How big was the Sinti community in East Berlin?
JL: There were very few. Here in East Berlin, there were five or six families. In Magdeburg, there were Sinti. And in Halle and in Erfurt. There were not many here. What was it like to be a Sinti in the GDR? Was the communist dogma of equality and respect for minorities an everyday reality? JL: The state made no distinctions. It didn’t matter if you were a Gypsy: you were a citizen of the GDR. But there were very few foreigners in East Germany, and we had black hair and were brown. It was not really racism, but people dealt differently with people who looked different. It was rather difficult: I had problems at school. BH: On the one hand, people were regarded as equal. But on the other, no one dealt with the unique history of the Sinti. It wasn’t dealt with in school. There was a very well-known children’s book, Edo und Uko, that was very popular in the Eastern Bloc and it was about a Sinti family. It was required reading in the GDR in the 1970s. But at the same time, people didn’t kn
