It took us four generations to heal

It took us four generations to heal.

My great-great-grandmother was wealthy, she was, so to speak,” fuck you money”rich. They had a mansion or some wealthy residence near Berlin. She was the fourth of six children. They had a huge library in their house and private teachers. My great-great-grandmother learnt English and French, and she spoke them fluently at that time. They even got their own dressmaker, coiffeur, horses and the Universe knows what more. Then she married a wealthy business owner, and they moved to Poland at the border to Ukraine, where her husband had a large property with several acres, and they started their business. They were really prosperous. My great-great-grandmother also had six children and one of them was my great-grandmother. She was also brought up in a well situated household. My great-grandmother also got married to a wealthy man and they had two boys. One of them was my grandfather. Then the Second World War started and their business and the house of my great-great-grandmother and of their family were destroyed by the Russians, because the Russians said it was their country. I don’t even know if my great-great-grandmother was killed then, because she protected what she had built. But my great-grandmother had to escape with her two boys. Her husband had to fight in World War II. Life wasn’t all ha-ha and he-he. I was told that they had to live in the forest and that they were hiding from bombs the Germans or the Russians (who knows -all shit) were throwing. After a while, my great-grandmother and her sons were brought to relatives in Kufstein in Austria, with nothing on than their clothes. Later on, she got the message that her husband had fallen in war.

Not knowing what to do, or where to turn to, she got to know a man, a soldier to whom the government promised a small flat in a very young town in Lower Silesia, Poland. There they moved, and my grandfather met his wife, my grandmother. They had two children. My uncle and my mum. My grandfather was so traumatised after the experiences of the war and the events that led to the Cold War that started afterwards that he was giving hell to his wife and his children. They got divorced and my mum and my uncle lived in deepest poverty because it was hard at that time for my grandmother, as a young divorced single lady, to raise two children on her own. As my mum grew older she hated everything about her life and the country she was living in and all she ever thought of was to escape that pseudo-communist country to move to Germany. She met my dad at a young age and soon got pregnant. As she did not want to have the same future for me as she had, she decided to flee to Germany. My dad did not have the choice, so he went with her.

I was raised in Germany. I am also a mother of a child now, and I have decided I am going nowhere. I am the fourth generation. I will stay here, raise my child here. And hell no – I will never have that journey again.

Enough – I decide that I am the one ending this escape story – I make sure a rich family comes out of me again!