Her grandfather drove trains in Auschwitz. There killed my great -grandmother

It doesn’t matter how much you are preparing for it. It will still leave you by surprise. As a great -granddaughter of a woman killed in Auschwitz, I meet with my granddaughter who chased Jews to death. I lost my words.

I never had to meet with my grandfather Ludwig, who survived the Holocaust or his mother Rachel. In 1944, they were put on the animals for the animal camp Auschwitz. Ludwig, who was about 15 years old at the time, was separated from his mother and sent to another concentration camp. But Rachel was tortured, poisoned by gas and killed.

I grew up, hearing so many stories about them and spending time with other people who survived the Holocaust in my family in Australia. They were the focus of me when I was in Germany where I was interviewed by Cornellium.

Cornelius’s grandfather was the main breadwinner in a very small income family. Initially, he worked as a coal miner, but after an accident, which remained with a two -day coal, decided to do something else. Everything turned when he eventually got a job at Deutsche Reichsbahn as a driver. Cornelius’s mother proudly talked about this achievement, saying that getting a job is a “chance of life”.

At first he transported cargoes for the war. But soon it grew into something more ominous. “I believe that my grandfather served as a train driver, traveled between death camps. He stayed in the ligory, now Legnitsa, at the boarding school, so there was a certain separation with his family and between death camps. “

Cornelia says that when her grandfather was just starting work, he didn’t know what it would be. “I think my grandfather saw a lot of terrible things and didn’t know how to get out of this work, did not know how to deal with her.”

After studying the family therapist, she deepened her past and tried to understand it better. She tells me that she began to ask, “What was the moment he was a criminal? Was he a criminals? When could he leave?”

At that moment, my mouth was dry. My heart beats. Listening all this, you feel outside the body. I can only think about how her grandfather drove trains in Auschwitz, and that’s how my grandfather and great -grandmother were there. I think of all my other relatives – cousins ​​and brothers I know that they existed, but I do not know anything about them – which were also killed in Auschwitz.

“If I were younger, I would feel a strong hatred of you,” I say to her, holding tears. “But I don’t know because it was very difficult to say it.”

“Give me a hand,” says Cornelia, also rising. “This is important. Your tears and my touches touch me… My grandfather was a driver in Auschwitz. What can I say? Nothing.

“I can’t apologize, it is impossible,” she adds, hinting that the crime is too heavy. “My grandfather felt very guilty and died with his fault.” Cornelia thanks me for her openness and says he needs to fully reveal the story.

Then she says what you couldn’t expect – that some Germans from Shanwald, where her family came from, reacted angrily to her study. Now the Polish city, renamed the fights, about 100 km from Krakow, did not reserve its Nazi past.

Cornelia explains that initially the city was against the ideology of the Nazi Party, but over time became absorbed. Hitler saw Schonwald as an exemplary village – Aryan village on the land of Slavs. He hoped that the local “fifth column” of ethnic Germans would be a useful help in the army.

It was the site of the incident in Glevitsa – an incident under a fake flag organized by Nazi Germany in 1939 to justify the invasion of Poland, one of the triggers of World War II. And in 1945, at the end of the war, it was the first German village to be attacked by the advanced Soviet troops.

But before that, one of the so -called Nazi death marches took place here.

When the Soviets approached Auschwitz, the Hitler Elite Protection, the SS, forced about 60,000 prisoners – mostly Jews – to move on to the West. Between January 19 and 21, 1945, one of these marches went through Shanwald. At a temperature below zero, the prisoners were only dressed in a thin striped shape and only with wooden boots on their feet. Fallen from hunger and exhaustion were shot.

The survivors were planted in open trains with carts that went further west, usually to other concentration camps such as Buchenwald. The Nazis wanted to keep their slave work – even at this point, some still believed in the final triumph of the third Reich.

Local History and Religion Teacher Krushtof Kruszynski leads me to the main street on which the death march was held. People expect to get on the bus near the main church on Rolnikov Street, known during Germany as Bauer-Strasse. He points to the ground and tells me that this is the original pavement on which the prisoners had to walk.

“This is a silent witness to the death march,” he says. “But the stone can’t speak.”

This story has been buried so far – partly because the Germans from Shanwald were forced to escape after the Soviet attack, which took place shortly afterwards, and the Poles moved the village. One German polka is 80, Ruta Kasubek told me how drunken Soviet soldiers invaded her family house and killed her father. But there is another reason: the active squeezing of the past.

I was not surprised that some Germans reacted negatively to Cornelius’s research. Germany is proud of this Memory cultureOr memory culture: Compulsory Holocaust, Museums, Memorials. But many consider it the work of the state and the government. And although they are happy enough to face the last abstract, it is harder for them to deal with their own family history, says Benjamin Fisher, a former leader of Jewish students and a political consultant. He calls it the “de -de -state.”

A A study by the University of Bielefeld It was found that a third of the Germans believed that their families helped save Jews during the Holocaust. It’s “funny,” says Benjamin, and “statistically impossible.”

In place in Boykov, 80 years after the death march, everything changes. Last week, a delegation of Germans, Jews and Poles, including local authorities, schools and emergency services, opened a new memorial to commemorate those who died in the city’s death march.

There were Cornelia and Krzysztof. For Cornelia, the story is deeply personal. She is convinced that studying and memorizing this is the key to understanding how society could change so quickly. And I am grateful for that. Their work and passion give me hope in the world growing anti -Semitism – when I try to preserve the memory of how my family was killed.

Residents of Shanwald believed that their city was on top of high culture and spirituality. But then it “resulted in an immorality,” says Cornelia. “These are the events we need to understand … They were not only good or evil. People can go to work with good intentions, but very quickly (find themselves) not on the other side.

“We can’t change the past. We can’t return the time back. But it is important to talk about it, reminding people of what happened, reminding people about what people can do with each other. “