World War II made its presence known again during the summer vacation of 1969. My father was in his bathing suit and I could see two holes in his thigh, one large, long one and one somewhat smaller. There was "shrapnel" in there, he told me, a war wound. But I was six years old and didn't know what shrapnel was. What I knew was that I didn't want to touch those two strange, yet fascinating hollows in the flesh of my father's leg.
Around 10 years later, we were driving along a transit route through East Germany (one of the few official motorways that connected West Germany with West Berlin) when my father cried out, "That's the village! That's where I stood in the village pond while the Russian tanks arrived!" At the end of this particular family trip, I found myself at the grave of my maternal grandfather, Adolf von Thadden, a nobleman from Trieglaff. The family cemetery was ravaged, its crosses torn down, everything that could be destroyed had been. I was rescuing the frogs unlucky enough to have fallen into the grave, which had been broken open.
Underneath the bookshelves in my parents' living room are cardboard boxes full of old black and white photos that I used to look at when I was a child. There's my father as a young man in uniform, his black hair and sensitive, observant face very different from the usual angular heads of Nazi men, with their hair left long in front and cropped short in the back. Then there's my mother, with her blonde hair and symmetrical features, so beautiful and so German she could easily have been designed by Nazi ideologues.
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