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Bettina von Hase’s father had always talked longingly of his birthplace in Silesia, lost to Poland after Germany’s defeat 60 years ago. But the family’s estates there remained lost idylls known only from faded photographs – until the whole family decided to go back
The cemetery was overgrown, dense foliage glistening from a recent downpour, the air hot and sticky and filled with mosquitoes. The muddy undergrowth was studded with ancient tombstones, all bearing German names. Further along, almost completely hidden from view, I found what I was looking for: a mausoleum, its red- brick walls covered in leaves. The wrought-iron gate had been forced, and I stepped down a creaky ladder into the vault. Inside it was dark, dank. Cobwebs brushed against my face. I lit a match and its flickering light revealed the broken zinc coffins bearing the bones of my ancestors.
I had found the final resting place of my father’s maternal family, the Hicketiers, Silesian landowners for hundreds of years. But since 1945 this secret garden of the dead has been part of Poland, the only memorial to the people who lived here for centuries, with even the placename changed from Markt Bohrau to the Polish Boröw. The collective memory of their lives, customs and history had been subject to the mass dislocation of peoples at the end of the Second World War, their stories carried west by Silesia's refugees.
For centuries, Silesia had been at the interface of shifting Middle-European borders, part of Prussia as a result of Frederick the Great’s campaigns — a powerful kingdom subsumed into the new German Empire in 1871. My father was born in December 1917, and his life-story spans six different Germanies; the Empire, Weimar Republic, Third Reich, Allied occupation until 1949, then the Federal Republic, and finally, the Germany reunited since 1989. The experience of my family illuminates the fate of countless Mitteleuropaer in the 20th century, as borders and peoples shifted, and feelings of loss and fundamental geographical uncertainties reverberated well into the next generation. For, growing up in Bonn, I realised from an early age that my family did not live where our roots were. Like a recurring note in a melody, my subconscious reminded me every now and then that a missing piece of the puzzle of where I came from was waiting to be discovered.
Silesia seemed very far away to me, a foreign land. It conjured up romantic images in my mind. perhaps because my father mentioned it with such yearning in his voice. At family gatherings he would regale us with stories from an idyllic youth there, and even the word was exotic: "Schlesien", with a beautiful rich sound, much more evocative than the prosaic and provincial Bonn.
My sense of curiosity only increased with age, and I nagged my father to take us there. Sometimes he would wistfully recall his visit to Wangern (now Wegry), the family home, in the harvest time of 1944, when all was still calm there and the farmers were bringing in the crops in timeless fashion. But by February 1945, my father’s cousin Sigrid, already a war widow, was giving birth to her first child in a covered wagon, among the chaos of the refugee treks heading west out of Silesia, in deep winter, fleeing from the Red Army. My grandparents were in Berlin at the time, but all her life my grandmother treasured a small glass casket containing a handful of her beloved Silesian earth.
My father's next visit was in 1982, just as Poland came under martial law. Yet none of us, his five daughters, had ever been. A framed photograph in his study of the old family house, now a school, was the only visible sign of this vanished world. Then last summer we found ourselves on a bus leaving from Zittau, on today's Polish-German border, on a privately arranged tour heading for Lower Silesia, in a party of eight: my parents. sisters and one brother-in-law. My father, now 87, had finally rounded up the family to go back to the place where he was born and where he had spent his early childhood and many happy summers during his youth.
As the trip progressed we re-established family ties. drank lots of Polish beer, indulged in sisterly tiffs and compared travel wardrobes. Visiting my father’s childhood meant revisiting our own, a rare moment of togetherness, echoing the time we were still living under one roof. That changed in 1970, when my parents moved to London following my father's appointment as German Ambassador, having entered the diplomatic service after the war in 1949.
My feelings hovered between excitement and apprehension about what we were to find, as a world previously conjured up only in my imagination was about to be made a reality. It didn't occur to me that I might be disappointed. The mere fact that the house was there at all was enough for me to look forward to, and indeed it is a miracle that it survived, as so much was destroyed during the heavy fighting in the chaotic last months of the Second World War. For on Hitler’s orders, the nearby city of Breslau, like other German cities in the east, was declared a Festung (fortress) in January 1945 — a meaningless designation, beyond the fact that those remnants of the Wehrmacht and the Hitler Youth left to defend Silesia's capital were expected to fight "to the last man". Meanwhile. some 60,000 women and children tried to escape the city on foot in deep snow, carrying what they could.
Some of these refugees would have passed through the park at Wangern — a typical Silesian manor house, with white stucco and a red tiled mansard roof, which came into the family through my great-great-grandfather Carl Hicketier in 1856. Carl’s granddaughter, Ina Hicketier, had married her second cousin. Günther von Hase. an officer in the Prussian Grenadier Guards, at the outbreak of the First World War on August 2, 1914 — a time when many couples married, reaffirming life in the face of the unknown.
Indeed, both my sets of grandparents married on that very date, and although war would shape their destinies, neither family had a military tradition. The Hicketiers were landowners, the Hases academics, ennobled in 1886 for the achievements of Karl-August von Hase, a celebrated 19th-century theologian who was turned down by several universities because of his former radicalism before Goethe appointed him to the chair of theology at Jena in 1830.
War would also be the uninvited guest at my parents' wedding, on February 13, 1945, the day that Dresden was bombed. My father, however, was absent from the ceremony, fighting in an encirclement on the eastern front in those last desperate months of the war. His situation was bleak, posted on what was effectively a suicide mission because his uncle, Paul von Hase, army commandant of Berlin, had recently been executed for his involvement in the July plot to assassinate Hitler. From the front my father had sent a radio message to his prospective father-in-law, requesting an immediate Ferntrauung (proxy marriage), a civil ceremony designed for times of war, allowing the bride to marry without the groom’s presence.
My mother was a 19-year old Red Cross nurse, wearing her uniform for the ceremony, conducted at home by a registrar. For the occasion a desk was decorated with a photograph of my father, flowers given by neighbours and, following convention of the time, a soldier's helmet resting on a cushion. My mother felt desperate — not helped by the fact that all the wedding guests were in tears. Three days later, my father was captured by the Russians and transported to the USSR. It would be another five years before she would see him again.
As we all travelled towards his childhood home, my father illuminated every familiar location with his reminiscences. He is a brilliant storyteller. it plays to his strengths - his warmth, his wit and charisma. He recalled childhood escapades, like being bitten by a dog, or the time he ate 14 frankfurters, having been given the go-ahead by racy aunt Edeltraut in the Monopol Hotel in Breslau to "eat as much as you like", promptly throwing up in the back of her car. The further back, the sharper the memory of people, pets, places, names. He excelled himself particularly on the fourth day of our ten-day journey, when, on the bumpy drive to Wangern, my father drew quick character sketches of Gustav the chauffeur, Auguste the cook and Alma the maid, and recalled a white pony called Ali, the carriage horses Max and Moritz, and the dogs Hexe, Wuschi and Rigo.
As we drove towards Wangern that morning, the familiar and foreign became inextricably intertwined, the glorious landscape unfolding before our eyes. It looked exactly as I had wanted it to, and it felt exactly like the place I had wanted to come from. I was dazzled by the poppy fields stretching to the horizon, the blue mountain ranges and huge skies. Black clouds and a heavy shower interrupted the long run of sunny weather, a change which only heightened our sense of adventure.
As we drew up at the house. the Sun came out with perfect timing. Schoolchildren spilled out of the house for their mid-morning break, looking at us with great curiosity. The young headmistress, Barbara Sasak, was expecting us. She came to greet us Outside the door to show us around. My father was visibly moved by seeing his birthplace again. which his mother had returned to while her husband was at the front.
Inside. all the rooms had neat rows of desks, walls decorated with collages and posters, and I found it easy to imagine how elegant Wangern must once have been. We walked through the rooms, classrooms filled with children, who stood up the minute we adults entered. When we stepped into Mrs Sasak's study, my father said suddenly. "This used to be my parent’s bedroom," which more than anything made me realise what a leap he had made from the present into the past. At one point. he sat on the front steps, just drinking in the atmosphere I suddenly saw him as a young boy.
We did not linger long, nor did we have to. It was enough to have seen it — and to have been reassured by the vibrant life within its walls. Then we drove on to another family estate, at Klein-Pogul, which. unlike Wangern, no longer exists in any recognisable form. as the Schloss was burnt down in 1947 in circumstances which remain unclear. The new tenants would also be refugees: Poles were expelled from their own country as early as 1939, as Soviet Russia appropriated a large part of eastern Poland, and were resettled after the war in German lands which had been forcibly vacated.
"I understand your feelings — we were also expelled," an elderly Polish woman had told my father on his last visit in 1982. Nothing remains of Klein-Pogul’s former splendour. other than the stables and a weathered statue of St Nepomuk, patron saint of bridges, decapitated and pushed off its plinth, a sad reminder of what had once been a beautiful estate with a park and two lakes. My first cousins lived in Pogul — three boys called Dietel, Jörgel and Ottel, who were my playmates over long, lazy holidays, with rides in the summer and shoots in the autumn. Walking around the grounds in the late afternoon, my father was lost in thought. He was intent on finding some evidence of the house, a stone. a fragment, anything to remind him. It seemed as if nature had swallowed up the house: the park looked as if no one had ever lived there.
Finally. we found the ancient oak tree which had appeared in several old photographs, now acting as a lonely compass in the wilderness. The darkened sky and rolling thunder prompted my father to turn to me, as if to excuse his fruitless search in the approaching rain. "It really is like a lost paradise," he told me. Before leaving, we looked at the original estate managers house, and the stables, left empty and untouched. A small white cottage was awkwardly attached to the latter, now lived in by a farmer’s family called Polakowski. Their four small children gave us shy glances, and finally came to say hello. Their parents offered us a large bowl of hand-picked strawberries, amazed both by our presence and by the old postcard of Pogul that we showed them.
Next came Breslau, to see a family town house, now the German Consulate. Some years ago, a mass grave of 200 teenage German soldiers was exhumed in the garden. They fell in the days before the war ended. "The whole city was a graveyard," the consul told us. The Gauleiter, Karl Hanke, fled on the last plane out. "His blind belief in Nazi propaganda and in the hopeless Festung policy, his fatal delays in ordering the civilian evacuation, would make the city's end as violent and painful as possible," writes Norman Davies in his book Microcosm, a history of Breslau. Heavy damage was incurred by Russian bombardment, and the city's surrender took place three days after Hitler’s suicide.
Finally, we went to the square outside St Elizabeth's church. to look at a statue dedicated to theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, my father's second cousin, executed in the wake of the July plot.
Sitting in a café on the Ring, the city's main square. we were back in the present. comforted by the knowledge that at least some of my father’s Silesia still existed. The Ring is testament to the polish people’s spectacular success in resurrecting the city's architectural heritage. Looking at the impeccably restored medieval and baroque houses in powder shades of lilac. primrose, pink and green. it is clear that Poland is on the move. The remnants of have been swept away to reveal a European country displaying signs or economic health. Shops are full of goods: fruit and vegetable stalls are stocked with produce; children are dressed in trainers and sports gear: there is even a British Home Stores — Brytyjski Dom Handlowy Breslau teems with life once more, with beautiful girls wearing micro-minis and platform shoes. This won't be my last visit. Part of me was longing to return to London, to get on with my future after being steeped in the past. But a gap has been filled, and a faded old photograph brought to life.
Bettina von Hase