My Grandad finally told the story of how he escaped German Nazi-occupied Poland on a once-in-a-lifetime trip to Auschwitz. What I learned about my family on that trip is why Queensland needs its new Holocaust museum, writes Jessica Marszalek.
We were sitting at a cafe in the middle of a town square in Krakow when my Grandad finally told the story of how he escaped German Nazi-occupied Poland.
It was 11 years ago and I wish I could remember the name of the square and exactly the words he used as the shadows cast longer across a day I’ll cherish for as long as I live.
What I do remember is the unbridled pain of an old man who would finally unlock one of his longest-held secrets to his granddaughter.
In his thick accent, and in the broken English his stroke had left him with, he told us how his mother had hidden her boy under the house of the farm where they lived so the Germans didn’t know a boy lived there.
There were still holes in the story – holes I would come to understand – but at some point he was set to be transported with his mother and little sister and was being held with a group of people.
Freeing his binds, and helping him escape with a few others by climbing underneath something – parts of the story could only be gestured, so painful was it for him to recount – his mother tells him she is too old and his sister is too young.
Raggedly, he remembers the last words she will speak to him: “Run!”
When my now husband and I told my Grandad during a holiday to England in 2009 we were headed to Poland next and he told us he’d come, we took it in good humour.
Read the article by Jessica Marszalek in The Chronicle.