What are some of your family’s WW2 related stories?

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1. My grandma lived as a child in the Ruhr area, the most important industrial area in Germany which was the target of heavy bombing. Because they were a family of 9 children, the constant bombing and the food shortages, at the age of 6 she was sent to her childless aunt and uncle in a small village. There she was safe from the bombs and as farmers they had enough food, but being seperate from her family in such an early age was hard.

   In the same village also my grandpa grew up. From the war the children didn’t notice much. At the beginning they had a map in their school showing the advance of the German front but when the Wehrmacht retreated, this was discontinued. Sometimes they saw the bombers flying over them to reach the bigger cites but their village was not targeted.

   They also had foreign forced labourers in their village who had to work in agriculture but they were strictly seperate from the local population. One day one of these workers threw himself in front of a train and commited suicide out of desperation.

   Finally, the village was liberated by US soldiers without any fighting. It was the first time the people there saw black people. My grandpa was 13 then and he visited a “better” school where they had some English lessons so the people asked him to translate for the soldiers. But he was so nervous (and probably his English so poor) that he couldn’t say a word in English.

   In terms of military service, most of my direct ancestors were quite lucky. My great grandpa in the Ruhr area was a miner and as a crucial worker didn’t have to go to war. One great grandpa was at first spared because of a foot injury and later was in Greece where it was relatively calm and he later said that the locals were friendly. Another one was in Norway where it was also pretty calm and the last one was too old to serve.

2. My grandparents wouldn’t really talk about it. I didn’t know my paternal grandma but my maternal grandma told me more after my grandpa died. She was in the WAAF in the UK and drove buses and heavy vehicles. She wasn’t the best driver though!

   My paternal grandfather was an engineer in the RAF and spent most of the war in Italy. He rode speedway bikes in Naples Bay.

   My maternal grandfather was a career RAF man, he’d joined up in 37 or 38 i think. He was an electrician but also very colour blind. He ended up in the far east and by all accounts did some reconnaissance work because he could see the camouflage.

3. My uncle wrote a book about his experience during ww2. He was fighter in RAF. Interesting fact is that because of him our family got surname we have now, because he was forces to change it before going to England

   He fought in battle of England, and just like other polish pilots he got little to no credit for it at that time. He, just like his autobiography, got acknowledgment just recently – as he won plebiscite started by RAF Museum in UK, where I think you can still see his photo. The best gift he could had gotten for 100th birthday!

   I never had a chance to meet him personally, but I met his sons which are great beings proudly sharing his story. People in his village and my family still remember him, and he appeared on news as well – meaning there’s a change he got many more people interested in these events. And that’s why it’s special, he never admitted to killing anyone – he just wanted to protect people and after that spread knowledge about all forgotten polish pilots. And he got what he wanted

4. It is a somewhat sombre story.

   In my grandparents’ village, there is a street dedicated to a cousin of my grandfather. In that village there is an important bridge over a stream, which after 1943, had been entrusted to men of the Wermacht Turkestan Legion, called ‘The Mongols’ by the locals. One day, partisans ambushed the German soldiers in the creek bed; therefore, operations to flush out the partisans began in the surrounding areas over the next few days. From what I know, while the family farmhouse was being searched, it was discovered that my grandfather’s cousin (16 years old), his father and a boy of the same age had helped the partisans, and so they were sentenced to death (from what I have read, it seems that some tried to escape by hiding in the hay, but the next day, in the meadow near the house, the bodies were found anyway). As I said, there is a street dedicated to him in the village, and my relatives are still invited regularly for commemorations.

5. My grandfather was sent to a work camp in 1943 and survived thanks to him speaking fluent German, he never spoke a word German after the war.

   My grandmother fought in the Warsaw uprising as a courier and survived the cleansing of the city but her older brother who also fought in the uprising was murdered in a KZ following the end of the fighting in Warsaw.

6. I have a few; I come from northern Italy so my grandparents families fought in the war until 1943, then some were again conscripted, while others were sent to work in Germany.

   My great uncle was posted in southern France in the first years (until 1943) of the war, and once saw an allied bomber coming towards him and most of his platoon ran towards a little church to shield themselves while he insisted on running in a nearby bushy area. He was the only one to run there, and the only one to survive. He also bragged to have never shot a round against anyone in the war.

   What my grandfather did during the war has always been quite a mystery, because he came from a small alpine village and most of his peer were sent to Russia and died there while he wasn’t. We recently learned from his younger brother that thanks to family connection, he managed to be posted as an attendant to a general in Northern Italy, so he passed the war quite well.

   Finally, on a better note, my grand-grand mother would help the partisans by hanging white sheets to dry when Germans were not around to signal that it was safe to get in the village where they lived while my grandmother at the timed lived in Rome and managed to hide a couple of Jews from the fascists.

7. Coming from France :

   * First the story of my maternal great-grandma & great-grandpa. They were living in rural France, she was helping her husband & schooling in villages and he was the owner of a “dancing floor” where he went from village to village to make some party. He was exempt from going to war in 1940 but not from [STO](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Service_du_travail_obligatoire) (Service de Travail Obligatoire) and was sent to work as an agrarian worker in Germany until the end of the war, while his wife was pregnant. During that time she had to take care of herself and her newborn daughter nearly alone. The family happily reunited after the war only for the daughter to die of a pneumonia after her teenage years at the end of the 50s. They both ended up living long life, him dying in his 90s during the 1990s, and her dying at 107 years old in 2019.
   * Then came my great-grandmother from my paternal side, that is where the most drama is. My great-grandfather died from tuberculosis before the war, in 1938, making her a widow. During the war, living in Nazi-occupied France, a bunch of German soldiers stayed in the village where she was living with her children. Then a sprinkle of love happened, and she fell in love with one of the German soldier, that resulting in the birth of small boy from that German soldier and her (and yes, she claim she loved him). All while her elder son was actively helping the resistance. The family meal must have been interesting. At the end of the war she was safe from public shaming and being a shorn women by being judged and punished by the law in front of a court, with some laxism thanks to her son contact and action in the resistance. The German soldier and my great-grandma never saw each other again after the war and we don’t know what became of him. Maybe my great-uncle is aware but I’m not sure he is interested. She was nicknamed the dragon in the family (she was not the kindest) and died in her 90s in the 1990s.

   Coming from Italy :

   * My Grand-Father is from the Veneto area, He was not old enought to go to war but he was helping in hospitals and as a stretcher bearer. He has seen some shit.

8. Not a huge story, but my great aunt survived the Belfast blitz, in Northern Ireland, her whole street was destroyed, we have a cloak stand that survived the bombing in our hallway now. So a little bit of history in the hallway.

9. I know a few stories from my grandparents from the time that the allies were trying to liberate the Netherlands with Operation Market Garden. This area became a frontline for several months.

   With the English on one side of the village and the Germans on the other side. With English soldiers in their home and eventually a tank stood near the house. They had some information on what was happening and could witness the destruction of the bell tower of the church. Talking to 2 german POWs that were there an older soldier and a boy that wanted back to his mother. After that, they were evacuated first to Nijmegen and then to Eindhoven. Where there was still a famine and people had to scrape by in that time. When they could return everything was shot to pieces and the slow process of rebuilding began.

   My grandfather didn’t speak much about that time but what is known is that he was around Nijmegen when it was leveled by the allies. Sometime later he wanted to get something from his home and had to cross the frontline. He got captured by some soldiers and held at gunpoint for hours until he got a chance to flee and got shot at. He stayed here in the area while others were evacuated.

10. Before the war my family were small landowners and mainly dealt in animal husbandry and trade (mostly horses). My paternal grandfather was a soldier in the 2nd Hungarian Army. He fought in the Battle at the Don-bend in 1943. It was a complete disaster and he and a couple of other guys got separated during the retreat. They met some other lost people and deserters and they decided to become partisans and fight against the Nazis.

    After the war the new communist government took away their land but offered my grandfather to become the police chief of his village because of his partisan work. He said that he saw enough uniforms and guns for a lifetime and just wanted to deal with horses for the rest of his life. And so he did.

    My maternal great grandparents owned a store in a small town where they helped local Jews hide and escape. Because of their trade they constantly had to provide more and more detailed genealogies to prove that they were not Jewish.

    My maternal grandfather was interned at the Kárpátalja region at a work camp (modern day Zakarpatia, Ukraine) because he was an anti-war leftist intellectual (he studied to be a highschool teacher). He never talked about anything drastic happening there, it was work service and they were fairly lax towards anyone who wasn’t Jewish or openly a communist. He said it was either that or joining the army and he sure as hell wasn’t going to join the army as several of his family members were killed in World War I.

    My maternal grandmother was 16 in 1945 and she had to live in the attic of their house for two months when the Russians came because they were known to rape. One time in April 1945 a group of soldiers came to their house and they were all very scared. After a lengthy discussion using an ad hoc sign language it turned out that all they wanted was a bag of potatoes. So my grandparents baked some potatoes for them and they left in peace. Some of my grandma’s friends were not that lucky.

11. The father of my grandmother was at the battle of Stalingrad, he managed to escape and went home to Romania by foot, dying few days after arriving home due to some wounds. My grandmother told me that he came back a very different man, very skinny, grumpy and refused to talk to anyone.

    My grandmother was 12 years old in 1944 when the front collapsed and she run to the woods with her mother and sister and stayed there for few weeks, fearing the Russian army.

    My grandfather was 18 yo in 1944 and and was sent to the front in nord-eastern Romania, few km away from his home, with his older brother. When the front collapsed he managed to escape, but his brother was caught by the Red Army and sent to Siberia to come back 15 years after the war. From 20 years old to 35.

    On my father side, my grandfather was an Ukrainian from northen Bucovina who move to Romania after the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact in 1940, when northen Bucovina was occupied by USSR and after the war he managed to stay in Romania by marring a Romanian girl, my grandmother. Because back then, if you were from Basarabia or from Bucovina, you had to be deported back.

12. My great grandfather was german and was strongly against Hitler since he was very pious and hated the idea of jews being persecuted. He was a teacher in Swabia (a region in Germany) and was sometimes even saying something against Hitler to his students. Some of them however turned out to be convinced Nazis themselfs and told the police about it. They arrested him and although they did let him free, he was fired after and the family became quite poor. He saw very badly even with glasses (which is also the reason why he wasn’t a sodier) so it was extremely hard for him to get a job. Once the war ended, the family was really poor, and their reputation of being aganist National Socialism gad spread throughout the neighborhood. And a very convinced Nazi was in charge to distribute the french troops and since this person naturally hated my great grandfather, he gave him 4 soldiers to host. And as you already know, thr family was extremely poor and barely surviving as it is. My grandmother then decided to leave and go to Switzerland in order to help the family (one mouth less to feed) and met my grandfather and so on.

13. Unfortunately many people from my grandparents’ generation thought it was a good idea *not* to talk about it and keep it to themselves. So they didn’t tell me much about the awfulness, just some simple things like how my grandpa was regularly stopped by the police for looking like a Jew and how they had to turn the lights of add night to make it harder for German bombers to navigate.

    A story they never told about was that of my great-uncle. They said he was arrested during the war and died in Germany, but that’s about it. My brother, a history student, did some research 2 years ago and found out what happened:
    He went to a protest where he sang some anti-nazi songs. That got him arrested and eventually sent to court. There the judge asked why he hated the Germans, to which he replied he liked the German people and just hated the Nazis. He offered to sing the song there in court so the judge would could hear exactly what he said/sang. Obviously the judge didn’t want to hear it and he sentences my great-uncle to work in a concentration camp. He died there after a few years but that’s where the information my brother found stopped.

    There is a small monument in a nearby town with the names of people from the region who died in concentration camps during the war. His name is on it as well but we never knew. My grandparents probably knew but never told anything about it. They simply changed the subject whenever we started talking about the war.

    A happier story is that of a sister of my grandma who, like many, married a Canadian soldier and moved to Canada after the war. We visited their children and grandchildren in Canada 2018.

14. My maternal grandmother was a child during the war. She lived in Milan, which was one of the most industrialised cities in Italy at the time and therefore one of the most targeted.

    She didn’t told us a lot about the war, which is a shame, but one thing she did say is that when they had to go in the air raid shelter, she sometimes looked between the sand bags and was kind of hypnotised by the fire and the bombs falling.

    Another anecdote she shared with us is about school: in 1938 the racial laws were implemented in Italy and they prohibited almost ever activity to Jews, in the same fashion as what was happening in Germany. As a result of this, my grandma quite vividly remembered the days in which her teacher changed and when some of her classmates couldn’t come to school anymore because they were Jews.

    My family was lucky since they were quite well off economically (my grand grandfathereven had accessti small quantitiesof chocolate before the arrivalof the allies), so they could flee to the countryside. And there things were not normal but much less dramatic than in the city.

    My granduncle was even younger than my grandmother but he was a troublemaker. One day, he was going around the countryside were my family was in refuge and brought home a small wooden box with two hand grenades he found in a hole in the ground. His parents were not thrilled I was told.
    We think these might have been hidden by the partisans.

    I don’t know much about my maternal grandfather, since I didn’t spend a lot of time with him (my grandparents were one of the first couples to divorce in Italy, right after it was mad legal lol) but I know his father fought in Etiopia in the colonial wars. It’s not really about ww2 and it’s kinda sad, but I thought it might be interesting. We still have a small frame with all his military medals and a photo of him in Africa.
    We obviously don’t celebrate what those objects represent but they are nonetheless part of our family history.

15. A story my mom has told a few times is when Sweden let the Germans use our railroad for transportation, as we were officially neutral. However on the platforms Swedish soldiers, amongst them my grandfather, born 1917, stood ready to shoot any German trespassing the border they had designed. According to her, he had said to have been wanting to shoot one, but as no one crossed the line, no shoots were fired.

    My parental grandmother, born 1934, used to tell me about soldiers staying at their farm, and how it was growing up with the war. How she had to be quiet when they listened at the radio and how she grew up having to do things the men would usually do, as with the war they had other more important things they needed to do, than for example getting firewood.

16. My grandfather from my father lived in Naples, the most bombed city in Italy during WWII. His parents were killed by one of the allied air raids on the city in 1943 when he was 17, later the same year the citizens of Naples liberated the city in a four days uprising ([Quattro Giornate di Napoli](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Days_of_Naples)) and while he was not an active fighter after the allies came he enlisted in the royalist Italian navy as a telegraph operator. In 1946 there was a referendum to decide between the monarchy or the republic, and while many in the south voted for the monarchy my grandfather voted for the republic, reason being he blamed the King for the rise of fascism and the war. He hated the king and his family until the end, i still remember his reaction when the remains of Vittorio Emanuele III were repatriated from Egypt: “Quel nano di merda andava gettato in mare” (That shitty dwarf should have been thrown into the sea)

17. Not that many, my grandmother lived right at the border between Vichy France and the German zone but she didn’t like to talk about it

    The border came right through the city (because it’s in the middle of a river) separated by only one bridge at the time (nowadays it’s like 3) and she couldn’t see the rest of her family without bribing some german troops, she was fortunate enough to live in quite a wealthy family at the time, at least before she got disowned

18. Both grandfathers were essential workers. On my father’s side he was too old to serve anyway, he wasn’t even pressed into the last ditch cannon fodder units. However he was pressed into becoming a party member. After the war he didn’t cooperate with the Sovjets as they demanded (they asked for his in depth knowledge about the aircraft industry and urged him to come with them. He refused as he wouldn’t be allowed to take his family with him and didn’t want to leave wife + three young children on their own in a starving post war country). They jailed him in a special camp (former concentration camp Buchenwald) and released him when he was terminally ill.

    On my mother’s side it went a bit better: My grandfather was in his own words blinded by the early success and propaganda, he wanted medals too! He left his safe place in the factory and volunteered to Luftwaffe. He was to become a fighter pilot. During a training mission he was shot down by US fighters. He parachuted out of the wreck and landed in the only tree in a wide area. He was badly injured and kept a slight disability for life. But more importantly he was out of the frontline for the rest of the war which likely saved his life.

    He wasn’t entirely fit again in 1945 and sent to one of the aforementioned cannon fodder units. Reconvalescents, surplus bomber crews, ground staff, no heavy weapons or equipment worth mentioning. Military value exactly 0.

    They were sent to the Battle of Berlin… and just piled up their uniforms and burnt them, the entire unit deserted. If they had been caught by some fanatics they’d all had been shot (same if they had actually reached Berlin I suppose). So he travelled home. One of the members of his unit wanted to stay in the Berlin area. My grandfather gave him a message for his gf who was from Berlin. He made it home safely in the chaos of the ending war, his gf could flee from Berlin before it was too late as well and found him. They became my grandparents and lived many decades in peace. Thanks for not trying to be a hero for the Nazi maniacs, grandfather!

    Yet there was one last thing to do for my grandfather: As he arrived back home just shortly after the war ended people wondered what happened. He claimed to be already released POW. One woman told the British occupation forces and they interrogated him. My grandfather admitted never been POW, but just being a deserter. They offered him two choices: Either taken POW, or: The British had piled up many captured aircraft at a nearby airfield. They wouldn’t take him POW but just pick him up in the morning and bring him home in the evening, and he’d tell them everything they wanted to know about the captured planes, without any further repercussions. My grandfather chose this and both sides kept their word. However he hated that woman forever for bringing him at risk.

19. My maternal grandma constantly lived in danger, because her brother was mentally disabled and thus should have been admitted by law into the nazis euthanasia program. After the Americans liberated the region she lived in, she was raped daily by American soldiers. Her first born child is a product of these incidents.
    My maternal grandfather was 13 years old when he was forcefully conscripted by the nazis in 1944. The first opportunity he had, he surrendered to the red army. He remained in a light pow camp, where he escaped in March 1945.

20. They all lived in rural Free France, so not many resistants but:
    – my grandma parents were friend with a cop, who would tell them when a “raid” would happen, so themselves would tell their 2 Jewish neighbors. The woman would go to another city for the day, and the man would come to my great grand parents and hide in the sheet wardrobe while the cop verified my family identities.
    – on my dad’s side, his grandfather was in Germany for STO. That was great traumatism, bc when my grandma talks about it she tells that he was a prisoner. Also he became alcoholic and killed himself when my grandma was 21, which I only learned when my own uncle was alcoholic.

    And I have no idea what about the other 4 great grand parents. I don’t think they did anything noteworthy.

21. My grandma didn’t like to tell stories about war time, all I know is that her home was bombed on her birthday, and that her town was freed by new zealand forces. She was 18-19 at the time and telling me the story she always gushed about how handsome these soldiers were 🙂

22. I live in Hungary (god damn it all), my family is Swabian, my great-grandma and her family didn’t even speak proper Hungarian. During the war while they weren’t ostracized (there were many Swabian families in the town and general area) they were very much side-eyed. Unfortunately as I learned not long ago there were some Nazi sympathizers in the extended family, not in my immediate family though, they were all very much anti-Nazi.

    The town didn’t see much actual fighting, a lot of bombing, though. My grandma, the only person who is still alive to tell stories, has mostly talked about the way they tried to find food, then hide the food from armies going through the city, and the bombings. The house they lived in was struck by a bomb, they moved to another one, which then miraculously avoided being bombed even though the neighboring houses both got struck, in fact it’s still standing (kind of, it’s really old and hasn’t been maintained so it’s kind of collapsing on itself by now). The town used to have a Jewish community, they were all taken away, most of them killed, almost nobody returned. (Some years ago she showed some houses that used to belong to Jewish townfolk, and were grabbed by the town’s elite… including the families of some currently prominent Fidesz politicians.) She told about seeing the authorities rounding them up, about how her father (my great-grandpa) tried to save a couple of children claiming they weren’t really Jewish, but he was beaten and threatened with being shot and his family getting taken away too. This is one of the things my grandma doesn’t want to talk about, perhaps she doesn’t know much herself, as she says her mother and father tried to shield their children from all that, they never talked about it to them then, nor later.

    At the late stage of the war they came to shelter a young German army deserter, he apparently dropped in one night. He was only 16 and kept crying for help and about the horrible things he’s seen, and kept saying he wanted to go home to his mother. They kept him hidden for a few days, and then one of the sisters was careless enough to give him their address as contact when he moved on… many years later he actually wrote to them from Germany, and he became a family friend. He passed away recently.

    Another thing my grandma doesn’t talk about is the Soviet army that basically raped their way through the city as they pushed westward. The family had a single male member (my great-grandpa), six girls and their mother. So.

    After the war thousands of ethnic Germans/Swabians were expelled from Hungary, most of my extended family were among them. They were rounded up, told to pack what they can carry, and get out of the country in whatever way they can. Obviously most of them went to East Germany, some managed to go to West. From their later communication it seems they had endured a really dire life for a very long time, but most of them managed to turn things around, or it got better for later generations.

    My grandma’s immediate family managed to avoid expulsion by pretending that her parents couldn’t even speak German so they were technically not really ethnic Swabians anymore (my great-grandma who couldn’t even speak proper Hungarian, learned to say some basic things and a Petőfi poem in very good, unaccented Hungarian for this). Which is on the one hand good as they managed to avoid all those hardships others had to endure, buuuut on the other hand if they had been forced to go I could be a German living in Germany right now, instead of being stuck in this godforsaken country.

23. The Women’s stories revolved mostly around family and how they tried to keep them safe and get food for the children.

    My great-grandmother, who got 101 years old and only died a few years ago, was separated from part of her family when Vienna was bombed and they had to flee. It was her and some kids in one place and her sister and the rest of the kids in another. It took 2 years before they found each other again even tho they weren’t that far apart.

    Her youngest brother was taken out of school when he was 14 and sent to war – without bullets. The gun they handed him was empty, which he didn’t know. He surrendered to the first Russian troops he saw and luckily wasn’t shot. Apparently they immediately realized that there weren’t any bullets in his weapon when they took it from him and felt how light it was. He said it was a shock to him, because while he was planning to surrender anyways he was under the impression that he at least had something to defend himself with. He was taken into a Russian pow camp and stayed there for a while. He wasn’t treated nicely obviously, but always said the they had no reason to and that the guys who took him could have just shot him. After all he was just some apparently armed Nazi soldier.

    The men of the other part of the family didn’t survive the war and I have to assume that at least some of them were involved with the Nazis. I don’t know much about them but we have a photograph where one poses in uniform on a relative’s wedding and I doubt you would do that if you weren’t a willing member.

    My other great-grandmother was sent from Vienna to Budapest to work for a Hungarian royal family as au pair before the war began as part of a program to get people out of Vienna, which was starving. She didn’t plan to come back as the family was treating her nicely, the two children loved her and she had a much better life overall. However after the Anschluss in 1938 Austrians abroad were summoned back to now-Germany. A message about that and that it was a crime to help them hide was broadcastet in German and Hungarian on the Hungarian radio, so the family my aunt stayed with threw away all of their radios and attempted to play dumb. A few days later tho two SS men knocked on their door and asked why my grandmother was still there – because she was sent there by the state they had information about it. They took a look around the house and luckily believed that they didn’t know anything but my grandmother had to come back with them and never saw that family again.

24. * One of my grandfathers was supposed to be sent to Germany for the STO (mandatory work service). The local *gendarme* (~policeman) came to give him the convocation document and told him that he would come back to pick him up the next day. Added “and you better not be there when I come back”… So my grandfather followed the advice, went into hiding and joined the resistance (*maquis*). I don’t know much more.

    * Other grandfather joined a resistance network around the same time he married my grandmother. Everyone was arrested in 1943, and he was lucky to be one of the only one not executed. It’s probably because some members of the family had connections with both the church and the occupiers (afaik they were basically nazis… weird how you can get completely opposite people in the same family), and they stepped up to “help”.

    My grandmother was interrogated a few times by the *gestapo*. It was scary, especially since they just had a baby at the time. But she was never arrested.

    My grandfather got a “trial” and was sent in various prisonner camps in Germany for the next two years. He was “Nacht und Nebel”, meaning zero outside communications was allowed, so my grandmother had no idea if he was alive or not all that time. She went to live with some family since she still had to raise my aunt and needed some support.

    He was freed by Russian army and came back to France a few weeks later.

    Never knew him personally but I know he had lots of health issues, and I was told that he was a really quiet man who barely talked even to his own children… I suppose the time there probably left scars. He wrote about it but I was 13 when I read it and didn’t really understood, I need to go back to it one day…

25. My grandfather was living in Algeria and was drafted in the free french in the engineering corp during the Italian campaign and was task to build the road for the allied tanks.
    One night he was sleeping in a ditch next to the road with his unit when a donkey fell and filled the ditch with rock. They had to evacuate…
    10 min after , German mortars targeted their position and one shell fell exactly at their former position.

    He always jokingly told us that we exist only because of a stupid donkeys

26. So, first of all, my family is originally from North Macedonia, so I’m talking from that point of view.

    My great-grandfather from my mother’s side fought in the Syrmian front with Tito’s partisans. If I recall correctly, one day his group was attacked by the nazis while in a trench. Most of his companions died, while he got a bullet in his left side, that blocked his left leg for all his life and gave him severe mobility issues. I don’t remember how he managed to save himself, maybe by faking being dead. He then became a sort of local hero in our area, with who knows how many people constantly visiting him, to the point it became quite an annoyance.

    My great-grandfather from my father’s side was sent to Vojvodina too, but I don’t think he ever fought. He was a quite fearful man, so he tried to escape the war.

    Sadly I don’t know much about my other two great-grandfathers.

    What I know though is that all my family, all its parts hated the fascists. The Italians and the Bulgarians were deemed particularly violent.
    Not all my family was communist, but fighting for Tito was seen as necessary and far more honourable than accepting the fascist occupation.

27. Great-Grandpa worked for NASA. Kind of. If you know what I mean.

    He was thrown in a wild concentration camp in 1933 and imprisoned multiple times for his underground work in the KPD. The last time he was in Buchenwald and Mittelbau Dora, where he was forced to work on the A4.

    He survived and was later harassed by the Americans until the Soviets took over. They made him the mayor of his small village until he pissed them of and was imprisoned in Speziallager 2 Buchenwald again for a year.

    Apparently he kept his beef with Herman Matern from the 1920s alive, even though Matern fled to Moscow.

    Before the border was completely closed he kept his underground work going on and smuggled documents and letters to West Germany.

28. My husband’s grandma told me that when she was a little girl her father would take her on picnics in the woods in Luxembourg during the war. She later found out they were dropping food for men who were hiding in the woods to avoid being conscripted by the nazis.