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!