Hannchen - She never arrived.

(DE) It was a sunny early summer's day, and my brother-in-law was visiting; the idea of devouring ice cream quickly came up. At “Venezia”, I ordered my obligatory “strawberry cup”, and he ordered the “Schwabinger cup”. In this beautiful weather, the ice cream parlour was full of people, including many children and us with our dog. The waiter quickly brought us what we wanted, and we were delighted.

When he appeared at our table a short time later with another plate, we were astonished. There was an ice cream cone on a porcelain plate - for the dog! He felt the need to share our joy with the unappreciated dog. What kindness and generosity from the waiter!

Memories from my early childhood came flooding back. Memories of my mother's side of the family's lack of empathy towards a needy family who had fled to us in 1945.

“You could set your watch by her”, my family said quite succinctly about Hannchen, a refugee woman who had found shelter with us.

Hannchen, as I saw her

For many years of my childhood, I would see her walking home from work at the lampshade factory in the evening, between 5 and 6 pm. The last part of her way home led past the large front door of our family villa, along a narrow paved path between the house and the garden, and then across the large courtyard, which already contained the less attractive things such as dustbins and carpet beater poles. The entrance door designated for her was made of unsightly brown-painted sheet steel for reasons of protection and because it was at the back of the house. It served us children, domestic staff and the refugees assigned to us as access to our house.

Four worn stone steps, also painted brown, led from there to a separate room at ground level with a heater and a water point. It was a kitchen, bathroom and living room in one for Hannchen and her family. They could sleep in a room on the second floor.

Hannchen was a displaced person from Silesia and had been on the run for a long time. When she arrived at the end of the war in 1945, I was four years old.

I experienced her as inaccessible as if living in a cocoon. With her head held high, she walked past us children without a second thought. Her figure seemed tall to me, sturdy, dressed inconspicuously, her dark hair combed back tightly and tied in a knot. She rarely carried anything more than her brown handbag. One exception was when she took a book from the municipal lending library once a week. Later, as a six-year-old, I was surprised that she didn't bring any shopping or anything else with her. After all, she had two daughters, Ruth and Helga, the same age as my older sister and me, to look after. Her household also included Anna, an old maid who had fled with her from Silesia.

Hannchen - not welcome as a member of the family! 

When I mentioned “my family” at the beginning, this inaccuracy reflects the conflict that weighed on me as a child.

Hannchen was my deceased father's sister, in other words, my aunt. She belonged to my family, yet she was not a family member, either.

My mother's ancestral family increasingly ostracised her. After a while, no one outside the family suspected there was a family connection between the two families.

 As a child, I suffered a lot from the petty and stingy way my grandmother, my aunt Gina and my mother, who all lived in the house, treated Hannchen. This eventually made her hard and withdrawn, even bitter. 

Hannchen's and my Father's Family in Silesia

She had once lived in different times. In 1943, during the war, when I was about 1 ½ years old, we visited Hannchen's and my late father's family in Silesia.

Hannchen in the middle of the photo (1943)

The war was not yet very noticeable in their rural area. There are photos of orchards in the summer with my mother, my sister, who was three years older, Hannchen with her two daughters, and a nanny. There seemed to be an air of cheerfulness and carefreeness about everything.

 My father's family was generous, open-minded and, unlike my mother's family, not materialistic. It was rarely discussed at home that everyone in my father's family was very well-read, interested in music and generally educated. My grandfather was a village schoolteacher and pub owner. The family had been part of the village for generations.

In 1995, my husband and I took a trip to Poland and found their house and the pub with its large dance hall almost unchanged. It was a large but simple property.

During the first years of the war, my father's family sent food to my mother's family. The generosity of the relatives by marriage in Silesia was well appreciated. There were plenty of hens' eggs and lots of pheasants.

I was able to experience the human greatness and emotional warmth of my paternal grandfather through a letter he wrote to my mother after the death of his son. His infinite grief and compassion for my mother and us children still deeply move me today.

At the end of the lost war, my father's family had to leave Silesia. The Russian forces left them little time to make decisions. My grandfather refused to flee. He stayed in the village. It was later said that he starved to death.

Much later, on our first trip to Poland in 1995, we found his grave.

Hannchen - the Strange Aunt

Hannchen, her children and the maid must have experienced terrible things on their escape.  The adults spoke of the worst abuse by Polish men.

As a child, I kept thinking about what had happened to her. How did they get to the West in the first place? Were there trains? How long had it taken? How had they slept? What had they eaten? Had it been cold?

The questions remained unanswered, and a word I didn't understand kept cropping up: Rape!

The timing of their arrival with my mother's family at the end of 1945 was extremely inconvenient: we had just been forced to leave our house to the occupying forces. We had retreated to my grandfather's factory. We lived there in very cramped conditions in the company office.

I was four years old, but I remember that things suddenly became very complicated. Instead of great joy at the arrival of the refugees, there were thoughts about how they could be isolated. All four of them had typhus and lice! Difficult to handle in the confines of the temporary accommodation! They were banished to the waiting area of the office, a tiny room. They were given head packs with petroleum, which had dire consequences. Some of the scalps could come off. Someone treated the typhus.

The lack of joy at the arrival of relatives was probably also because my grandparents had not welcomed my mother's marriage to my father. The in-laws were not wealthy, and my father could only bring a modest amount of money into the marriage. On the other hand, my mother was pregnant, so my grandparents couldn't stand in the way of a marriage if they didn't want to jeopardise their good reputation.

The family villa in which there was hardly any space for Hannchen and her family.

Now, my mother's sister-in-law, Hannchen, and her family were here; they no longer had a home and had to be looked after. After the occupying forces had left and the bugs they had left behind had been successfully eradicated, Hannchen moved with her children and the maid, Anna, into the small, separate room in the large family house, which was accessed via the back stairs. They gave her what they could spare, nothing of great value. Nevertheless, my grandmother complained for many years about spoiled mattresses. Of course, traumatised children often became bedwetters. No, my mother's family had no compassion; they didn't manage to be generous. There would have been enough resources for that.

Even the cellar assigned to them was outside the house, a damp home to frogs.

Even as a five- to six-year-old, my heart suffered from the stinginess of my beloved ancestral family. Couldn't they have given them more, invited them to dinner or given them some of the plentiful fruit harvest in the fall? The family's garden was huge, but Hannchen was given a garden bed outside that was intended for all refugees.

She wasn't accepted into the family as a matter of principle, and, partly as a result of her emotional wounds, she increasingly cut herself off.

We children played with the newly arrived cousins in the garden, but a small rift remained between us.

Hannchen - an Open Wound in my Soul!

As not much was said about my deceased father, my fondest wish would have been to hear stories about him and Silesia from Hannchen. But I was afraid of her rejection. Sometimes, I asked my aunt to accompany me to Hannchen to mediate between her and me. She didn't like it. So, my desire for stories remained unfulfilled.

Only the maid seemed unaffected by the inner isolation. When she saw me, her greeting was immediate: “Da Monala!” That sounded Silesian and unbiased. That was a blessing for me.

How can a child mediate if the adults don't show any greatness of heart?

Around the age of five, Hannchen hardened up again. I found out the reason years later from my mother. She had remarried at the time, and the celebration took place at the family villa. But Hannchen wasn't invited to the wedding. Had my mother wanted to be considerate of Hannchen's feelings? I don't know.

After the wedding, my mother moved with her husband and us children to another town. We never spoke about Hannchen again.

She stayed in her makeshift home for decades.

My feelings towards Hannchen are like an open wound. I had experienced the stinginess of my beloved birth family and suffered as a result. It never got better. The injustice remains in my memories today. On the other hand, I had to live with the harshness of my family because I loved them.

No, Hannchen was not like clockwork, as my family said. She had gone into retreat. I want to dedicate this memory to Hannchen with affection. (MoWi)