Haunted, or at home?

Abstract

I grew up only knowing the bare facts: that my mother had come from Germany on a Kindertransport aged 9 and her parents and brother had been ‘killed in a concentration camp’. She had been fostered by an elderly Christian English couple and swiftly turned into a little Christian English girl. The past was a very closed book and a terrifying abyss of mystery that fuelled my nightmares. I only finally began to find out the truth eleven years ago, by an increasingly absorbing and compulsive process of research, mourning and commemoration which has taken over much of my life. Since then, I have visited Germany ten times and been involved in the laying of nineteen (soon to be twenty) Stolpersteine and organizing two exhibitions (one in Laisa, my mother’s home village, the other in Battenberg, the nearest town where her grandfather was born and grew up). At some point in the process my mother’s parents and brother became my grandparents and uncle.