Erich Hackl’s documentary narrative reconstructs the life of Sidonie Adlersburg, a Romani girl raised by a working-class foster family in Austria and forcibly removed from them under National Socialist racial policy before being deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where she died in 1943. Drawing on archival documents and testimony from surviving members of the foster family, Hackl transforms an individual biography into an account of the mechanisms through which racial persecution operated at the level of local welfare institutions and everyday administration. First published in 1989, Abschied von Sidonie has become an important literary work of Austrian memory culture, preserving the story of a Romani child whose fate had remained largely unacknowledged for decades.
