My grandparents lived through the second world war. I don't know much about how it must have been for them, they didn't talk about it much. For the most part, unless they were soldiers, most people would have had similar experiences, so for them I guess there wasn't much to discuss. However, for my maternal grandmother, experiences were a little different to what my English grandparents had, because that grandmother was born in Breslau, in East Germany.
For those who don't know, Breslau was in a part of East Germany which returned to Poland after the second world war. Grandma was born halfway through the first world war, to an educated, middle class family. Her father was an eye surgeon and her grandfather a doctor.
You might think that being born into a family which allowed for more opportunity would have been a good thing, but the events soon to follow made no discrimination and affected all classes eventually. In a country where so many atrocities were committed, it probably made Britain seem like the nicer place to be.
When Hitler's Nazi party came into power, the German people all started to experience what it was to live in a dictatorship. A new class system seemed to be coming in and it was based on how German you could prove yourself to be. I have a fair amount of family ancestry from this side of the family, purely because they had to trace their ancestry back as far as they could to show a long German history. I sometimes wonder how accurate it is, though, because to keep yourself and your family safe you didn't really want to see much mixed ancestry there and certainly not Jewish heritage. I always got the impression that the family were just trying to keep their heads down and not draw attention to themselves.
I've written about my grandmother's life a bit before and mentioned how she ended up being driven from her home, her family and her country by the war. I don't believe she ever got to see her hometown again, even to reminisce, after the war ended and this went for the rest of her family too. She wasn't with her family when the Soviet army came through and they had to flee their home, I have an account written by one of them which my aunt started to translate for me (one day I must try and translate the rest) and it describes day after day of walking and walking to try and keep ahead of the encroaching “red army”. They had no supplies, very little on them and relied on the kindness of others to be able to eat at the end of the day. I'd never before come across plain boiled potatoes being described as if they are the most delectable food in the world.
They weren't the only family in this situation, it seems there was a mass migration fleeing west. This part of the family eventually got settled in East Germany, essentially split off from the rest of the family who were in the West or out of the country, in my grandmother's case. Visits to the East weren't easy and getting permission for them to leave and visit family was even harder. I only once got to meet my great grandmother when she managed to get permission to visit her daughter in West Germany and they snuck over to visit us in England. I remember very little about the visit other than the impression that it was a pretty special occasion.
Life can be hard with what it throws at us and when it all seems too daunting and I am worrying how we'll pay the bills, I think of what my grandmother lived through and fought through, along with many more survivors from that time and many who went through much worse. Then it puts things into perspective. Many people survive much worse!
This is my response to the @ecotrain question of the week.