Her grandfather drove trains to Auschwitz. My great grandmother was killed there

It doesn't matter how much you prepare for it. It still surprises you. As the great-granddaughter of a woman who was murdered in Auschwitz, I meet the granddaughter of a man who drove Jews to their deaths. I have no words.

I never got to meet my grandfather Ludwig, who survived the Holocaust, or his mother Rachel. They were loaded onto a cattle car at the Auschwitz death camp in 1944. Ludwig, who was about 15 years old at the time, was separated from his mother and sent to another concentration camp. But Rachel was tortured, gassed and killed.

I grew up hearing so many stories about them and spending time with other Holocaust survivors in my family in Australia. They were at the forefront of my mind when I found myself in Germany interviewing Cornelia Stieler.

Cornelia's grandfather was the main breadwinner in a very low-income household. He originally worked as a miner, but after a near-fatal accident that left him trapped under coal for two days, he decided to do something else. Things turned around when he eventually got a job with the Deutsche Reichsbahn as a driver. Cornelia's mother spoke of this achievement with pride, saying that getting the job was “the chance of a lifetime.”

It originally transported goods for the war effort. But it soon turned into something more sinister. “I believe my grandfather served as a train driver traveling between the death camps. He stayed in Lignitz, now Legnica, in a boarding school, so there was some separation from the family and between the death camps.”

Cornelia says that when her grandfather started work, he didn't know what was going to happen. “I think my grandfather saw a lot of terrible things and he didn't know how to get out of this job, he didn't know how to deal with it.”

After training as a family therapist, she dug into her past and tried to understand it better. She told me she started asking, “At what point was he a perpetrator? Was he an accomplice to perpetrators? When could he have gone?'

My mouth is dry at this point. My heart is racing. Listening to it all feels like an out-of-body experience. All I can think about is how her grandfather drove trains to Auschwitz and that's how my grandfather and great grandmother ended up there. I think of all my other relatives – cousins ​​I know existed but know nothing about – who were also killed in Auschwitz.

“If I was younger, I think I would have a strong hatred for you,” I tell her, fighting back tears. “But I don't, because saying all those things must have been really hard to admit.”

“Give me your hand,” says Cornelia, rising as well. “It's important. Your tears and my touch touch me… My grandfather was a machinist in Auschwitz. What can I say? Nothing.

“I can't apologize, it's impossible,” she adds, implying that the crime is too serious. “My grandfather felt very, very guilty, and he died with his guilt.” Cornelia thanks me for my openness and says she needs the story to be fully revealed.

Then she says something you might not expect – that some Germans in Schönwald, where her family comes from, have reacted angrily to her research. The Polish town, now renamed Bojków, about 100 kilometers from Krakow, has not come to terms with its Nazi past.

Cornelia explains that the town was initially opposed to the ideology of the Nazi Party, but over time it was absorbed by it. Hitler saw Schönwald as a model village – an Aryan village in a land of Slavs. He hoped that a “fifth column” of ethnic Germans there would become a useful addition to the army.

It was the site of the Gleiwitz incident, a false flag incident orchestrated by Nazi Germany in 1939 to justify the invasion of Poland, one of the triggers for World War II. And in 1945, towards the end of the war, it was the first German village to be attacked by the advancing Soviet forces.

But just before that, it was the scene of one of the so-called Nazi death marches.

As the Soviets approached Auschwitz, Hitler's elite guard, the SS, forced some 60,000 prisoners there – mostly Jews – to move further west. Between January 19 and 21, 1945 one of these marches passes through the Schönwald. In sub-zero temperatures, the prisoners were clad only in their pin-striped uniforms and with only wooden shoes on their feet. Those who fainted from hunger and exhaustion were shot.

Those who survived were put on open cattle wagon trains that headed further west, usually to other concentration camps, such as Buchenwald. The Nazis wanted to keep their slave labor – even at this point some still believed in the final triumph of the Third Reich.

The local history and religion teacher Krzysztof Kruszynski takes me to the main street where the death march passed. People wait to catch their bus outside the main church on Rolnikow Street – known as Bauer-Strasse in German times. He points to the ground and tells me that these are the original cobblestones that the prisoners were supposed to walk on.

“It's a silent witness to the death march,” he says. “But the stone cannot speak.”

This story has been buried until now – in part because the Germans of Schönwald were forced to flee after the Soviet attack that came soon after and the Poles resettled the village. A German-Polish woman in her 80s, Ruta Kasubek, told me how drunken Soviet soldiers broke into her family home and killed her father. But there is another reason: active suppression of the past.

It did not surprise me that some Germans responded negatively to Cornelia's research. Germany is proud of its own The culture of memoryor a culture of commemoration: compulsory Holocaust education, museums, memorials. But many see this as the work of the state and government. And while they're happy enough to face the past in the abstract, it's harder to deal with their own family history, says Benjamin Fischer, a former Jewish student leader and political consultant. He calls it the “deindividualization of history.”

A Bielefeld University study found that a third of Germans believed that their family members helped save Jews during the Holocaust. That's “ridiculous,” says Benjamin, and “statistically impossible.”

On the ground in Bojków, 80 years after the death march, things are changing. Last week, a delegation of Germans, Jews and Poles, including local authorities, schools and emergency services, unveiled a new memorial to those who died in the city's death march.

Cornelia and Krzysztof were there. For Cornelia, the story is deeply personal. She believes that studying and remembering it is key to understanding how society can change so quickly. And I'm grateful for that. Their work and passion gives me hope in a world of rising anti-Semitism – as I try to keep alive the memory of how my family was killed.

The people of Schönwald believed that their city was at the pinnacle of high culture and spirituality. But then it “grew into immorality,” says Cornelia. “It's a development we need to understand… They weren't just good or bad. People can start out with good intentions, but very quickly (find themselves) on the wrong side.

“We cannot change the past. We can't turn back time. But it's important to talk about it, to remind people of what happened, to remind people of what people can do to each other.”