The 96-year-old Zilli Schmidt has made it her mission to tell the world what was done to the Romani people by the Nazi regime. She warns of contemporary parallels -- and strikes a chord with many of her listeners.

It is September 2020 when Zilli Schmidt walks into Kulturhaus RomnoKher in the western German city of Mannheim, to attend a reading of her book about her memories as a survivor of the Auschwitz death camp. "Your visit is a gift," is a common expression of gratitude among the many people who turn out to greet her.

The book is entitled God had plans for me: To keep alive the memory of the German Sinti and it tells of happy childhood days, as well as her incarceration, hunger, guards shooting at small children and mass murder.

In an interview with DW, she explains that it is her mission to say what the Nazis did to the Sinti, one of Europe's Romani tribes. "They were all gassed, my entire family, all my people." She says all the talk after the war was about the Shoah: "The Jews were all sent to the gas chambers. And all the Sinti are still alive?" She pauses: "Nobody was still alive."