Her grandfather was driving trains to Auschwitz. My great -grandmother was killed there

It doesn’t matter how much you are preparing for it. It still surprises you. As a great -granddaughter of a woman who was killed in Auschwitz, I meet with the granddaughter of a man who drives the Jews to death. I have no words.

I never managed to meet my grandfather Ludwig, who survived from the Holocaust, or his mother Rachel. They were uploaded to a livestock cart at the Auschwitz Death Camp in 1944. 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, wrapped and killed.

I grew up, listening to so many stories about them and spending time with other survivors of the Holocaust in my family in Australia. They were at the forefront of my thoughts when I found myself in Germany, interviewing Cornelia Still.

Cornelia’s grandfather was the main hosting of a very low -income household. He initially worked as a miner, but after an almost fatal incident that left him trapped under coal for two days, he decided to do something else. Things turn when he eventually gets a job at Deutsche Reichsbahn as a driver. Cornelia’s mother spoke of this achievement with pride, saying that getting a job was a “chance for life.”

He initially transported goods for military efforts. But it soon became something more sinister. “I believe my grandfather served as a driver, traveling between the death camps. He remained in Lignitz, now Lieutennitsa, at the International School, so there was some separation from the family and between the death camps. “

Cornelia says that when her grandfather started work, he did not know what would happen. “I think my grandfather saw many terrible things and he didn’t know how to get out of this job, he didn’t know how to handle it.”

After studying as a family therapist, she buried herself in her past and tried to understand him better. She told me that she began to ask, “At what moment he was the perpetrator? Was he complicit in the perpetrators? When could he go away? “

At that moment my mouth is dry. My heart is passing. Listening to all this feels like an experience outside the body. All I can think about is how her grandfather was driving trains in Auschwitz and so my grandfather and great -grandmother were there. I think of all my other relatives – cousins ​​I know existed, but I don’t know anything about them – who were also killed in Auschwitz.

“If I were younger, I think I would have a strong hatred of you,” I tell her, fighting her with tears. “But I don’t do it, because saying all these things must have been really difficult to recognize.”

“Give me your hand,” says Cornelia, also rising. “It’s important. Your tears and my touch move me … My grandfather was a driver in Auschwitz. What can I say? Nothing.

“I can’t apologize, it’s impossible,” she adds, suggesting that the crime is too grave. “My grandfather felt very, very guilty and died with his guilt.” Cornelia thanked me for my openness and said she needed a complete disclosure of the story.

Then she says something you may not expect – that some Germans from Schoenwald, where her family comes from, reacted angrily to her research. Now the Polish city, renamed Bojków, about 100 kilometers from Krakow, has not reconciled with its Nazi past.

Cornelia explains that initially the city was against the ideology of the Nazi party, but over time it was swallowed up by it. Hitler sees Schoenwald as a model village – Aryan village in a land of Slavs. He hoped that a “fifth column” of ethnic Germans would become useful help in the army.

It was the place of the Glivitz incident, an incident with a fake flag organized by Nazi Germany in 1939 to justify the invasion of Poland, one of the incentives for World War II. And in 1945, towards the end of the war, it was the first German village to be attacked by the coming Soviet forces.

But just before that, it was the scene of one of the so -called Nazi death marches.

As the advice approached Auschwitz, Hitler’s elite security, SS, forced about 60,000 prisoners there – mostly Jews – to move even more west. Between January 19 and 21, 1945, one of these marches passed through Schönwald. At temperatures below zero, prisoners were dressed only in their thin stripes and only wooden shoes on the feet. Hunger and exhaustion have been shot.

Those who survived were uploaded to open livestock trains that headed the west, usually to other concentration camps, such as Buchenwald. The Nazis wanted to maintain their slave work – even at that moment some still believed in the final triumph of the Third Reich.

The local history and religion teacher Krzishtof Krushinski takes me to the main street where the March of Death passed. People are waiting to catch their bus in front of the main church on Rolnikow Street – known as Bauer -Strasse during Germany. He points to the ground and tells me that these are the original cobblestone stones that the prisoners have to go.

“It’s a silent witness to the March of Death,” he says. “But the stone can’t talk.

This story has been buried so far – partly because the Germans from Schoenwald have been forced to flee after the Soviet attack, which comes shortly thereafter and the Poles re -selle the village. A German-Polish woman at 80 years old, Ruta Kasubek, told me how drunk Soviet soldiers invaded her family home and killed her father. But there is another reason: active suppression of the past.

It was not surprised that some Germans responded negatively to Cornelia’s study. Germany is proud of its Memory cultureOr a culture of commemoration: mandatory education for the Holocaust, Museums, Memorials. But many see this as the work of the state and the government. And while they are happy enough to face the past abstract, it is more difficult to deal with their own family history, says Benjamin Fisher, a former leader of Jewish students and a political consultant. He calls it “denduidualization of history.”

A Study by the University of Bielefeld It found that one -third of the Germans believed that members of their families had helped to save the Jews during the Holocaust. It’s “ridiculous”, says Benjamin, and “statistically impossible.”

On the spot at Bojków, 80 years after the March of Death, things change. Last week, a delegation of Germans, Jews and Poles, including local authorities, schools and emergency services, opened a new memorial in memory of the death toll in the city.

Cornelia and Krzishtof were there. For Cornelia, history is deeply personal. She is convinced that studying and remembering it is crucial to understanding how society can change as quickly. And I’m grateful for that. Their work and passion gives me hope in a world of increasing anti -Semitism – as I try to keep the memory alive about how my family was killed.

The Schoenwald people believed that their city was at the top of high culture and spirituality. But then it “grew into immorality,” Cornelia says. “This is a development we need to understand … they were not just good or evil. People can start working with good intentions, but very quickly (find themselves) on the wrong side.

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