My grandfather was on a train to Auschwitz, but managed to avoid it and survive. A childhood friend of his survived in the camp until liberation. They always paid tribute to the liberators along with those who died in the attempt, at a ceremony commemorating their community.
From what I gather, he managed to get quite a few people out of there on medical grounds - but not himself.
She never spoke of him. I only found out from the posthumous memoir of her surviving brother, who was a conscientious objector who got sent to Stalingrad. Not an easy read, but one that made me acutely aware of just how quickly things can go incredibly bad.
If I may ask, how did this influence you and/or your relationship with your grandmother?
I think I would have forgiven her, however - I have, now, at any rate.
She was born in 1928 - she grew up in Vienna, immersed in an increasingly fascist culture, and joined the Hitler youth because it was simply what everyone did. In the last days of the war, she, in terror for her life, married a German officer who promised to get her out of Vienna before the Russians arrived - which he did, dumping her, pregnant with his child, in Kano Nigeria.
At the same time, many of her cousins were also fleeing Europe to escape war crime prosecution, and many remained in subsaharan Africa.
She met my grandfather there, a British war and famine profiteer, through a lonely hearts advert. They had many miserable years together.
All in all, I feared her as a younger child, pitied her as a young man - she was a cruel and angry woman, who was scornful to me as a child, and bitter to her (fourth) husband. Her brother, Sigrid, who by the time I was around lived with her, his wife long dead, always looked out for her, told us to be kind, that we didn’t and couldn’t understand why she was as she was.
And then his death, her death, his memoir, and I understood. I wish now that I had known while she was alive, but then, I was a younger man, and I may not have understood. Now, I see her as a victim as much as any of them - her entire life was a pyre of guilt and shame and self-loathing, always running, and never escaping her past, her actions.
As to me, I learned several things I felt were of critical importance:
- That cruel people are usually the product of cruelty - that they are cruel because they are ashamed, and wish to hate themselves.
- That righteous people, working with what they know to be right and good can carry out acts of atrocious evil.
- That you should be aware that your actions, if sufficiently bad, will haunt you til the end of your days.
He was then placed with the family of Kazimierz Gołba, a Polish poet(who was himself hiding first from Nazis then from the secret police after the war) - and lived with them using a fake name for a while, only going to back to his original name and surname some years after the war.
Him and my grandma spent years and years of their lives trying to find any trace of what happend to his parents or any of his other family, but without any luck.
Unfortunately, he passed away last year, almost certainly due to covid(I say almost certainly - he passed away due to respiratory problems, and grandma got diagnosed with covid a day later, he was never tested).
Him and grandma and myself and the rest of our family have always lived literally 10 minutes away from the former Auschwitz camp as well - in a little town nearby.
My Grandmother (wife of the man I spoke about) was from your area, Wadowice. She was 16 on the eve of invasion, and her family survived by fleeing east.. gambling on Stalin over Hitler. Her father almost turned them back, having fought Russians in WW1. They were refugees for 7 years, most of the time in central asia. They returned for a while, but a couple of murders over property disputes convinced most survivors (very few survived from Wadowice) to leave. I have some family members who married out and converted. We're not in touch, unfortunately. The live in Krakov, last I heard.
She always maintained ties to her old community, even their most famous member. This is her elbowing past a Prime Minister to say hi and try to get him to do some renovation on an old synagogue. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1EcC8xKgplBhF3BthO82AbazxkeM...
We might be related.
One of the survivors I knew was executed twice. He said "it didn't catch".
Many/most of the Lubaks (local SS) were from the area, and he'd gone to school with some of them. That's part of the story, but I don't know exactly how it fits in.
I want to remind how little people today remember who 3rd reich collaborators were.
The myth of "unwilling collaborators," and "forced to work for Germans under a gunpoint" was invented after the war by political forces who got in bed with 3rd reich, and then wanted to save their skin from pitchforks when they lost.
Those were often very mainstream, and popular political parties. Some of them exist to this day.
Well, there were even Jewish collaborators, in fact, quite plenty of them.
Yet they themselves were eventually murdered by the germans..
The history is simple, in this case. There were bad people, and there are bad people trying to muddy the boundary of a very clear cut difference of who was bad, and who was good.
One go kills random innocent people — he is bad.
Not to mention Ordinary Men [0], the dynamic that makes your average citizens with no ideological indoctrination become the murderers of tens of thousands of Jews, to the point they'd shoot at small children with a clear conscience. They'd even have the option not to directly take part in the murders, but still do.
Again, these were average, ordinary people. No strong party affiliation, SS membership or anything.
The fact that Christopher Browning's book was a revelation when it came out shows how little we've learned from WWII. We might have put the lid on undisguised antisemitism, but we have merely channeled its otherising roots elsewhere. Otherwise, we wouldn't find it so easy to turn a blind eye to the settler colonialism happening right now in Palestine.
[0] https://www.amazon.com/Ordinary-Men-Reserve-Battalion-Soluti...
Read the biography of Stanislaw Lem for instance, who grew up in Lwów(current Ukraine, back then Poland) - Nazis frequently recruited local population to both kill and then bury anyone they wanted to get rid of, under a) promise of reward b) threat of being killed themselves. But you don't need to trust the biography of one man and his experiences - we also know this because Nazis kept extensive video and photo evidence of those executions, which they would show back in the 3rd Reich as "evidence" of the barbarism of the local people in places they were occupying ("look at those stupid Poles/Ukrainians/Jews, killing each other for a scrap of food!").
"Well, there were even Jewish collaborators, in fact, quite plenty of them."
Again, because some of them were given a choice of either joining the ghetto kommando unit, or being shot there and then, along with their families. It didn't matter at all in the end of course, because they all got executed in the end anyway. Can you say with with 100% confidence that you wouldn't make the same choice in the same situation? And I do mean 100% confidence?
Polish nobelist, Wiesława Szymborska, said something about these choices people faced in WW2 that I will always remember - "we only know ourselves as much as we have been tested - and I pray that my moment of trial never comes".
I think she's absolutely right - it's easy to judge what people have done from the comfort of our homes in 2021. But I do hope that I am never put in front of the same choice. I hope I will never be tested in the same way those people were.
And I will clarify here - of course there were willing collaborators too. 100%. But your comment reads as if that wasn't the case and the "myth" of unwilling collaborators was purely made up. I see no reason to believe such a thing.
10000% confidence
Like I said above - I hope my moment of trial never comes.
I am very sorry what your grandfather had to endure and I am happy he survived. Though it doesn't change the past I will make sure that my children and grandchildren will remember what happened in order to prevent anything like that happening in our lifetimes again.
There is no point getting depressed from one's ancestors past - if one looks in the past far enough, there will be probably something utterly horrible that given nation/tribe/group did to somebody innocent. Basically all western european democracies fall into this category, and many, many other nations too.
Don't forget about it by any means, tech your kids as I will do, but don't put emotions into this just because your nation was the culprit. There were similar things happening to innocent civilians en masse in the past elsewhere. Genocides are not an invention of Germany or 20th century, life was often pretty horrible and violent in the past.
Time and entropy (empires dissolving or population groups migrating) definitely diffuse the responsibility for a horrific act. Of which there are many in history. But this specific thing happened in living memory, was performed by an organization that still exists (a German speaking nation state, with almost the same borders as before), and by people the OP knows personally. In fact, it's a very wealthy nation that OP has gained a lot of advantage from living in. It's subjective and graduated, but I don't think it's been nearly "long" enough that the Holocaust just background noise next to all other events that have happened in human history.
Modern Germany is awesome btw. Really respect how they've reckoned with this awful time in their history.
I have a lot of respect for Germany's honest portrayal and study of its past. It is a rarity, perhaps singular.
You might want to check out the new podcast Day X. It's about resurgence of far right extremism in Germany going on right now. Sadly, the same thing seems to be happening in my country (US).
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/19/podcasts/far-right-german...