It doesn’t matter how much you prepare for it. It still surprises you. As the great-granddaughter of the woman who was killed in Auschwitz, I meet the granddaughter of the man who drove the Jews to their deaths. I am lost for words.
I never met my grandfather Ludwig, who survived the Holocaust, or his mother Rachel. They were put in cattle carts in the Auschwitz death camp in 1944. Ludvig, who was about 15 years old at the time, was separated from his mother and sent to another concentration camp. But Rachel was tortured, extinguished and killed.
I grew up hearing so many stories about them and spending time with other Holocaust survivors in my family in Australia. They were on my mind when I found myself in Germany interviewing Cornelia Stieler.
Cornelia’s grandfather was the main breadwinner in a household with very little income. He originally worked as a coal miner, but after a near-fatal accident that left him trapped under coal for two days, he decided to do something else. Things turned around when he eventually got a job with the Deutsche Reichsbahn as a train driver. Cornelia’s mother spoke of the achievement with pride, saying the job was “the chance of a lifetime”.
In the beginning, it transported goods for the war effort. But it soon turned into something more sinister. “I believe my grandfather served as a train driver, traveling between the death camps. He stayed in Liegnitz, now Legnica, in a boarding school, so there was a certain separation from the family and between the death camps.”
Cornelia says that when her grandfather first started the business, he didn’t know what he would become. “I think my grandfather saw a lot of horrible things and he didn’t know how to get out of this business, he didn’t know how to deal with 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, “At what point was he a perpetrator? Was he an accessory to the perpetrators? When could he leave?”
My mouth is dry at this point. My heart is racing. Listening to it all feels like an out-of-body experience. All I can think about is how her grandfather drove the trains to Auschwitz, and that’s how my grandfather and great grandmother ended up. I think about all my other relatives – relatives that I know exist, but know nothing about – who were also killed in Auschwitz.
“If I were younger, I think I would have felt a strong hatred for you,” I tell her, fighting back tears. “But I don’t know because all those things must have been really hard to admit.”
“Give me your hand,” says Cornelia, also squirming. “It’s important. Your tears and my touch touch me … my grandfather was a train driver in Auschwitz. What can I say? Nothing.
“I can’t apologize, it’s not possible,” she adds, implying that the crime is too serious. “My grandfather felt very, very guilty and died of his own guilt.” Cornelia thanks me for my openness and says that there is a need to fully reveal history.
Then she says something you might not expect – that some Germans from Schönwald, where her family came from, reacted angrily to her research. The Polish town now renamed Bojków, some 100 km from Krakow, has not come to terms with its Nazi past.
Cornelia explains that in the beginning the city was against the ideology of the Nazi party, but over time it consumed it. Hitler saw Schönwald as a model village – an Aryan village in the land of the Slavs. He hoped that the “fifth column” of ethnic Germans would become a useful aid in the army.
It was the site of the Gleiwitz Incident – a false flag incident ordered by Nazi Germany in 1939 to justify the invasion of Poland, one of the triggers of World War II. And in 1945, towards the end of the war, it was the first German village to be attacked by advancing Soviet forces.
But just before that, it was the scene of one of the so-called Nazi marches.
As the Soviets closed in on Auschwitz, Hitler’s elite guard, the SS, forced some 60,000 prisoners there – mostly Jews – to move further west. Between January 19 and 21, 1945, one of these marches passed through Schönwald. Below freezing temperatures, the prisoners were dressed only in their thin striped uniforms with only wooden shoes on their feet. Those who collapsed from hunger and exhaustion were shot.
Those who survived were put on open boxcar trains heading further west, usually to other concentration camps, such as Buchenwald. The Nazis wanted to hang on to their slave labor – even at this point, some still believed in the final triumph of the Third Reich.
Local history and religion teacher, Krzysztof Kruszynski, takes me to the main street where the death march took place. People wait to catch their bus in front of the main church on Rolnikow Street – known as Bauer -Strasse in German times. He points to the ground and tells me that these were originally cobblestones for the cobblestones that the prisoners had to walk on.
“It’s a silent witness to the death march,” he says. “But a stone cannot talk.”
This history has been buried until now – partly because the Germans of Schönwald were forced to flee after the Soviet attack that came soon after, and the Poles moved into the village. A German-Polish woman in the 80s, Ruta Kassubek, told me how drunken Soviet soldiers broke into the family home and killed her father. But there is another reason: active suppression of the past.
I was not surprised that some Germans responded negatively to Cornelia’s research. Germany is proud of its Erinnungskulturor the culture of memory: Compulsory Holocaust education, museums, memorials. But many see it as the job of the state and government. And while they’re happy enough to face the past in the abstract, it’s harder to face their own family history, says Benjamin Fischer, a former Jewish student leader and political consultant. He calls it the “deindividualization of history”.
AND A study by the University of Bielefeld found that a third of Germans believe that their family members helped save Jews during the Holocaust. That’s “ridiculous,” says Benjamin, and “statistically impossible.”
On the ground in Bojków, 80 years after the death march, things are changing. Last week, a delegation of Germans, Jews and Poles, including local authorities, schools and emergency services, unveiled a new memorial to those who died in the city’s march.
Cornelia and Krzysztof were there. For Cornelia, history is deeply personal. She is convinced that studying and memorizing is key to understanding how society can change so quickly. And I’m grateful for that. Their work and passion gives me hope in a world of rising anti-Semitism – as I try to keep the memory of how my family became murdered alive.
The people of Schönwald believed that their city lay at the pinnacle of high culture and spirituality. But then it “turned into immorality,” says Cornelia. “This is a development we have to understand … they weren’t just good or bad. People can go into business with good intentions, but very quickly, [find themselves] on the wrong side.
“We can’t change the past. We can’t turn back time. But it’s important to talk about it, to remind people of what happened, to remind people of what people can do to each other.”
