It doesn’t matter how much you are preparing for it. It still takes you unexpectedly. As a great -granddaughter of a woman who was killed in Auschwitz, I meet with my granddaughter who was traveling to the death of the Jews. I got lost for the words.
I never met with my grandfather Ludwig, who survived the Holocaust or his mother Rachel. In 1944, they were put on a cabus for animals in Auschwitz’s death camp. Ludwig, who was separated at the time for about 15 years, was separated from his mother and sent to another concentration camp. But Rachel was tortured, soda and killed.
I grew up, hearing so many stories about them, and spent time with other surviving in the Holocaust in my family in Australia. They found themselves at the forefront of my mind when I was in Germany, interviewing Cornelius Stiller.
Cornelius’s grandfather was the main breadwinner in the household with a very small income. Initially, he worked as a miner of coal, but after an almost deadly accident, which left him trapped under coal for two days, he decided to do something else. Everything unfolded when he eventually got a job at Deutsche Reichsbahn as a train driver. Cornelius’s mother talked about this achievement with pride, saying that getting a job is a “chance for life.”
At first he transported goods for military efforts. But it soon turned into something more ominous. “I believe that my grandfather served as a train driver while traveling between death camps. He stayed in Lignitsa, now a legitimate, a boarding school, so there was a certain separation with his family and between death camps.”
Cornelia says that when her grandfather first started work, he did not know what it would be. “I think my grandfather saw a lot of terrible things and didn’t know how to get out of this work, didn’t know how to fight it.”
After training as a family therapist, she delved into her past and tried to understand it better. She tells me that she began to ask, “What was the moment he was a criminal? Was he an accessory for the criminals? When could he leave?”
At this point my mouth is dry. My heart rushes. Listening it all feels like body experience. Everything I can think about is how her grandfather was traveling on trains in Auschwitz, and that’s how grandfather and great-grandmother turned out. I think of all my other relatives – the cousins I know, but I do not know anything – who were killed in Auschwitz.
