Since 1996, the German Bundestag has commemorated the victims of National Socialism every year on January 27th. The Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp was liberated on this day in 1945. It is traditional for a Holocaust survivor to give a speech in Parliament. In 2022, Inge Auerbacher, who had survived the Theresienstadt concentration camp, gave the speech.
This year, Rozette Kats will fill that role. According to the Bundestag, the Dutch woman was born in 1942 to a Jewish family. Her parents were deported to Auschwitz and murdered there by the Nazis. She only survived because a couple in Amsterdam took her in and passed them off as their own child. According to the Bundestag website, Kats only adopted her Jewish identity later in her life.
This year’s commemoration day is dedicated to commemorating persecuted sexual minorities under National Socialism. Kats also wants to focus on that in her speech, the topic is “very close to her heart,” she told the “Jewish General” in an interview: “I have many friends who are homosexual, but I never paid attention to them, they They’re just my friends. When I was asked from Berlin, I gladly agreed. There’s a very nice thought behind it: solidarity from one group to another.”
“You first have to get to know someone and you can’t always judge them the same way,” emphasizes the Holocaust survivor. She tries to convey this again and again in lectures at schools and other places. From 1940 onwards, many homosexual people were deported to concentration camps. There they had to wear a pink triangle as a sign of identification. At least 5000 homosexuals were murdered in the concentration camps.
Although she does not belong to this group of victims, Rozette Kats told the “Jewish General”, she knows “a lot of her problems”. “I’m telling this based on part of my own story and building a bridge from there to the story of the homosexual victims,” announced Kats.
In addition to the Dutchwoman, the actress Maren Kroymann and the actor Jannik Schümann also take part in the commemoration event in the Bundestag. Both are openly homosexual. Kroymann will present a text on Mary Pünjer, who was arrested as a “lesbian” and later gassed. Schümann reads a text about Karl Gorath, who died in 2003 and survived a total of three concentration camps as a homosexual.
Sources: Bundestag / “Jewish General”
