The day my grandmother Inge told me about the trauma that defined her life, I was standing at the kitchen table making my cousin’s wedding cake. I stood for a minute, frozen, the cake icing cloying and sticky between my fingers.
Women of my grandmother’s generation were taught to deal with trauma by not mentioning it at all. This silence was compounded by the nature of historical narratives in which women rarely feature. Their lives, lived away from the front line, were not deemed worthy of much scrutiny.Silence has its own, pernicious legacy. As a journalist, words are my trade. But in the shock of Inge’s revelation that day, they failed me. I did not know what to say. All I could do then, was to hold her.
Over the years that followed, that shared sense of a place, though long wiped from the map, encouraged her to confide the past, and taught me, for the first time, to listen to the woman hidden beneath her carefully curated exterior. In 15 years of journalism, I had travelled the world looking for stories, without suspecting that the most compelling of all had been there all along. I found it within my own family.
She needed food, and medicine for an ailing friend, the mother of the lover who had not yet returned from war. Crippled by arthritis, the older woman had grown reliant on morphine, which it had fallen on Inge to procure. In the devastation of post-war Germany, that meant turning to the black market.The man who offered to help her knew his way around this illicit trade. He befriended her in an almost textbook manner.
Inge’s trauma was not unusual. It was lived by millions of women in those final months of war and the precarious years that followed. In a war that had all but destroyed Europe, they were no more than collateral damage. Their story is a chapter of German history that for decades was never even told.
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