Funeral for Jan Hauer will be held on Monday, 5 September in Prague, Czech Republic
The funeral for the late Jan Hauer will be held on Monday, 5 September 2022 in the Church of Saint Roch (Kostel svatého Rocha) at the Olšany Cemeteries (Olšanské hřbitovy) in Prague; his family has informed news server Romea.cz of the date. Mr. Hauer was an eminent member of the Sinti community that has lived in the Czech lands since at least the beginning of the 19th century and was a descendant of Holocaust survivors who sought to the commemorate them until his last moments; he passed away after a long illness on Saturday, 27 August.
Mr Hauer was born in 1947 to parents who had survived Nazi persecution and who were both traumatized for the rest of their lives by the hardships they endured and the loss of their relatives. At Auschwitz II-Birkenau, Mr. Hauer’s father was imprisoned with his first wife and four children, all of whom died there, while his mother was imprisoned in the camp at Lety u Písku with two children who died there – “my siblings”, as Mr. Hauer frequently emphasized when describing his parents’ wartime experiences.
It was not until Mr. Hauer was an adult that he learned about his parents wartime suffering when, in the late 1960s, he joined his father’s quest to discover what exactly had happened to his children born in the interwar period. He and his father traveled to Germany to visit the archives and their relatives from the Sinti community who had survived the Holocaust.
During the gradual discovery of his siblings’ fates and the acquisition of archival documents, Mr. Hauer’s own interest in learning more about his family history grew. With the aid of friends, Mr. Hauer then accumulated archival materials documenting his family history back to the 19th century and collected family photographs documenting how Sinti people lived in the Czech lands during the First Czechoslovak Republic, a collection that is unique.
“…Mr. Hauer abounded in wisdom, quick judgment, and a strong sense of tradition. When, in 2020, Mr. Hauer became an expert jury member selecting the winning design for the new memorial at Lety u Písku, it was exactly the design he had instinctively picked that eventually succeeded from among the 41 designs submitted to the architects’ expert jury,” Renata Berkyová has noted in her obituary for Romea.cz. During his final year of life, Mr. Hauer worked intensively on his own book entitled My People (Moji lidi).
