my grandpa

i am lucky to have all my grandparents. that was something i heard very frequently growing up. i knew it to be true bc i was the only one i knew with both sets of grandparents.
i was often with my mamas parents. on several occasions i stayed up to 6 weeks with them while my parents travelled the globe. it was cosy and anachronistic and homey. my granny cooked, always gutbürgerlich, and cleaned. my grandpa was in his workshop puttering around. as soon as the sun was sining they were in their schrebergarten - complete with gnomes - were they had their produce. it was great.

when i was a little older, around 9 i think, i asked them about the war.

he was fourteen when the war started and twenty and a prisoner of war when it ended. his youth came and went during the war. there was seldom flirting, next to no school. there was hunger and fear. and choices to be made. when he was fifteen he was forced to leave school. it was necessary to "be a productive member of society and do all he could for winning the war". he grew up on a little farm in what is now poland. near birkenau. he did not want to join the ss so he was made to be an automechanic in the camp.

when i asked him about that he told me, that since then he believed in god, bc he certanly saw hell on earth in these days.

by the time he was 18 he had to take the gun and fight. he never told me more than that.

when he was 21 he returned. but home was not there anymore, it was a part of poland now. so he went to wolfsburg to build Volkswagen. it was all he knew exept handling a gun.

he met my grandma at a schützenfest near celle. she had just turned 18.

she was 12 when the war started. my oldest son is twelve now.

grandma was born in a wee hamlet adjacent bergen, the village that housed bergen-belsen. her youth was formed around the fact that, if she smiled to a stranger, lend a hand to a foreigner, was nice to the prisoners of war - they were distributed among the farmers to help with the produce and animals - she would be send to the camp.

two month after the war they met and never let go of each other. she made him a home, he made her felt safe. they had 3 children. one of them died during childbirth. they learned, they travelled, they worked. they visited moskau in the early 80´s in the middle of the cold war.

when his already pregnant daughter married a hippie he picked up the restaurant tab and smiled. when his first granddaughter was born with bright red hair he shed a tear because there had not been a redhaired girl in the family sind his own grandma.

he taught me fishing, wood carving and everything about gardening. he bought me sweets and hid them from my mom. i spend long hours in his woodshop that smelled like his pipe and sawdust.

he held my firstborn. saw my twins and three months after his redhaired great-granddaughter was born he died.

i loved him.