Tracing Roots Lost to War
Echoes of a family’s journey across time and borders. I’ve been wanting to blog about this for a while. This will probably be a long one—and it might even turn into a series of posts around a central theme. My mother—more than me, but me too—has always wondered about her mother’s family. A Childhood Cut Short My grandmother was born in Poland in 1926, before World War II. She was just 13, almost 14, when Germany invaded. According to my mother, my grandmother was at school in Kraków when the invasion happened. She was taken away from her parents, older brother, and sister. The last time she ever saw them was before going to school that day. I just learned this part while preparing for this post: my grandmother was taken to a concentration camp and was “in line for a shower.” She was seen by a German officer, who pulled her out of the line. She was forced to serve as an au pair—but in truth, she was a slave. My mother told me that, surprisingly, my grandmother wa...
