Her grandfather led the trains to Auschwitz. My family was killed there

It does not matter the amount you prepare for. He is still surprised. As a granddaughter of a woman who was killed in Auschwitz, I met the granddaughter of a man who led the Jews to their death. I am lost to words.

I have never met Lovig, who survived the Holocaust, or his mother Rachel. They were placed on the cattle vehicle to the Auschwitz death camp in 1944. Levite, who was about 15 years old, was separated from his mother and sent to another listing camp. But Rachel was tortured, gas and killed.

I grew up and I heard a lot of stories about them, and spend time with other survivors of the Holocaust in my family in Australia. They were at the forefront of my mind when I found myself in Germany an interview with Cornelia Steller.

Cornelia was the main family in a family with a little income. He originally worked as a coal mine worker, but after a semi -fatal accident, he left him besieged under coal for two days, he decided to do something else. Things when he eventually got a job in Deutsche Richcen as a train driver. Cornelia’s mother used to talk about this achievement proudly, saying that getting the job was a “life opportunity”.

Initially, he was transporting goods for the war effort. But soon it turned into something more evil. “I think my grandfather was a train driver, and he moved between death camps. He stayed in Legnitz, now Legeneca, in an internal school, so there was a specific chapter on the family and the death camps.”

Cornelia says that when her grandfather started at first, he didn’t know what would be. “I think my grandfather saw a lot of terrible things and did not know how to get out of this work, he didn’t know how to deal with it.”

After training as a family treatment, she entered her past and tried to understand it better. She told me that she started asking: “At what point was the perpetrator? Was it an attachment to the perpetrators? When did he leave?”

At this stage, my mouth is dry. My heart is racing. Listen to all of this looks like an experience outside the body. All I can think about is how her grandfather led the trains to Auschwitz, and so my grandmother and my grandmother ended there. I think about all other relatives – the cousins ​​I know exist but I do not know anything – who were killed in Auschwitz as well.

“If you are younger, I think I will feel the strong hatred towards you,” tell her as she fights tears. “But I do not do because saying all these things should be really difficult to recognize it.”

“Give me your hand,” says Cornelia. “It is important. Your tears, a touch, touch me … My grandfather was a train driver in Auschwitz. What can I say? Nothing.

“I cannot apologize, this is not possible,” she added, which means that the crime is very serious. “My grandfather was very guilty, and he died with his guilt.” Cornelia thank me for my openness and says that there is a need to completely reveal history.

Then she says something that you might not expect – that some Germans were from Shanwald, where her family came, it was angry with her research. The Polish city has not now been named after bojków, about 100 km from Kraków, with its Nazi past.

Cornelia explains that originally, the city was against the ideology of the Nazi party, but over time, it became consumed by it. Hitler Schunwald saw a typical village – an Arian village in a land of Slav. He hoped that the “fifth column” of the ethnic Germans would become a useful help in the army.

The GLIWITZ incident – a false science accident organized by Nazi Germany in 1939 to justify the invasion of Poland, was one of the operators of World War II. In 1945, near the end of the war, it was the first German village to be attacked by the progress of the Soviet forces.

But immediately before that, the scene of one of the alleged death marches was.

As the Soviets approached Auschwitz, the elite guard forced Hitler, SS, about 60,000 prisoners there – most of them Jews – to move to the West. Between 19 and 21 January 1945, one of these marches passed through Shunwald. At less frozen temperatures, prisoners were wearing only thin striped clothes with wooden shoes only on their feet. Those who collapsed from hunger and exhaustion were shot.

Those who survived the open livestock vehicle trains are placed to the West, and other concentration camps, such as Bu Pchenwald. The Nazis wanted to stick to their delicate work – even at this stage, some still believe in a final victory for the third sheikh.

The history teacher and local religion, KrZysztof Kruszynski, takes me to the main street in which the march of death has passed. People are waiting to arrest the bus outside the main church on Rolnikow Street – known as Bauer -strasse in the German era. It refers to the ground, and tells me that these are the stones packed with gravel that the prisoners had to walk.

He says, “He is a silent witness to the march of death.” “But the stone cannot speak.”

This date has been buried so far – partially because the Germans from Shanwald had to flee after the Soviet attack, which came shortly after the village. Rota Casupik, a German woman, in her eighties, told me how the Soviet soldiers were drunk her family’s home and killed her father. But there is another reason: an active repression of the past.

It did not surprise me that some Germans responded negatively to Cornelia’s research. Germany is proud of it Memory cultureOr a culture of remembering: mandatory Holocaust teaching, museums, memorials. But many see this as the position of the state and the government. Benjamin Fisher, a former Jewish student and a former political advisor, says, while they were happy enough to face the past in the summary, it is difficult to deal with the history of their families. It calls it “getting rid of history”.

A A study from the University of Belveield I found that a third of the Germans believed that their family members helped save the Jews during the Holocaust. This is “ridiculous”, as Benjamin says, and “statistically impossible.”

On the ground in bojków, 80 years after the March of Death, things change. Last week, a delegation of Germans, Jews and Poles, including local authorities, schools and emergency services, revealed a new memorial that celebrates the celebration of those who died in the city’s death march.

There was Cornelia and Czezusov there. For Cornelia, the date is very personal. It is convinced that the study and its remembrance is the key to understanding how society can change very quickly. I am grateful for that. They give me their work and passion for hope in a world of increasing anti -Semitism – as I try to keep the memory of how my family is alive.

The Shunwald people believed that their city lies at the top of high and spiritual culture. But then “folded in immorality,” says Cornelia. “This is a development that we need to understand … they were not good or only evil. People can enter functions in good faith but very quickly, (find themselves) on the wrong side.

“We cannot change the past. We cannot go back. But it is important to talk about this, to remind people of what happened, to remind people of what humans can do to each other.”