Her grandfather drove to Auschwitz. my great grandmother was murdered there

It’s okay that you prepare for this. It still surprises you. As the great-granddaughter of a woman who was murdered in Auschwitz, I met the granddaughter of a man who drove Jews to their death. I'm lost.

I never met my grandfather Ludvig, who survived the Holocaust or his mother Rachel. They were put on oxcarts to the death camp at Auschwitz in 1944. Ludvig, then about 15 years old, was separated from his mother and sent to another concentration camp. But Rachel was tortured, gassed and murdered.

I heard many stories about them growing up and with other Holocaust survivors from my family in Australia. They were at the forefront of my mind when I found myself interviewing Cornelia Stieler in Germany.

Cornelia's grandfather was the main breadwinner in a family with very little income. He started out as a coal miner, but after a near-fatal accident in which he was trapped under coal for two days, he decided to do something else. Things changed when he finally found a train driver in Deutsche Reichsbahn. Cornelia's mother once spoke of this achievement with pride, saying that getting the job was “the opportunity of a lifetime.”

At first, he was transporting goods for the war effort. But it quickly turned into something more sinister. “I believe my grandfather was a train driver commuting between the death camps. He lived in a boarding school in Liegnitz, now Legnitz, so was close to his family and death There is a certain separation between the battalions.”

Cornelia said when her grandfather first started the job, he had no idea what it would become. “I think my grandfather saw a lot of horrible stuff and didn't know how to get out of this job, didn't know what to do with it.”

After training as a family therapist, she delved into her past and tried to understand him better. She told me she started asking: “At what point is he a perpetrator? Is he an accessory to the perpetrator? When can he leave?”

At this point, my mouth is pretty dry. My heart is in racing. Listening to all of this feels like an out-of-body experience. All I can think about is how her grandfather drove the train into Auschwitz, which is how my grandfather and great-grandmother ended up there. I was thinking about all my other relatives – cousins ​​I knew about, but knew nothing about them – who were also murdered in Auschwitz.

“If I were younger, I think I would feel an intense hatred for you,” I told her, fighting back tears. “But I'm not saying all these things because it must be hard to admit.”

“Give me your hand,” Cornelia said, also breathing heavily. “This is important. Your tears and my touch are touching me… My grandfather was a train driver at Auschwitz. What can I say? Nothing.

She added: “I can't apologize, it's impossible.” It meant the crime was too serious. “My grandfather felt very, very guilty about his death.” Cornelia thanked me for my openness and said it was necessary to fully reveal the history.

Then she said something you might not have expected – some Germans from her family had an angry reaction to her research. The current Polish town renamed Bojków, about 100 kilometers from Kraków, has yet to come to terms with its Nazi past.

Cornelia explains that initially, the town opposed the Nazi party's ideology, but over time it became consumed by it. Hitler saw Schönwald as a model village – an Aryan Village in the land of the Slavs. He hoped that the “fifth column” of Germans there would become a useful aid to the army.

It is the site of the Gleiwitz Incident – a false flag incident raised by Nazi Germany in 1939 to justify the invasion of Poland, one of the triggers of World War II. In 1945, at the end of the war, it was the first German village to be attacked by the Soviet Union.

But just before that, this was the scene from one of the Nazis' so-called death marches.

As the Soviets approached Auschwitz, Hitler's elite guard camp, they forced the roughly 60,000 prisoners there, mostly Jews, to move west. Between January 19 and 21, 1945, one of these parades passed through Schönwald. In subfreezing temperatures, prisoners wore only thin striped uniforms and wooden shoes. Those who collapsed from hunger and exhaustion were shot.

Those who survived were put on open oxcart trains and headed west, often to other concentration camps such as Buchenwald. The Nazis wanted to hold on to slave labor – and even at this point, some still believed in the eventual victory of the Third Reich.

Krzysztof Kruszynski, a local history and religion teacher, took me to the main street where the death march passed. People wait to catch buses outside the main church on Rolnikow Street – known as Bauer-Strasse in German times. He pointed to the ground and told me these were the original cobblestones on which the prisoners had to move.

“This is a silent witness to the death march,” he said. “But the stones cannot speak.”

This history has remained buried to this day – in part because the Germans from Schöwald were forced to flee after a Soviet attack that occurred shortly after, and the Polans resettled the village. Ruta Kassubek, a German woman in her 80s, told me how Soviet soldiers burst into her home and murdered her father. But there's another reason: active suppression of the past.

It's not surprising that some Germans have reacted negatively to Cornelia's research. Germany is proud of its memory cultureOr the culture of remembrance: mandatory Holocaust education, museums, memorials. But many people think this is the job of the state and government. Benjamin Fischer, a former Jewish student leader and political consultant, said that while they were happy enough to face the past in the abstract, they had a hard time processing their own family history. He called it the “mystification of history.”

one Research at the University of Bielefeld One in three Germans was found to believe their family members helped save Jews during the Holocaust. Benjamin said this was “ridiculous” and “statistically impossible.”

Eighty years after the death march, on the ground in Bojków, things have changed. Last week, a delegation of Germans, Jews and Poles, including local authorities, schools and emergency services, unveiled a new memorial to those who died in the town in March.

Cornelia and Krzysztof are there. For Cornelia, history is deep. She firmly believes that studying and remembering this is key to understanding how society is changing rapidly. I'm grateful for that. Their work and passion give me hope in a world where anti-Semitism is on the rise – as I try to preserve the memory of how my family was murdered.

The people of Schönwald believe that their town lies at the pinnacle of high culture and spirituality. But then it “folded into immorality,” Cornelia said. “This is a development we need to understand… They are not good or evil. People can go into work with good intentions but very quickly (find themselves) on the wrong side of things.

“We can't change the past. We can't move time. But it's important to talk about it and remind people what happened and what humans can do with each other.”