I found Monika in autumn 2020. She has lived in the UK for many years and was born in Poland. She is a qualified English teacher and works now in the office of a rental car company. When she only ever got short-term teaching contracts in Poland 17 years ago and wasn’t offered a follow-up contract, she decided to give life in the UK a try. She wanted to see London at some point anyway. There was no new teaching contract in Poland anyway, so she wanted to see what life in the UK could be like. ‘Just a year on the island.’ She was no longer able to work as a teacher in the UK, but she spoke English every day. She met her partner at the time and soon had a daughter. She ended up staying.
Monika speaks with a wonderful British accent, that’s what I realise as we order a coffee and switch from Polish to English. I had forgotten where exactly she was living. Somewhere near London, that’s all I remembered. I wrote to her without checking my notes first. I only remembered that she had moved some time ago. Shortly after I asked her if she would like to meet up, she immediately replied with a ‘yes’. And also that she would be happy to make the 1.5-hour train journey to London; she would simply like to meet me. In response to my reply that I would also be happy to come to her place, she pointed out that I had already searched for (and eventually found) her and her family enough in space and time, so to go to the effort of travelling to London would be perfectly fine for her.
Monika’s (family) history is intriguing. And even more so how it has changed in the course of the research; it has somehow been uncovered, almost decluttered, somehow unmasked.
It all started when her grandmother died in 1988, about 35 years ago, a year before I was born. Monika was about 16 years old at the time. She found documents about her grandmother more or less by chance when she was helping her mother with the application for a death certificate. She gathered the details, place of birth, birth date, spouse, everything you need in order to deal with the paperwork when someone passes away. Monika found a marriage certificate of her grandmother and Franz, her grandmother’s first husband.
She wrote down all the dates, randomly – she was curious. Monika knew – and so did her relatives – that her grandmother’s first husband had been murdered by the Germans in Auschwitz in 1945.
So the story goes.
Monika made various search enquiries about Franz, her grandmother’s first husband. She quickly learnt from the archives of the Auschwitz Memorial that there were no records under the name she was looking for. She tried the Polish Red Cross. After about a year, she received the answer: no records under that name were found there either, but at least she was told that they would contact her if they ever found anything about Franz. That was in the early 1990s.
It took a long time, years passed. Until 2001, when Monika received another reply. This time from the International Tracing Service in Bad Arolsen, a close co-operation partner of the Polish Red Cross.
The information about Franz was written in English and (even more so) in German; nothing in Polish. So Monika couldn’t understand much. Nor was there anyone she could have asked to translate the German parts. The letter was put aside and eventually forgotten.
Monika didn’t think about it for a long time. At some point there was a conversation in the family about her grandmother, about Franz, and she remembered that there had been something. Where was this German-English reply letter again?
At that time, she had already been in England for a long time. Perhaps she would look for it the next time she visited Poland and bring it with her to England. By now, Google Translate was around, so that could at least help a little. Monika’s partner at the time had worked in Germany for a while, he could at least translate ‘cemetery’, cmentarz. Strange. Why was there a cemetery in Germany mentioned?
Google certainly helped, but there were so many abbreviations that it was still incomprehensible. Only one thing was clear: Franz had not died in Auschwitz in 1945. In fact, he had never been imprisoned in Auschwitz.
And he had survived the Nazi era.
He remained in Germany and got married a second time, even though he was already and still married.
A German of all people! He lived in Upper Franconia from around 1947. Franz was registered as a displaced person in various DP camps, including Flossenbürg. That’s how I came across him, his name and Monika in my research on the Flossenbürg DP camp.
I ‘knew’ him as Franciszek and found him interesting for several reasons. The Germans arrested the then 34-year-old shortly after the occupation, in November 1939. From 1940, the father of three was in several prisons and concentration camps; he was liberated in Ebensee in Upper Austria.
The SS had held him in the concentration camp as an ‘S.V. prisoner’, a so-called ‘preventive detainee’. This was a category of prisoners in the concentration camps about which there is less research and there are also fewer memoirs from these people themselves, as the stigma of criminality and asociality was attached to them, even after 1945. For a long time, hardly anyone was interested in this group of people and the survivors themselves rarely spoke out, nor were they able or willing to do so, as the negative labelling and categorisation often stuck to them.
This category of the National Socialists and SS was often not appropriate.
As I once wrote in an article: ‘As early as the 1970s, the International Tracing Service informed us that in the Mauthausen concentration camp complex [where also Franz was] Poles who had been registered as ‘preventive detainees’ or ‘professional criminals’ were predominantly not ‘repeat criminals’: ‘The label had been given to them because they had previously served time in penitentiaries or prisons for political reasons such as listening to radio broadcasts by the ‘enemy’, preparation for high treason, offences against wartime economic regulations and also for non-political punishments.’‘’[1]
And this can also be found about Franz/Franciszek: He was sentenced to four years in a penitentiary for preparing high treason. This was followed by prison, penal camps, and concentration camps. After his liberation by the Americans, he was brought to Bavaria via various stations in the spring of 1946, one year after the end of the war. When I found out that he had children and was still living in Bavaria until his death in the 1990s, I wanted to at least try: did he perhaps leave behind any notes? Or photos? Or maybe anything else?
It was worth a try.
I also found the fact that he had married a German woman after the war fascinating. This was often completely despised in Polish post-war society (and often among the DPs too). Getting involved with the enemy, even long after 1945 (as well as during the war), was an absolute taboo for many – the German-speaking majority society felt the same way.
I didn’t find out much about Franz’s ‘German’ family, but I did find out about his Polish family and that’s how I came across Monika.
Why Monika’s family and her grandmother herself were told that Franz was murdered in the Auschwitz concentration camp is also unclear to Monika. It’s all speculation. But through a lot of questions and enquiries, she was at least able to bring to light that an older relative did remember: there had once been a letter from Franz, shortly after the war, which had been found after her grandmother’s death. It contained the following sentence:
“Nie czekaj na mnie, bo już nie wrócę.”- “Don’t wait for me, because I’m not coming back.”
The letter no longer exists today, her aunt didn’t want it to be read, not even by Monika.
Was it easier for Monika’s grandmother to basically declare Franz dead than to live with the certain, supposed or actual shame that her husband would not come back? Not back to Poland, not to his family? And then also married a new wife, a German?
Possibly.
But maybe it was completely different. But neither Monika nor I can say how. We are asking these questions too late. And even if someone had asked them 30, 35, 40 years ago, there might not have been any answers back then either. Nevertheless, Monika was close. Franz died four years after her grandmother, in 1992, and is buried in a cemetery in Upper Franconia, around 60 kilometres from the former Flossenbürg DP camp.
The text first appeared on the travel blog ‘Mit Geschichte(n) um die Welt’ by Sarah Grandke, who is currently working on her PhD thesis in the UK, Canada and Australia.
[1] Cf. reply to request, ITS to Bronisław K., 2 November 1976, Arolsen Archives, ITS Digital Archive, 6.3.3.2/110018796. and more: Sarah Grandke, Moving memories – memories on the move? Erinnerungsinitiativen von Displaced Persons in Flossenbürg 1946/47, in: Beiträge zur Geschichte der nationalsozialistischen Verfolgung (ed. KZ-Gedenkstätte Neuengamme), 2022, pp. 45-64.
Translated by Gyde Sönksen
