Thinking about it today, I realize that my grandparents never really talked about the war. The parents of my father died when I was rather young. Back then I didn’t know what World War II was, much less did I have a conception of what a Nazi is. The father of my mother died during the war. Somewhere in Russia, cannon fodder wearing a Wehrmacht uniform. So the only person left to really talk about the war was my mother’s mother.

She mentioned that everyone was hungry, that everyone was trying to survive somehow. That’s about it. She never talked about my grandpa, she never talked about her relationship to the jewish people, she never mentioned what she thought about the Nazis back then.

Then again, I know that some people talked about what happened during the war. My girlfriend told me a story she heard from her grand-aunt. How she helped Russian forced labourers to survive the hardships in a German steel mill.

We all know the sentence “never forget”. But I do understand those, that do not want to talk about the past. Some of them don’t want to relive the horrors of that time. Even more understandable so, if they suffered from what the Nazis did to them. Some of them probably have other reasons why they don’t want to talk about the past. Maybe even because of remorse.

Inspired by the story of my girlfriends grand-aunt, I wrote a short story. Here is my sorry attempt to translate it into English: Bread and butter and cigarette stubs (and the original story for the Germany readers: Butterbrot und Kippenstummel)

What did your grandparents tell you?