The first presentation at TEDx Krakow last week was by Uwe and Gabriela von Seltmann. They told their story.

Uwe (a German) had four grandfathers. The first two were both killed in WW2 and their respective widows both remarried.

Grandfather One died an honourable soldier’s death fighting the Russians. Grandfather Two was not talked about in the family.

Uwe started to dig into his family history and discovered the appalling fact that Grandfather Two had been a top SS commander:

Here he is, sitting with Himmler himself. He helped lead one of the bigger WW2 war crimes, the suppression of the Warsaw Ghetto rising in 1943.

Researching this dark family history Uwe met a Polish woman in a Krakow cafe. She told him that her own grandfather had died at Auschwitz.

They got married.

And came to TEDx to tell their own story of reconciliation. Here is the text of their presentation.

Perhaps the most striking part of what Uwe said was the fact that many members of his own family ("especially the Austrians") feel that by writing about his SS grandfather he has brought ‘dishonour’ on the whole family. 

I asked Uwe and Gabriela about this afterwards. How could he explain that some of his relatives felt more ‘dishonoured’ by Uwe’s writings than by the murderous behaviour of one of their forebears?

The answer seems to be that families who include a monster just can’t cope with it all. They remember the monster being friendly and kind, a normal family member. It is just too appalling to have to confront those warm, real memories with the comparatively abstract results of the monster’s violent activities elsewhere. That boat must not be rocked.

Shame is contagious. How dare someone in our own family somehow make us a victim too?!  

Which leads back to my previous posting about Timothy Snyder’s book Bloodlands. That book compels us to deal with this:

[On the Holocaust numbers] But this number, like all of the others, must be seen not as 5.7 million, which is an abstraction few of us can grasp, but is 5.7 million times one

Just as the victims were each individuals, so were the perpetrators. And so are their families living today, still grappling to come to terms with these unfathomable events nearly seventy years later.  

As Uwe and Gabriela show us.

Their book needs publishing in English. If any reader can help them with this or otherwise help them get their story out to a wider audience, do let me know or directly contact Uwe through his site.