So, I've been thinking about it some more and have decided to share the other, less cheery and amusing, story about my Grandmother's family during the war. In part my decision is influenced by my currently watching the Australian version of Who Do You Think You Are? Today's episode features Magda Szubanski who is a favourite Aussie comedian of Polish/Irish stock. It's always cool to hear in depth stories of other people's family histories even when you will never be able to discover the stories of your own family.

Anyway, I've decided to put this one under a cut because it's not at all friendly and rather graphic. Ordinarily I wouldn't bother with the cut, but huge Nazi involvement and violence leads me to think that cutting this story is kind of appropriate.

So, before I told the story about the guy who took some boots that didn't belong to him only to find that they still had feet in them. That'll learn ya. This story is about my paternal Grandmother's family in (formerly) Czechoslovakia during Nazi occupation. My Grandma always refers to the Nazis as "Germans" and I can't blame her - I never heard her say the word "Nazi" and I'm sure that she never, ever will - but I want to ensure that people don't think that I think that all Germans are Nazis, because I don't and they're not, and I'm going to try to differentiate where possible. Also, an interesting side note is that I didn't hear this story from my Grandma; I heard it from my dad who heard it from his elder (not eldest) brother who heard it from my Grandmother who told the story to him after my Grandfather died back in '99....So surely some of this is hearsay, but I'll be as faithful to the details that I know as I possibly can be.

OK, so my Grandmother lived, as aforementioned, with her parents, grandmother, three sisters and two brothers (or one brother at this point, there's some confusion about him) in a house on a farm in Czechoslovakia. Her father was, at some point, taken by the Nazis to a camp, though no one knows which one for sure (I think it was Theresienstadt, because that's near enough to where they lived and the only camp in the country). The other thing that no one really knows, besides my Grandma, is why he was sent there; I know the camp held about 7,000 undesirable Czechs amid a large number of Jews, but I was always under the impression that he was sent there because he was both Jewish and a teacher. I don't know where I got that impression from, but that's what I always thought. Anyway, what we know is he was taken to the camp that was built in an emptied town called Terezín. 

Now, my Grandmother's family lived on a little farm that had a barn and she and her siblings would go out to the barn from time to time and discover that some handkerchiefs, a little bit of money and sometimes a handwritten note were left there by her imprisoned father. He had been, periodically, escaping the confines of the camp, leaving little gifts in the barn, and then going back to avoid detection. He wouldn't come up to the house because that would put his family in danger, but he'd go to the barn and go back to the camp.

The next details are a little hazy, but the end result is certainly not. I will have to ask my dad about this last bit again. The way I heard it is that one day he'd escaped the camp again and ran up to the house. He pounded on the door and his wife (my Grandmother's mother) raced around the house to hide the other family members. At this point my Grandma and a couple of her siblings were hidden in the chimney and the others were hidden around the house. Through the cracks in the brickwork my Grandmother saw her father be surrounded by fully uniformed SS officers...And at that point they opened fire on him and he was cut in half by their machine gun fire. He died, in front of his home, in full view of his family.


So, that's the story. I don't know any clearer details about it and I can't ask my Grandma...Even though, as her memory goes, more things will come out, but I can't ask. The war was the thing that wasn't spoken about in our family...That itself wasn't spoken about, lol, but we knew that we couldn't ask about the war and if any details were revealed then we weren't to press for more information. I know that a lot of things were hidden...My Grandmother especially spent her whole adult life actively forgetting her experiences through the war, not ignoring, not suppressing, but actively "unremembering," which took a lot of effort - sometimes very visible effort - and as a result she (and to another extent, my Grandfather) was made into a completely different person. And, the more I think about it, the war made my grandparents into the people I know (and knew) them as...Which is incredibly painful to really think about.

WWII stole them...Ruined them in a lot of ways...Made sure that they could never be the people that they were really supposed to be. It's not a grudge that's mine to hold and I can bear to be part of that history in some way, but it's not something that I can forget, and nor is it something that I have been able to forgive in any meaningful way because the effects of the war did not end in 1945. I grew up with the damaged people that my grandparents became, and that's something that will stay with me until the day I die...It's not right and it isn't fair and I struggle to understand how one small group of people could treat a myriad other groups of people in such a way. I also can't stand that I will never know the whole story...I won't know what happened to my family - my people - in great detail and I feel cheated. I think we all do. It sucks.

Urgh. Anyway, that's that from me for now, I think. I'm going to have a sit down and a bit of a cry, I think. 'Night xx