Sofie “Kerwala” Schönberger, née Höllenreiner (4.4.1907 Sickershausen – 25.7.1974 Schwäbisch-Hall)

Sofie Höllenreiner lived with her family and most of her relatives in Munich, where she worked primarily as a peddler. She married the trader and blacksmith Johann Schönberger in May 1934 and they had three children together. After the war broke out, Johann Schönberger was drafted into the Kriegsmarine (German Navy). He was asked several times to divorce his wife, who was being discriminated against by the National Socialists as a ‘gypsy half-breed’, but he vehemently refused to do so. As the Allied bomb attacks increased and National Socialist reprisals against Sinti and Roma became more and more intense, Sofie Schönberger fled with her three children to Rott am Inn, where the children attended school. Like many German Sinti and Roma who were spared from being deported to the Auschwitz-Birkenau Concentration Camp, Sofie Schönberger had to be sterilized. On March 18, 1944 she went to the  University Women’s Clinic in Munich, where the procedure was carried out.

After the war, the family returned to Munich. Most of her relatives were deported to the Auschwitz-Birkenau ‘gypsy camp’ in 1943. Many of her siblings, nephews and nieces were murdered or died there and in other concentration camps, as a result of the inhumane prison conditions.