Originally Posted by
Hokulea
... wondered if anyone else here is in the same position or knows someone who is. I suspect some might see this as some weird liberal "look at me" post but that couldn't be further from the truth. For those who might understand what I'm getting at, do you have any advice? My mother lived with this for so long without telling me and I'm sure she has a good reason for doing so, but she is also a part of history and is in a group of people that is growing smaller every day.
Thank you.
Hokulea, I can share an almost exact parallel story.
My partners mother would have been a little older than your mother. She was born and lived the first part of her life in the Austrian Alps (though she had worked as a maid in Graz). She had two brothers in the German armed services, the older of whom also disappeared in Russia (his picture, in uniform, still hangs on her bedroom wall, we haven't had the heart to change her room since she died). Neither her nor my partners father (who died several decades ago) spoke about their wartime experiences other than they knew each other from both working in a steel factory during that time. My partners father came to Australia after the war as he was a stateless person and when looking to settle down wrote to my partners mother, to see if she was interested in marriage. She came to Australia and married him here.
One night a couple of years before she died while we were sitting in the lounge and a documentary on WW2 was playing on the television (though none of us were really paying it much attention) she looked up and saw some old newsreel of Hitler in an open topped car in a parade and simply said, "I saw him, you know". We pressed a little bit and she said that every one (from the factory we assume) was given a day off if they would go and watch him go by. So she did. It wasn't anything more sinister than that.
In fact, we went back to her home town after she died and talked to the few of her friends who were then still alive (they are all gone now) and we got clues of some things but either they didn't know everything or wouldn't tell us either. We also found a lot of records regarding my partners father in Australian refugee records. We think he wouldn't speak of his experiences due to his fear of retribution by post war Jugoslavian communist forces (even 40 years later in Australia). When they met in Austria, he was almost certainly some form of "forced worker" (Zwangsarbeiter) though not a slave worker. There seems be a story about her being threatened with punishment and being told not to give bread to a group of forced workers (including him?) but we cant confirm the details.
From what little bits we have been able to piece together I think she was just a fairly normal, kind hearted person, very parochial* in a lot of ways. The partners father _may_ have deserted from one (or more!) Slovak conscript armies before being a forced worker (because of it?) and may have done some shady things (black market?) directly post war but probably due to circumstances of the time and was a perfectly fine law abiding naturalised citizen for the remainder of his life in Australia. Both of them just normal folks born into a bad place and time, dealt with it as they could.
* If you know of the writings of Peter Rossegger you'll understand exactly what I mean.
I would advise you ask you mother her stories though. Some of the things we found out, I don't think either of my partners parents would have freely talked about, one for maybe embarrassment and one from fear, but that will vary from person to person.
Certifs