands, in Deventer, they were still called ‘Egyptians’, later they became pagans, and later still gypsies. In 1944, Dutch mayors were already openly talking about a ‘gypsy plague’. “The raids were not carried out by the Nazis, but by Dutch police officers. That is what makes it so painful.”
Hardly anyone says ‘gypsy’ anymore, says Lalla Weiss, and she has contributed to that. She is proud that people now know who the Sinti are.
Angry about a billboard
She was 9, she says, and whenever her father couldn’t sleep, he would tell her about “what happened to us,” and she promised him that she would pass on his stories. She remembers how he would get so angry that flakes of foam would fly out of his mouth. “They would never target him again, nor would his family.”
He lined up his seven children, including her severely disabled brother. Everyone with a weapon. “Landmines were hidden in the wheels of our caravan.” And then? “Then we were drilled, and once a year, on New Year’s Day, we were allowed to fire.” She stands up to roll up her pant leg and show the scars on her leg. “Shamrock,” she says. She was too small, or the weapon was too heavy, that’s also possible. “My mother was always laughing. Later I understood that what I saw was not happiness, but nerves.”
As a girl, she was one of the few at the caravan camp in Best who had learned to read and write. People came to her to have her write letters to the German government to claim one Wiedergutmachungs-compensation. Her father and she ensured that not only the Jews but also they received an apology from the Dutch government for the cold post-war treatment. In 1999, the Kok government allocated 30 million guilders to support victims and their families.
The story that Lalla Weiss promised to tell has already resulted in an exhibition, The long shadow of the past in the former Westerbork camp. A theater performance, Backpack full of distrustwhich visits schools. For years, seeking and finding recognition was a day job for Lalla Weiss, in addition to her job as a social worker.
Now she works in a lunchroom and the war past keeps her busy at times. Always around May 4 and 5, sometimes it hits the hair in the face, like the other day in Eindhoven. “There is a sign in the shopping street. A billboard like that. It says: ‘Are you the next Hitler?’. She goes into the store with that sign. Spitting with anger. What fool put that outside and did they know what that man had done to her family? It turned out to be an advertisement for Secret Hitler, a board game.
