Looking back at his childhood, Holocaust survivor Mano Höllenreiner recalled how his father, his uncles and other Sinti and Roma joined forces to fight to the death against the SS paramilitary Nazi organization in 1944 inside the Auschwitz extermination camp.

Höllenreiner was only 10 years old at the time, and he later spoke about the men in his family: "They had been in the military, they weren't afraid."

Together, they defended themselves against imminent transportation to the gas chambers in the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration and extermination camp.

In the camp, they and their families suffered from hunger, thirst, cold, disease, brutal violence and unbearable hygiene conditions in the so-called "gypsy camp." The children were the first to die.

After they received a warning about a major SS operation, the prisoners armed themselves with stones, sticks and shovels they had been able to smuggle into their barracks from their forced labor sites. They entrenched themselves behind the entrance, ready to fight, and refused to come out.

The guards finally left, Höllenreiner remembered. "Even as a child, you understood that they got the message, that this time the people would fight back," he said. He added that the guards knew that a few of them might lose their lives in the attempt to squash the resistance, and that they would not be able to gas all the inmates without fierce opposition.

Many prisoners who were fit for work were then transferred to other concentration camps. Cousins Hugo and Mano Höllenreiner,........

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