Welcome to my part of the train. I don´t want to share some history-events with you, but want to tell a bit of the story of my grandparents during WW2 and the time of national socialism in Germany. I will keep it short, because I only want give you an insight in four different lifes.
It was not usual to talk with the grandparents about the war, there were only few and short moments, when they shared some of their experiences. So let´s start:
The mother of my father was named Maria. She lived in a family of farmers in southern germany. Her father left the family as a soldier during the WW2 and never came back. Her mother died when she was 14 years old. From this date she had to do the houshold for the whole farm. She had a lot of brothers and not all survived the war.
After the war they could not run the farm anymore and she had to go to the city and worked at a local inn. There she had to do the household and bring the beers to the men. There she met a young man with the name Rolf and they maried. Maria was a kind person, serving others for her whole life.
My grandparents also never liked to talk about the war, even though one of my grandpa's warmed up a little the last years and started to tell about his experience growing up in Nazi Germany as a Dutch immigrant. Due to his father being a socialist and thus being imprisoned, one can clearly tell how much he struggled because of all the obstacles people placed before him just by his background. My other grandfather, of German heritage, was originally a teacher and also of socialist belief and had to join the Wehrmacht to avoid further prosecution... it's honestly hard to imagine from a modern point of view what lunacy the world had succumb to in the middle of the last century to inflict so much sorrow and pain on so many and in addition to that, people living through all of this while keeping their sanity intact :x.
Thank you for telling this story :).
Comment has been collapsed.
Thank you for sharing the story of your grandfathers. If you still have the Chance to talk to your grandparents (mine are all dead) I want to encourage you talk with them. Maybe even record their stories. These parts of your family history will be gone one day, if nobody makes the efforts to record them.
Comment has been collapsed.
Unfortunately, the latter passed away several years ago and the only stories I know of are things like his escape from Stalingrad due to pneumonia or his capture in Monte Cassino, and even then he never got into detail (well, who would tbh, nothing you could explain properly to anyone who didn't witness those things, especially to a then little grade-school brat ;D).
It's sad to see that so much knowledge has vanished and is now, ~70 years later, about to perish forever, since it's a big difference between reading historical facts in a book and real eyewitness testimonies, considering they help one put these facts in perspective and to realize there's never simple black and white but a whole lot of shades of gray. Imagine having a eyewitness tell you about the life while Rome rose to power, the discovery of America or meeting Sokrates roaming the streets of Athens, stopping him for a little talk about the meaning of life from the eyes of someone who never grew up with the modern understanding of dualism, ethics etc ;D...
Comment has been collapsed.
I agree with you 100%. At least we have this, The World At War and this Shoah. These first hand accounts are invaluable.
Comment has been collapsed.