Photos from the trip

The Wang church at Krummhübel with the pre-WWII cemetery in the foreground 

The Lazarus statue at the Wang church

Explanation of the Lazarus statue in German

Scene from Buschvorwerk

Scene from Buschvorwerk

Old town Kowary (Schmiedeberg)

The Town Hall in Kowary (Schmiedeberg)

The old cemetery wall, Kowary (Schmiedeberg)

The crosses that mark the hidden graves

My mom investigates

What lies beneath?

At the archive in Jelenia Gora (Hirschberg)

Drawing to a close

It's a sunny 5:30am in our hotel in Berlin, on the morning of our departure. For the past two days I have been unable to update the blog, as I couldn't seem to connect to the internet in our hotel in Prague, where we made a short detour.

So I'll start where I left off - at our last day in Poland, and our last hope of finding any more information on our ancestors.

That morning we headed out by bus to Jelenia Gora, where we were hoping to view some records in the archives of the district Hirschberg. There we encountered a very friendly and helpful lady (whose name slips my mind right now) who tried her best to find something for us, although she too pointed out that without a person's birth place, it is very difficult to impossible to find more information on them, especially if you're looking to find out who their parents were. She also tried to find the marriage certificate of my mother's grandfather and grandmother in Wernersdorf (for which we have the exact date, as seen on the picture I've used for the background of this blog) and allowed us to look through the actual marriage registries with her, but we couldn't find it, perhaps because we were looking at records for the wrong Wernersdorf (we tried two, but there were something like seven Wernersdorfs in Poland at the time!). She also said that she would probably be able to find something if she had more time, and gave me her email address to send her all of the information we have and are looking for, for her to do a longer search. So we'll definitely do that as soon as we get back to SA!

After that, we also visited the archives at Kowary (Schmiedeberg), hoping to find Johann Friederich's death certificate from 1914. Strangely we encountered the exact opposite attitude in Kowary than we did in Jelenia Gora - the people at the archive seemed unwilling to help, even slightly rude. While their records would have been only a fraction of that of the much larger Jelenia Gora, they wouldn't let us look at any of it, instead proposing we give them our postal address, for them to mail us Johann Friederich's death certificate. They wouldn't consider trying to find Josefine's, or their daughter Emma's marriage certificate, presumably not even if we paid them! What really blew my mind was when the woman asked if she should mail us the original or a copy of Johann Friederich's death certificate! Did they not care for these records from a time before they or any of their relatives lived there? What if someone else - a distant relative - was looking for my g. g. grandfather and they had sent off his original birth certificate to me - would they tell them he never existed?

We also asked them about  what happened to the graves of the Germans that lived there before the war, expecting to hear that they were destroyed as I had read in my research, but instead the woman said that, since no taxes were paid for their upkeep, the gravestones were replaced and new bodies buried on top of them. Although I know this to be standard (yet heartless) practice in many cemeteries around the world, I find it very hard to believe that this is what happened here. Firstly, it goes against what I have read - that all German graves on the Polish  side of the Riesengebirge  were decimated directly after the war, and it doesn't explain the overgrown remnants of a graveyard with the remains of an old wall  that we found directly in front of the present-day cemetery. Although I wanted to point this out to her, I decided to leave it, as I felt that it wouldn't get me very far.

The ordeal at the archives in Kowary left me feeling frustrated and defeated. All we wanted was to find the records for my g. g. grandparents so that we could trace our genealogy - instead it seemed it got us tangled up in politics and emotional baggage caused by a war that didn't even happen until 25 years after my g.g. grandfather's death! I couldn't help but notice that in all of the tourist information brochures of the area (with the possible exception of that of the Wang church) where its history is described, there is no mention of the former inhabitants and founders of these towns - they have literally been written out of history! Did my g. g. grandparents really deserve to have no trace left of their existence in the place they called home?

I guess there is no objectivity when it comes to history (or most other things for that matter). As an outsider, it is easy for me to say things should be told as they were, and the facts would speak for themselves. As a South African, I am all too aware of the historical and emotional baggage a nation can carry around with them. All of us are products of our environments, as much as we are products of our genes. While dates and places of origin can only put a person in the context of their milieu, perhaps the characteristics we share with our living relatives is a much better barometer of who our ancestors really were, and how they would have behaved given the particular environment they were faced with. In this case, especially with the lack of details we are faced with, perhaps the best answers have always been internal, rather than external.

Having visited the towns of the Riesengebirge - Buschvorwerk, Schmiedeberg, Krummhubel - where my g. g. grandparents chose to spend at least the last 20 or so years of their lives, makes me realise that there is definitely a bit of them in me. The few days we spent there were definitely the highlight of our trip, as we enjoyed the fresh mountain air and beautiful surroundings. In fact, this is where we learnt the most about them - even without the pieces of paper we set out trying to find at the start of our journey.

Answers blowing in the wind

After spending two nights in Wroclaw, Poland, we headed out by slow train through the Polish countryside to Jelenia Gora, where a friendly gentleman who knew some German and had been with us on the train directed us to the bus that would take us to Karpacz, where we are now staying.

We decided to stay in Karpacz as it is a touristy ski town with lots of accommodation options only 6km from Kowary, which used to be called Schmiedeberg, where my great great grandparents lived for at least 20 years of their lives until they died.

Karpacz (still referred to sometimes by its old German name, Krummhübel) is a quaint little town, visited by mostly Polish and German tourists for skiing in winter and hiking in summer. The surroundings are most beautiful and it was a relief to be out in the countryside after spending all of our trip in big cities so far.

Yesterday morning we took a taxi up the mountain to Wang church, a Lutheran church which had originally stood in Vang Norway (since 1200) before it was re-erected in Krummhübel in 1842, meaning it would have been here already when Johann Friederich and Josefine came here, and it is likely that they would have visited the church as they were Lutherans.

Behind this unusual and striking building we found a well-kept cemetary with German graves from before the Second World War, which surprised us, as we were under the impression that all the German graves on the Polish side of the Riesengebirge were destroyed after the war and after the German inhabitants had been driven out. Finding these graves gave us a bit of hope that we might also find the graves of Johann Friederich and Josefine somewhere in Buschvorwerk or Schmiedeberg.

So today we got up early to hike the 6km to Schmiedeberg (Kowary), passing through Buschvorwerk (Krzaczyna), where we know Johann Friederich's funeral took place, according to the funeral letter in our possession. As we were walking along, taking in the beauty and calmness of the environment, my mother remarked how much this place looked like Wilderness, George, where my grandfather (Heinz Herbert Meissner I) had bought a farm many years ago. In fact, all of my grandfather's children and grandchildren would feel very comfortable and at home in these surroundings!

When we arrived in the tiny town of Krzaczyna, we tried to imagine which of the houses would have already been there at the turn of the previous century, make-believing that one of the houses could have been that of my great great grandparents. We also kept an eye out for gravestones anywhere, but didn't see anything. While scouring a map on an information board in Krzaczyna, two Polish hikers stopped by to find out if they could help us. When they realised we couldn't speak Polish, they called a man who was standing nearby who knew some German. He told us that there were no cemetaries in Krzaczyna, but that there were two in Kowary, an older one and a newer one, which he pointed out to us on the map.

So off we went to Kowary, finding the old town a little run down but still looking exactly the same as a hundred years and more ago, except that all of the street names had been changed from German to Polish and the shops were more modern, of course. About a hundred metres behind the town hall we found the cemetary, and we began to scour the graves for any German names or dates from before the war. We soon realised, however, that all of the names were in Polish and the earliest deaths were from the fifties.

Feeling a bit defeated, we started making our way back in the direction we came from. Along what we thought was just a very overgrown, open plot, ran a stone wall that seemed as if it had been standing there for at least a century. I ran my eyes along the length of the wall, and suddenly something clicked. I saw that there was a narrow footpath going through the long grass and weeds and started following it in the direction of what looked like a wooden cross and a steel cross on a wooden pedestal, but the footpath turned away from it and we couldn't get to it. I tried another way through the grass where it wasn't as overgrown, and came upon what looked like a piece of a broken gravestone, and further on another.

Meantime my mom, who was wearing longer pants than I, had made her way through the long grass to where the crosses were standing, and told me they were definitely marking the spot where two graves were. That was it - I had to see them for myself! I started wading through the grass, just hoping that there weren't any snakes or poison ivy or deep holes that I couldn't see, and finally made it there. Although completely covered with moss and grass, I could definitely make out the two graves, although any inscriptions that might have been there, would have been impossible to read, even if I did remove all of the moss covering first. The two crosses seem to have been erected there, perhaps a decade or two decades ago, and were much newer than the graves themselves. A remembrance of sorts. Looking around I could make out other pieces of broken stone beneath the grass - vaguely. We were standing in the middle of what would have been quite a big cemetary in its day, surrounded by an old stone wall.

Could this be where all of the Germans who inhabited and died in the town, then called Schmiedeberg, had been buried? Had the gravestones that should have been standing there been destroyed by the Russians, or the Poles, after the remaining Germans were forcefully removed in 1946? Were Johann Friederich or Josefine perhaps buried somewhere in that very cemetary - six feet beneath where I had been traipsing through the grass? I kept on mulling over these questions in the bus on the way back to Karpacz. Perhaps we will find the answer in the Jelenia Gora (Hirschberg) archives, where we are headed tomorrow morning.

PS. I will try to add some photos of the hidden cemetary as soon as I am able to use my own computer again.

PPS. A Google search this afternoon led me to these two photos of Buschvorwerk in the olden days, added by an anonymous person. Underneath the first the "publisher" is named as Paul Fischer, whose name I immediately recognised as the same as the person who took the only photograph of Johann Friederich and Josefine we have in our posession!

Chased out of town by the church!

Today I'm writing from the Silfor Europejski Hotel in Wroclaw, Poland. I know that after my last blog entry you were probably expecting an account of our time in Dresden, but while we did make it to Dresden, we bought our train tickets to get out of there A.S.A.P. within an hour of our arrival!

You see, what we didn't realise and what no guidebook or person had told us, was that our intended trip was to coincide exactly with a massive church festival attended by hundreds of thousands of people. The fact that our train was so full that we had to sit in the passage for the entire trip, should have given us a bit of a clue, but what do we know about trains and overbooking in Germany? Being nosy as I am about what people are reading, it did catch my attention that quite a few people in our carriage had their noses in religious or church-related materials (e.g. Jesus fur Atheisten!), but I thought that perhaps a group of people on my carriage were attending a church conference in Dresden.

Little did I realise that my mother and I were probably the only people on the entire train not planning to attend Kirchentag, as this German Evangelical festival that runs over 5 days is known. Upon our arrival the train station was teeming with people and signs welcoming one to Kirchentag, or pointing Kirchentag attendees in the right direction for storing their luggage. Outside there were marquees set up with Kirchentag information, Kirchentag performances, etc.

We made our way to the tourist information centre, where, according to our guidebook, the friendly staff can organise any kind of accomodation for you on the spot. That is, except when it's Kirchentag! The woman behind the counter just shook her head while staring at her computer screen, which was confirming what she already knew: That there were no hotels, inns, rooms, dorms, or any other kind of accommodation for us in Dresden, nor in the surrounding towns up to 50km away. What were we to do? We decided to walk over to the train station again to look at available trains leaving Dresden.

When we were about 20 metres into the left wing of the building, a deafening alarm suddenly went off, startling us. After what must have been just a few seconds, the heavens suddenly opened up and rained dirty water down on top of us, while inaudible announcements over loud speakers presumably urged us to move towards the exit of the building. Soaking wet people were scattering everywhere while the water continued to gush out of the roof. Clueless as to what was going on, we made our way to the door and stood outside, waiting for an indication of what to do next, while brown water was dripping off our hair, our faces and our clothes.

After a while we summised that what happened must have been by some technical fault, as only the flooded section of the train station was cordoned off, while the rest kept on running without a hitch. By this time droves more festival goers had arrived, and dirty, wet and without a roof over our heads for the night, we decided to rather get out of Dresden, and bought ourselves tickets to Wroclaw for later in the afternoon.

While waiting for our train, we went for a walk and managed to locate both the Lutheran Church offices and the Rathaus, where we would start our search for civilians who perished in Dresden in WWII if we do make it out that way again. That is, after Kirchentag is over! While obviously not comparable, the confusion and shock we experienced yesterday, as well as the ringing alarms and tons of police and ambulances on standby for Kirchentag, did make me think about what people must have felt during the air raids 66 years ago, before nearly the entire city and thousands of its inhabitants were killed when fire bombs were dropped on them. Nothing was untouched by that war, something which is as evident here in Wroclaw. But more on that tomorrow.

What a shame!

Yesterday's trip to the Standesamt unfortunately didn't deliver much, although we did get a lead for another archive to try: The Evangelische Zentralarchiv in Berlin, which contains the church records, such as the baptism and wedding records of members of the Lutheran church. Their records should go farther back than those at the Bundesarchiv, but we'll have to leave it for when we return to Berlin before our flight back to Cape Town as we have run out of time in Berlin!

Herr Schultz, the researcher at the Standesamt, was very  helpful but unfortunately couldn't find any records on any of our family members. As he was looking up the towns and names, he kept on shaking his head, saying "Schade, schade" (meaning shame, shame). For example, he wasn't able to find the death records for Johann Friederich or Josefine, as the records they had of Buschvorwerk ended in 1909, while Johann Friederich only died 5 years later in 1914, and Josefine some time after that.

The other problem was that we don't know where either Johann Friederich, Josefine or their two daughters were born, and the whole system at the Standesamt is set up in such a way that you can only look up any information by place of birth. So if place of birth is what you want to find out at the Standesamt, you're out of luck!

We've had a slight change in plans, so today we're headed out to Dresden first by train, where we'll stay for 3 nights before leaving for Poland. Besides being a really interesting city by the looks of it, Dresden is also where Johann Friederich's daughter, Amalie and her husband, Paul Engler lived, according to my grandfather's family history book. My grandfather had a photograph of his father and his aunt, Amalie (along with two unknown possible members of the family) from the time the South African Meissners came to visit Amalie in 1925. My grandfather said that after the war (WWII) they never heard from her again. Of course, most of Dresden was destroyed in an arial bomb attack in the war in 1945, with  up to (or even more than, according to some records) half of its population killed.

Would the city have records of the civilian people killed during the war in Dresden? And would Amalie and her husband be among them? That's what we'll try to find out in the following days...

Dead ends

After a weekend of sightseeing, orientation and jet lag recovery, we finally got a chance to head out to the Berlin-Lichterfelde Bundesarchiv after a wholesome breakfast at our hotel. While the archive is located on the outskirts of the city, we chose to go to this particular archive first, as it is supposed to house the largest collection of data of all the Bundesarchiv locations. Before we left the hotel, we also spoke to a Herr Ludwig at the Bildagentur fur Kunst, Kultur and Geschichte on the phone, to find out whether they had a copy of or information on the photos Johann Friederich took of the crown prince at the opening of the Suez Canal in 1868. Herr Ludwig took down the details, and promised to email me back by the end of today.

To reach the Lichterfelde archive, we took the S-Bahn to Sundgauer Strasse station, and from there caught bus 184 which dropped us off right in front of the archive building, where I nearly got run over by a bicycle again, as I'm still looking in the wrong direction for oncoming traffic! At the entrance we were given tags and keys to enter the building, after handing over our passports, and from there proceeded to the archive on the other side of the premises.

Unfortunately, here we received our first blow of the day: the researcher told us that the records they have do not go back far enough to find Johann Friederich or Josefine on the system. After making a phone call, she gave us the address for the Standesamt I in Mitte, Berlin, where they might have some information for us on Johann Friederich. The Standesamt apparently keeps information on German citizens who lived abroad - and they could have Johann Friederich in their records, as he lived both in Egypt and South Africa before returning to Germany. We decided that we will explore this avenue tomorrow to see what it turns up.

As we exited the building, my mom's foot caught the side of a wheelchair ramp, and having her hands full with notes and papers, she had no way  to stop her fall. Within seconds blood was gushing out of her finger, elbow and knee, which had made contact with the ground first. Having my own hands full with tissues to try to stop the spate of hay fever that had overcome me on the way to the archive already, I wasn't in a position to break her fall either. What a sorry pair we were - this was not a good start to our research!

On our return to the hotel, and after we had stopped off at a pharmacy to pick up some plasters and disinfectant, I checked my email and saw that I had received the following message from Herr Ludwig:

"Dear Ms Mulder,

thank you very much for your mail. I am afraid we do not hold this photograph or, as far as I can see, any others by Johann Friederich (Fritz) Meissner."

Strike two! This is proving more difficult than I anticipated. Will all of our efforts lead to dead ends? Will we ever be able to unravel the story of my great great grandfather and Josefine's lives? The answers remain to be seen in the upcoming days of our trip. We have booked an extra night at the hotel in Berlin and plan to travel to Wroclaw in Poland on Wednesday, if all goes well (better than today, at least!).

According to the weather report, tomorrow will be another scorcher, and the local news channel told of an outbreak of a bacteria-born illness that has caused 14 deaths in Germany in only two weeks, with thousands falling ill and contracting permanent kidney damage. The report warned people to avoid raw tomatoes, cucumbers and lettuce, which, as luck would have it, was exactly what we had for lunch! Before casting any further doom and gloom on our trip, I will sign off with a reminder to myself to maintain a positive attitude for the rest of our time here. We're on an adventure into the past, after all!

Tales of tragedy and the promise of finding a living relative! (Pre-departure research)

Only one day to go before our departure, and already there is a big cloud hanging over our plans - a volcanic ash cloud, that is! If the expert opinions are to be believed, the ash should have dissipated by the time we get our connecting flight from Doha to Berlin, so let's hope they're right!

This morning we got a call from my aunt Elke - the same aunt who initially gifted the notebook to my grandfather with the instruction to write down our family history. She wanted to wish us safe travels, and to find out if we had followed up on her phone call to Frau Anders in Germany.

How I initially got put into contact with Frau Anders is a story of modern technology, humanity and chance, as well as a newfound sadness over a part of German history that I had known nothing about.

Before embarking on this trip, I wanted to find out more about the places where my ancestors had lived: Schmiedeberg im Riesengebirge, where my great great grandfather (Johann Friederich), his wife (Josefine) and three children (Emma, Amalie and Friedrich Wilhelm) lived, Wernersdorf, where their son, my great grandfather Friedrich Wilhelm and his wife, Marie, were married, and Buschvorwerk, where Johann Friederich was buried.

As it turns out, I found out a little more than I bargained for. It seems one cannot look deeper into the history of any town in the erstwhile Prussia, without uncovering some of its war-time atrocities - tales of power, loss and grief.

While my great great grandparents were "lucky" enough to have died before the start of WWII, the war's aftermath had a direct impact on the area they were from. In my research I learnt that the towns I mentioned above were all in close proximity to each other in the Riesengebirge or Giant Mountains (Karkonosze in Polish), a mountain range in the south-west of present-day Poland that divides Poland and the Czech Republic. After the war this area was returned to Poland, all German citizens were driven out by brutal force, their tombstones removed, their existence wiped out and their towns renamed. It was a typical tale of retaliation - an eye for an eye - with the victims so often the ordinary people who had wanted nothing to do with the war in the first place.

While I have cried many times before over the horrific and undeserved fate of so many Jews during WWII, I now also had reason to cry for the ordinary Germans - perhaps people known by my family - who were murdered, raped, dispelled from their homes or put in concentration camps, in the aftermath of that dreadful war. And because their stories did not make it into the official history books, it is incredibly hard to find out what happened to these people, as if they just disappeared off the face of the earth.

My mother and I were also very disappointed to learn about the destruction of the German tombstones along the Riesengebirge, as this meant that not even my great great grandfather's memory survived the Second World War, even though he died in 1914 already (we're not sure when or how his wife, Josefine, or his daughter, Emma, passed away). We had anticipated going to look for their graves, but this new information made this hope fade quickly.

Wanting to find out more about the Riesengebirge during and after the time my ancestors lived there, I found a website in German on the Riesengebirgler (people of the Giant Mountains) and promptly wrote an email to the administrator to find out if he knew anything at all about Schmiedeberg or Buschvorwerk. Although his research covered mainly the Czech side of the mountains, he was kind enough to advise me of a mailing list for Lower Silesia (the province which covers the Riesengebirge) whose members one could send your request to.

Not expecting much, I sent out my request. To my surprise I had three responses by the next afternoon! The listies were eager to help. One sent me the name of a book about Buschvorwerk from the war years to the forced removals. Amazingly, this book is still in print and available from Amazon. Someone even e-mailed me from Cape Town, offering to help with maps or translations! My greatest surprise was when I received an answer from a very kind man who had contacted an old resident of Schmiedeberg, who in turn contacted Frau Anders of the Schmiedeberger Kulturbund, from whom he found out that not only did she find a reference to my great aunt Emma Junge (Meissner), but also a living relative of mine! I was overwhelmed.

Through my subsequent correspondence with Frau Anders, as well as my aunt's phone call to her, I found out that legally she was not at liberty to give me the information, and that we would have to go to a town called Brilon and enquire at the Rathaus to find out who this living relative was. Unfortunately Brilon is not anywhere near the rest of the places on our travel itinerary, and I'm not sure if we'll be able to make a plan to get there, so my hope at this stage is that the relative returns Frau Anders' message (that she left on her answering machine) and decides to get in contact with us. We'll see!

But for now we've still got a lot of packing and finger-crossing to do before our flight tomorrow. May the wind blow the ash cloud out of hope's way!