Grandmother's Diary: Deciding What to Remember

My grandparents' wedding day, Moravia, 1960s

I would like to write about how to process dark family history, but after working on Ancestral Vision for over 3 years, I realize I still don't have all the answers.

During one visit to my grandmother, probably around 2018. I have asked her to write down family memories. I had learned that she had written it and left me 188 pages of deeply emotional memories only after she had died. I always thought we'd talk about the content of her family chronicles next time. I thought we had time.

Some of the memories are too painful for anyone to read. I have only been able to process the diary in full in recent days. It took me 6 years after she had passed, and I have even reached out to a therapist to help me process it.

When I received her diary, I had no idea what I would find inside. And to my surprise, it gave me so many layers of things to process that I continue to struggle with every time I start thinking about it, and perhaps it will take me years to come to understand what I'm reading there. In the first chapters, she writes about her memories of being labeled German as a child and being put in a concentration camp in the aftermath of the Second World War. The amount of physical and emotional pain that she had lived through as a child is impossible for me to put into words. When I'm reading it, I can feel the traumatic memories and the way she is describing herself as an 8-year-old child. Her memories, especially about gruesome details of witnessing death, murders, and torture, are written in incredible, visceral detail. As she herself struggles to understand and keeps coming back to it with questions, why have we been exposed to such human malice? We were children, and I struggled to answer it with her. This part of Czech-German history is not widely discussed, and the March of Death around Brno (Pochod Smrti kolem Brna) has been largely disregarded due to limited accounts and the dismissal of survivors. I understand that holding on to her memories is part of the full picture of history, not only our personal one. As I'm writing this post, I'm considering hiring a professional editor to help me make edits because I'm finding myself paralyzed every time I dive in; there are too many traumatic details for me to get a clear image. The material needs distance and someone to edit the raw text with sensitivity.

Because the truth is, I haven't been able to share her family chronicles with anyone, not even family, yet. The outcome I would like is a book for the family, and distributed as additional material for future Ancestral Vision exhibitions.

In later chapters, she writes that she has experienced so much darkness in her life, but in the end, she is grateful for the goodness she has lived with as well. I would like to believe that my grandmother had found refuge in writing her memories, as painful as they are, and perhaps they are safe there, on paper, as a form of therapy. And if her memories ever reach the world, we would soften them around the edges. I'm hoping she would have agreed with me.