Prologue:
‘Only those who can’t achieve anything on their own need a family tree.’ I have been living with this quote (from whom?) since my teenage times. Nevertheless, I am providing this information here because (a) I have been asked for it repeatedly for several years now, and (b) as a teenager I was repeatedly bullied by neo-Nazis and told to return to my parents’ homeland. As a matter of fact, this is Berlin, Germany.
Self-Assessment:
I am the “black sheep” of my family: the only one with dark hair and dark eyes; everyone else is blonde and blue-eyed.
Documented Facts:
I was born in East-Berlin (GDR), participated in demonstrations that resulted in a peaceful revolution in 1989. These events of 1989/ 1990 left one of the biggest impressions on my character.
My mother was a doctor; my father a nurse. All my siblings and parents were born in Berlin, Germany, but migration of various branches took place in the generations before that:
Mother’s mother: born in 1915 in Berlin; her parents, with a German family name, had moved there from Ratibor/Racibórz, Silesia (now Poland) because her father, a company lawyer, was promoted and was told to move to the headquarters in the capital of the German Empire. Her older brother died as a child. My grandmother attended a girls’ school for higher education, spoke and wrote at least four languages, and worked as a secretary for international communication before she married. My grandparents married before the war; the sons were born during the war, which is why she fled Berlin and lived in her parents’ hometown in Silesia for a couple of years. Her second son was born on the day of the attempt on Hitler’s life. She returned to Berlin in 1945 with the very last train before the Soviet occupation.
Mother’s father: born in 1913 in Berlin as a son of Polish immigrants from the area between Poznań and Warsaw. He was tall, blond and blue-eyed and a pilot in the war. In the war, he had to serve – but not as a soldier: he worked in his profession (as a surveyor) in Norway, Western Europe, North Africa and finally in France, where he was captured by Americans in the last days of the war.
There is some mystery about wartime:
My grandfather said that he was captured in southern France and, during the surrender, he was on a ship across the Atlantic Ocean that was ordered to return to Marseille/ Europe and release the prisoners to Germany; due to the division of Germany, the Americans would release him to Munich, from where he somehow managed to get back to East Berlin, where his wife with two young boys had found their apartment undamaged. My grandfather’s mother and sister lived in West Berlin (Tempelhof, on the same street where the surrender was signed), and he likely went there first from Munich.
A family member with almost the same name as my grandfather and the same occupation in wartime (pilot) is reported in Yad Vashem to have deserted when ordered to bomb Warsaw, then fled the Nazi regime, hid under a wrong name, saved some Jews, survived the war but died young in Russian captivity some years later, and now has a plaque in Yad Vashem as Righteous Among the Nations. There are some contradictions in all the stories, as Yad Vashem gives two deviating dates of death (1951 or 1953).
I don’t know if that was my grandfather (with a faked death and birthday, and deliberately dropped the first of two given names, as “Leonhard” was the second one), or if it was his father Sylvester (with the wrong name and birthday, as it was faked anyway, and in the photograph the man looks similar to my grandfather at my parents’ wedding – so a faked age is not excluded), or a mysterious cousin (with the same name).
As a surveyor (engineer), my grandfather played a key role in the post-war reconstruction.
Father’s mother: born at the edge of the city of Berlin in 1923; her parents lived there, and the family had lived there for at least three generations, but the family name was Polish. The history is not preserved. She worked as a sales assistant in a paint shop.
Father’s father (“Hoffmann“): born in 1922 in Glogow, Silesia, now Poland. He served as a soldier in Eastern Europe during the war, finally in Romania, where he was captured. He returned from Russian captivity due to an injury, but was not allowed to return to his home town (which was then on Polish territory); instead, he went to stay with an aunt in Berlin, where he met my grandmother. He was a professional carpenter but couldn’t continue working in that profession after his war injuries, so he worked as a forklift driver in a brewery.
Silesia
Silesia is known as “the nation that never was”, a Central European culture that has been defined by the mixture of German and Polish elements, as the composition of the population has always (for at least one millennium) been mixed. This culture lived in areas now politically assigned to Poland and Czechia; small parts might still be German.