My fixation began at the age of fifteen, I was going though things in boxes, papers and family documents when I discovered I had a bit of an interest for my family's history.
It wasn't a secret that certain things we were not allowed to uncover in my house, my mother always says , "if you dig up the past be prepared to get dirty", that is very true. Eleven years ago I started finding letters and documents containing information about someone I never knew, my grandfather. My father once had told me Ernst had found refuge in Italy during the WWII since our family had suffered with the holocaust , the truth is that he had been exiled in Italy because he was part of the holocaust, a Nazi. When do become children of the dammed, apologizing at every turn for sins committed by another? A life and soul are shaped differently once someone tells you the real version of the story.
I wish I had had more time with my grandfather , he and I could have talked long hours about the whys and decisions that shaped an era of bloodshed and tears, and later rebirth and reconstruction of a life. Without him I have spent years looking into a mirror and trying to find the answer , why wasn't he the Jew I loved, why was he the other? And from that discovery I have shaped my own self so different from when I once started.
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