My ancestors' lifes were very much influenced by world politics in the 20st century.
My mother's parents lived in east Poland, today Ukraine, until 1939. Their families were mixed German, Polish and Ukrainian, and mostly spoke Polish at home, but because their passport said they are ethnic Germans, they were resettled and sent to Germany in 1939, due to the Hitler-Stalin-Pact.
Especially my grandmother looked almost Mongolian, probably she had some Hun blood in her, but her family was very proud to have maintained the German name "Ritter" (=knight), which dates back to the medieval German knights who christianized these eastern regions in the 13th century or so. They were very poor peasants, my grandfather even was illiterate, my grandmother only went to elementary school for four years.
My maternal grandfather was drafted in 1940 and was stationed in France, where he became British POW in 1944, but was released again in 1945 and could return home. He said the British were fair and provided the POWs with good food, he said that time was good, at least compared to the impoverished situation he had been used from his youth.
In 1945, the lands they were resettled to were assigned to Poland again, so my grandparents and their kids had to flee again, to West Germany this time. They were not allowed to take anything with them they couldn't carry with their bare hands.
This is a paternal granduncle of mine (my paternal grandmother's brother). In his youth, he was a devoted Nazi, as you can see, he joined the SA as early as 1929, IIRC.
But my grandmother (his sister) and her husband soon lost contact to him, because my grandfather was very opposed to Nazism, for religious reasons. He was a devoted Christian, so he rejected Nazism and soon got in disagreement with his brother-in-law.
My paternal grandparents lived in south Brandenburg (the Prussian main province), about 100 miles south of Berlin. My grandfather worked in the administration of his town as a leading clerk, but since he refused to join the Nazi Party after 1933, he was not promoted and often disadvantaged. In 1941, finally, he was drafted and obliged to do logistics and organisation for a military hospital at the eastern front. After the war, when all German crimes became known, he felt guilty and turned to the church, even more than before.
My father, born in 1940, grew up in this town south of Berlin, in the communist East German GDR. He showed me a few essays he had to write in school he got bad grades for, because he refused to cheer for "father Stalin". In 1960, one year before the Berlin Wall was built and the communists closed the border, he went to West Berlin for college. It was a bit of a shock for him when suddenly, the Berlin Wall was built and he now was disconnected from his parents, who lived on the east side. They were not allowed to visit the West, and when he wanted to visit them, there always was a huge bureaucratic hassle and long hours of waiting at the border controls. Once, he was even approached by a Stasi officer who attempted to give him a job as spy, but he refused.
In West Berlin at college, my father met my mother, who had come there as well from West Germany. There I grew up, and when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, I was there too, right in front of the Brandenburg Gate. I was a child, of course, so I didn't really understand everything, but it was a thrilling atmosphere back then.
Waterproof
