My cousin from Vancouver faxed me this today. It was drawn by our grandfather Erich.
Also, see my other post about the church building in the background.
My father would have been motherless and 11 years old.
Everyone looks so chubby. They are wearing all the clothes they have. This is what Martin's aunts and uncles did when they fled by wagon.
My grandmother had just died of Typhoid fever which she had caught from Jewish individuals who had been released from concentration camp and who were living in their house for this reason. My grandfather remarried a lady from his town whose husband had been shot on the street at random. I gained four aunts this way.
Now you know why there are so many cousins.
My grandfather's paintings still hang in the old house inhabited by the Polish now. Sometimes my uncles go back there. This summer my brother went there for the first time. I would be curious, too.
This is a picture of my gradpa Erich and my grandmother, whom I've never met, but whom I resemble. (See my cheap IKEA frames all twisted.)
My mother was born in Grunwald, Silesia in 1924. She was among those ethnic Germans, labeled by Hitler as "Volksdeutsche", who were expelled in 1945, by Russian, a American soldiers, at the end of WWII. Sadly, she passed away in 2007, and there was so much she wouldn't never speak about, because it was to painful. I have read a lot of the history of the area since my mother's passing. I can't imagine how it must have been for a 20 year old young woman, who was forced to leave the only home she ever knew, simply because of Politics and War. There were many ethnic Germans who were innocent of any crime, but were simply victims of where they made their homes for many many years. Ironically, my Mother met and married my Father in 1952, who was an American soldier that fought in WWII, after meeting him when she was living in Weinheim, Germany. I was born in Landstuhl in 1961, when my Father was stationed there for the second time. I've been trying to do genealogy research on Silesia, but it has proven to be very difficult.
ReplyDelete