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Eva Clarke BEM was born under unimaginably harrowing circumstances in the final days of World War II. Her birth, on 29 April 1945, just outside the gates of the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria, came just one day after the Nazis had run out of gas for the chambers and less than a week before liberation by the US Army.

During this year’s Gypsy Roma Traveller History Month, historian Rainer Schulze reminds us of the systematic persecution the Roma and Sinti suffered during the period of Nazi rule in Germany and in Nazi-occupied Europe.

Steven Frank was born in Amsterdam in the Netherlands. In 1940 when he was five years old the Nazis invaded and occupied the country. His life and that of his two brothers changed very quickly because they were Jewish. His parents were not religious and thought of their identity as Dutch (although his mother was from England), but to the Nazis that made no difference.

Born in 1927, Otto Rosenberg grew up in Berlin with his grandmother and two siblings. His family were Sinti, a Romani population of central Europe. Otto remembers living on private rented ‘lots’ of land that his family shared with the caravans and houses of extended family and other members of the Sinti community.

Johann ‘Rukeli’ Trollmann was born on 27 December 1907 near Hannover. He was a popular German Sinto boxer, who was discriminated against, marginalised, sterilised, and finally deported to a concentration camp, where he was murdered. Here, Rainer Schulze, Professor of Modern European History at the University of Essex, shares his story.