His grandfather ran trains to Auschwitz. my great grandmother died there

It doesn’t matter how much preparation you do for it. It still surprises you. As the great-granddaughter of a woman who was murdered in Auschwitz, I am meeting the granddaughter of the man who led Jews to their deaths. I have no words.

I never met my grandfather Ludwig, who survived the Holocaust, or his mother Rachel. He was put in a cattle car 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, gassed and murdered.

I grew up hearing a lot of stories about them and spending time with other genocide survivors in my family in Australia. He was at the forefront of my mind when I found myself interviewing Cornelia Styler in Germany.

Cornelia’s grandfather was the main breadwinner in a very low-income household. He originally worked as a coal miner, but after a fatal accident in which he was trapped under coal for two days, he decided to do something else. Things changed when he finally got a job with Deutsche Reichsbahn as a train driver. Cornelia’s mother spoke proudly of that accomplishment, saying that getting the job was “the opportunity of a lifetime.”

At first, he was transporting goods for the war effort. But it soon became even more frightening. “I believe my grandfather worked as a train driver, commuting between the death camps. He lived at a boarding school in Liegnitz, now Legnica, so was away from the family and the death camps There was a certain separation between.”

Cornelia says that when her grandfather first started the job, he had no idea what it would become. “I think my grandfather saw a lot of terrible things and didn’t know how to get out of this thing, didn’t know how to deal with it.”

After training as a family therapist, she delved deeper into her past and tried to understand it better. She tells me she started asking: “At what point was he a criminal? Was he an accessory to criminals? When could he leave?”

My mouth is dry at this point. My heart is beating loudly. Hearing all this feels like a supernatural experience. All I can think about is how his grandfather drove the trains to Auschwitz and that’s how my grandfather and great-grandmothers got there. I’m thinking about all my other relatives – cousins ​​and sisters I know of, but know nothing about – who were also murdered in Auschwitz.

“If I were younger, I think I would feel deep hatred toward you,” I tell her, choking back tears. “But I don’t say that because it must have been really hard to accept all those things.”

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

“I can’t apologize, it’s not possible,” she says, adding that the crime is too serious. “My grandfather felt very, very guilty, and he died with this guilt.” Cornelia thanked me for my openness and said that history needed to be fully exposed.

Then she says something you might not expect – that some Germans in Schönewald, where her family came from, reacted angrily to her research. About 100 km from Kraków, the Polish town has now been renamed Bojków, which bears no resemblance to its Nazi past.

Cornelia explains that originally the town was against the ideology of the Nazi Party, but over time it came under its influence. Hitler saw Schönwald as an ideal village – an Aryan village in the land of the Slavs. He was hoping that the “fifth column” of ethnic Germans there would become a useful aid to the army.

It was the site of the Gleiwitz Incident – ​​a false flag incident organized by Nazi Germany in 1939 to justify the invasion of Poland, one of the triggers of World War II. And in 1945, at the end of the war, it was the first German village attacked by the advancing Soviet army.

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

As the Soviets approached Auschwitz, Hitler’s elite guard, the SS, forced the approximately 60,000 prisoners there – mostly Jews – to move further west. Between 19 and 21 January 1945, one of those marches passed through Schönwald. In temperatures below zero, the prisoners were dressed only in thin striped uniforms and had only wooden shoes on their feet. Those who collapsed from hunger and exhaustion were shot.

Those who survived were put on open cattle-cart trains headed west, usually to other concentration camps such as Buchenwald. The Nazis wanted to take over their slave labor – even at this point, few people still believed in the ultimate victory of the Third Reich.

Krzysztof Kruczynski, a local history and religion teacher, takes me to the main street where the death procession passed. People wait to catch their bus outside the main church on Rollnikow Street – known as Bauer-Strasse in German times. He points to the ground, and tells me that these are the original cobble stones that the prisoners had to walk on.

“It is a silent witness to the procession of death,” he says. “But stone cannot talk.”

This history has been buried until now – partly because Schönwald’s Germans were forced to flee after the Soviet attack and Poles resettled the village. Ruta Kasubek, a German-Polish woman in her 80s, told me how drunk Soviet soldiers attacked her family home and killed her father. But there is another reason: active repression of the past.

I was not surprised that some Germans reacted negatively to Cornelia’s research. germany is proud of ErinrungskulturOr a culture of remembrance: compulsory Holocaust education, museums, memorials. But many people consider it to be the work of the state and government. And while they’re quite happy to confront the past in the abstract, it’s hard for them to deal with their own family history, says Benjamin Fisher, a former Jewish student leader and political consultant. He calls this the “deindividuation of history”.

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

80 years after the death march, things are changing on the ground in Bojko. Last week, a delegation of Germans, Jews and Poles, including local authorities, schools and emergency services, unveiled a new memorial to those killed in the city’s death march.

Cornelia and Krzysztof were there. For Cornelia, history is deeply personal. He is convinced that studying and remembering this is the key to understanding how society can change so rapidly. And I am grateful for it. Their work and passion give me hope in a world of rising anti-Semitism – as I try to keep alive the memory of how my family was murdered.

The people of Schönwald believed that their city was at the pinnacle of high culture and spirituality. But then it “turned into immorality”, says Cornelia. “It’s an evolution that we need to understand… They weren’t just good or bad. People can go into jobs with good intentions but very quickly, find (themselves) on the wrong side.

“We can’t change the past. We can’t turn back time. But it’s important to talk about it, to remind people of what happened, to remind people of what humans can do to each other. Are.”