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Comment by dalbasal | Hacker News Reader

A long series of events, 3 years. Initially there was a backlog. Not enough trains to Poland. He went through several camps, work assignments. He never got shipped to Poland. Eventually he was freed by his brother, with the help of the Czech partisans using forged/backdated baptismal records. The Slovak subsidiary of the third reich was church oriented. Most survival stories that I know of personally involved the church, one way or another. The brother who worked tirelessly to save him had been the one on the list. He had a baby on the way, born the following morning. My grandfather volunteered to take his place, while the couple hid. The daughter became a teacher. He survived the rest of the war as a partisan. I don't know the whole story. He rarely spoke of it.

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.

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As a German, born roughly 40 years after the war, I still cannot fathom the atrocities we Germans brought to the world at large and to so many million individuals. I grew up learning the history, I know my grandparents (as well as probably great grandparents) played their part in what happened. I am deeply sorry for what they/we did and even saying it these words just sound hollow in light of the magnitude of cruelty and injustice that happened.

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.

I would suggest avoiding some sort of self-inflicted trauma from this horrible past (which might not be happening but it reads like that to me).

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.

I don't know if personal guilt or shame is the correct feeling either, but I also don't think OP should feel nothing.

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.

He held no grudges by the time I knew him, certainly not against unborn generations. He visited in Berlin in the 70s, as a tourist, spoke german, had german friends and felt sorry for those who (like him) had their communities destroyed after the war. We were brought up to believe the remembering does matter, fwiw.

I have a lot of respect for Germany's honest portrayal and study of its past. It is a rarity, perhaps singular.

> 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.

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...

Hey fellow European. Please allow me to thank you deeply for that. You cannot be held responsible for anything that some people 3 generations before yours did, but nevertheless your sense of responsibility is really truly inspiring.

> Eventually he was freed by his brother, with the help of the Czech partisans using forged/backdated baptismal records. The Slovak subsidiary of the third reich was church oriented.

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.

>Well, there were even Jewish collaborators, in fact, quite plenty of them.

Yet they themselves were eventually murdered by the germans..

Not always. My grandfather, who was in Auschwitz, ran into, and confronted one of his own Kapos[1] on the street several years after the war.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kapo

Not all of them some were even declared "Honorary Aryans" including Hitlers personal chauffeur Emil Maurice.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emil_Maurice

I wouldn't even necessarily call the SLS collaborators. They were primaries. Broadly though, yes. When we know a little about a topic, it tends to be clean, black and white stereotypes and cliches. Real history is infinitely complicated. Even (especially) individuals are not one thing or another.

> we know a little about a topic, it tends to be clean, black and white stereotypes and cliches. Real history is infinitely complicated.

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.

> 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.

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...

I'm not sure what you are trying to say - hopefully not that there weren't any unwilling collaborators?

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.

> 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?

10000% confidence

Then all I can say is that I envy your confidence in your resolve, and I wish I could be as confident about what I would do with a gun to my head(or worse, to my children and my wife heads) as you are.

Like I said above - I hope my moment of trial never comes.

Thanks for sharing this story

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