As an adolescent, Toni Hanny Fischer moved from northern to southern Germany with her family of performers and musicians in the late 1930s. She worked as a housemaid and a dancer and artist in her grandparents’ circus. In Eggenfelden, where the Fischer family lived from around 1937, she worked in a factory.
She was arrested in Eggenfelden in March 1943, brought to police prison in Munich and, a short time later, transported to the ‘gypsy camp‘ at Auschwitz-Birkenau, where her other family members had already been deported a few days before. At Auschwitz Concentration Camp, she had to work in the kitchen detail. The horrific conditions in the camp resulted in the death of her brothers Hugo and Adolf Heinz Fischer after just a few weeks. Their father Hugo Fischer also died in the ‘gypsy camp’ in 1943.
Toni Hanny Fischer and her mother and sister Marianne were transported to Ravensbrück Concentration Camp in the summer of 1944. From there they were taken to Mauthausen Concentration Camp and on to Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp on transports lasting days and under appalling conditions in spring 1945. Toni Hanny Fischer became ill with typhus in the last days of the war and had to be treated in the hospital for weeks after the liberation.
She married Hermann Wilhelm Schmidt in February 1947. He, too, was persecuted by the National Socialists as a ‘gypsy‘ and had lost most of his family in the concentration camp.
Toni Hanny Schmidt, as she was now called, lived for a time in Munich with her husband. They moved with their two children to Hanover in the late 1940s. It was not until 1982 that the Federal Republic recognized the National Socialist crimes against the Sinti and Roma as genocide on racial grounds, which is why there were often no reparation payments previously made to Sinti and Roma, or only very small ones. Toni Hanny Schmidt also had to fight for decades for appropriate compensation for wrongful imprisonment.
