His grandfather drove auschwitz trains. My great -grandmother was killed there.

No matter how much you prepare for it. He still takes you by surprise. As a great -granddaughter of a woman murdered in Auschwitz, I meet the granddaughter of a man who brought the Jews to death. I stay speechless.

I could never meet my grandfather Ludvig, who survived the Holocaust, or his mother Rachel. They were taken in a cattle car to the Auschwitz extermination field in 1944. Ludvig, which at that time was about 15 years old, was separated from his mother and sent to another concentration camp. But Rachel was tortured, gased and killed.

I grew up listening so many stories about them and spending time with other survivors of the Holocaust in my family in Australia. They were in the foreground of my mind when I found myself in Germany interviewing Cornelia Stieler.

Cornelia’s grandfather was the main support of a family with very few income. Originally worked as a coal miner, but after an almost fatal accident that left him trapped under coal for two days, he decided to do something else. Things changed when he finally got a job at Deutsche Reichsbahn as a train machinist. Cornelia’s mother used to talk about that achievement with pride, saying that getting the job was “the opportunity of her life.”

At first it transported merchandise for war. But soon it became something more sinister. “I think my grandfather served as a train driver, traveling between the extermination fields. He stayed in Liegnitz, now legnica, in a boarding school, so there was a certain separation of the family and between the extermination fields.”

Cornelia says that when his grandfather began to work, he did not know what he would become. “I think my grandfather saw many horrible things and I didn’t know how to get out of this job, I didn’t know how to face it.”

After forming as a family therapist, he deepened in his past and tried to understand it better. She tells me that she started asking: “At what time was a perpetrator? Was he complicit in the perpetrators? When could he have gone?”

At this point, my mouth is dry. My heart is accelerated. Listening to all this feels like an extracorporal experience. The only thing I can think about is how his grandfather drove trains to Auschwitz, and that’s how my grandfather and my great grandmother ended there. I am thinking of all my other relatives (cousins ​​that I know existed but of those who do not know anything) who were also killed in Auschwitz.

“If I were younger, I think I would feel a strong hatred towards you,” I say, struggling to contain tears. “But I don’t do it because saying all those things must have been very difficult to admit.”

“Give me your hand,” says Cornelia, also full of tears. “It’s important. Your tears and my touch move me … My grandfather was a machinist in Auschwitz. What can I say? Nothing.

“I cannot apologize, it is not possible,” he adds, implying that the crime is too serious. “My grandfather felt very, very guilty and died with that guilt.” Cornelia thanks me my openness and says that it is necessary to discover the story completely.

Then he says something that was not expected: that some Schönwald Germans, where his family was, reacted angry at his investigation. The now polish city renamed Bojków, about 100 kilometers from Krakow, has not accepted its Nazi past.

Cornelia explains that originally, the city was against the ideology of the Nazi party, but over time, it was consumed by it. Hitler saw Schönwald as a model village: an Aryan village in a Slavic land. I hoped that a “fifth column” of ethnic Germans would become a useful help in the army.

It was the place of the Gleiwitz incident, a false flag incident organized by Nazi Germany in 1939 to justify the invasion of Poland, one of the triggers of World War II. And in 1945, towards the end of the war, it was the first German village attacked by the advance of the Soviet forces.

But just before that, it was the scene of one of the calls of the death of the Nazis.

As the Soviets approached Auschwitz, Hitler’s elite guard, the SS, forced some 60,000 prisoners there, mostly Jews, to move further to the west. Between January 19 and 21, 1945, one of those marches passed through Schönwald. At temperatures below zero, the prisoners wore only their thin stripe uniforms and only wooden shoes on their feet. Those who fell hungry and exhaustion were shot.

Those who survived were taken to open trains with cattle cars that were heading further west, usually to other concentration fields, such as Buchenwald. The Nazis wanted to keep their slave work; Even at that time, some still believed in a definitive triumph of the third Reich.

A local history and religion professor, Krzysztof Kruszynski, takes me to the main street where the march of death passed. People expect to take the bus in front of the main church on Rolnikow street, known as Bauer-Strasse in German times. He points out the ground and tells me that these are the original cobblestones on which the prisoners had to walk.

“He is a silent witness of the march of death,” he says. “But the stone cannot speak.”

This story has remained buried so far, partly because the Schönwald Germans were forced to flee after the Soviet attack that occurred shortly after and the Poles were relocated to the town. A German-Polish woman of about 80 years, Kassubek Route, told me how drunken Soviet soldiers had broken into her family’s house and killed her father. But there is another reason: an active suppression of the past.

I was not surprised that some Germans had responded negatively to Cornelia’s investigation. Germany is proud of its Culture of memoryo Culture of memory: Compulsory education about Holocaust, museums, commemorative monuments. But many see that as the task of the State and the Government. And while they are happy enough to face the past in abstract, it is more difficult to deal with their own family history, says Benjamin Fischer, former student leader and Jewish political consultant. He calls it the “deindyvidation of history.”

TO Study of the University of Bielefeld He discovered that a third of the Germans believed that their relatives helped save the Jews during the Holocaust. This is “ridiculous,” says Benjamin, and “statistically impossible.”

On the ground in Bojków, 80 years after the march of death, things are changing. Last week, a delegation of Germans, Jews and Poles, including local authorities, schools and emergency services, inaugurated a new monument in memory of those who died in the march of the death of the city.

There were Cornelia and Krzysztof. For Cornelia, history is deeply personal. She is convinced that studying it and remembering it is key to understanding how society could change so quickly. And I am grateful for it. His work and passion give me hope in a world of growing anti -Semitism, while trying to keep the memory of how my family became murdered.

The inhabitants of Schönwald believed that their city was on the cusp of high culture and spirituality. But then “it became immorality,” says Cornelia. “This is an advance that we must understand … They were not only good or bad. People can access jobs with good intentions, but very quickly (they are) on the wrong side.

“We cannot change the past. We cannot go back in time. But it is important to talk about this, remind people of what happened, remind people of what humans can do to each other.”