In March of
2012, I received an email from a wonderful woman working on behalf of the
government of Hamburg Germany who had come across some genealogical information
which I had uploaded on the net. In part, the initial email began:
I hope I have now
found a member of the family (name redacted), for whom I have been searching
for some time. I found your name in the family tree maker side of family (name
redacted) on the Internet. For several
years I have been working on the project „Stolpersteine - Biografien der
Opfer in den Stadtteilen“ that has been initiated by
the "Landeszentrale für Politische Bildung Hamburg" and the
"Institut für die Geschichte der deutschen Juden". The aim of this
project are publications, that are issued by the "Landeszentrale für
Politische Bildung Hamburg". There you will find short biographies of
the victims of Shoah. You will find it also on the Internet www.stolpersteine-hamburg.de
Thus began a journey which would, over the next four years, result in the sharing of information, the creation of a family page on Facebook and the gathering of several branches of the family that had been long scattered. My father was thankfully still living at the beginning. He died less than 18 months later, but he was able to participate as much as he liked at the start. Pictures were shared, people identified, stories told.
In 2016, a reunion was held in the south of Sweden
which I unfortunately was unable to attend. Cousins arrived from all over the world. I watched online as one of my
cousins spoke at the opening of the reunion marking the first time that all of
the branches of our family were together in over 60 years. It was emotional, it
was exhilarating, it was gut-wrenching. The
children and grandchildren of those who fled were together again, remembering those who survived
and those who did not, those who came before us and who were now gone, those
who never lived to see this come to fruition. And that is when the journey
became, for me, very personal.
I am the daughter of a refugee of war.
