3 days ago
We Cannot Escape History
This personal reflection is part of a series called The Big Ideas, in which writers respond to a single question: What is history? You can read more by visiting The Big Ideas series page.
When I was born, only 22 years had passed since the end of World War II. Throughout my childhood, as I grew up in the center of East Berlin, I played in the ruins.
When the Berlin Wall fell, I was in my early 20s.
Not long ago, a publisher prepared a biographical note to be printed with one of my stories claiming that my father was Russian and my mother was Polish. But this was not quite true.
My father was born in Ufa, then the capital of the Bashkir Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. His parents were Germans who had emigrated to the Soviet Union to escape fascism and returned to Germany after the war.
My mother was born in a small town in what was then German East Prussia. When that area became part of Poland at the end of the war, my great-grandmother took my 3-year-old mother and her two siblings westward to what was still Germany. They traveled partly on foot, partly by train, partly by horse-drawn cart.
My mother's father was still a prisoner of war in Norway then, while her mother had been transported by the Red Army to Siberia, where she was performing forced labor. Shortly before Christmas 1946, she returned to Germany and was reunited with her family.
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