The Thin Line of the Living

Genealogy consumes my early morning hours.  When the house is still asleep, and with a cup of coffee beside me, I pore over a blossoming family tree, searching for answers I may never find. 

This near obsession started months ago, soon after reading All the Light We Cannot See, a beautiful and painful novel about a French girl, and a young German soldier whose lives intersect briefly, but intensely, near the end of the Second World War. 

I thought of my mom, born in the Netherlands, in October 1944. A horrific winter of starvation and deprivation awaited the Dutch people.  Thousands would die.  One of the deaths was an infant – my mom’s twin sister who only survived a few weeks and lost her life on November 11^th 1944.  Remembrance Day.

I imagine the grief and misery my grandparents must have endured as young parents in a war torn, Nazi occupied nation.  I knew those grandparents well and spent a lot of time with them growing up.  I occasionally asked them about the war, but they spoke little about it.  I know almost nothing about what they endured.

The desire to know more, a lot more, led me to genealogy.  My father’s family was also a mystery.  The surname had changed sometime in the early 20^th century when a Polish family adopted a British sounding name.  I’ve learned my dad’s grandparents moved from Poland to the United States before World War I.  They had children, and then, inexplicably moved back to Poland.  Somewhere in those years one son died, and another was born.  The family made its way back to Canada in the 1920s.  They were not wealthy.  I don’t know how, or why, they emigrated to North America, returned to Europe, and then came back again.

My wife’s family is German and Scottish.  Our daughter carries these bloodlines within her.  My research increasingly draws me to the wars and the intersections of our families. My wife’s grandfather was wounded in the Great War.  My wife’s uncle, Helmut, still a teenager when he enlisted, criss-crossed the continent during World War II, fighting on both the eastern and western fronts.  He was wounded in France, just weeks after D-Day, fighting to rappel the Allies who fought to liberate the continent – liberate people like my pregnant grandmother and her soon to be born twins.  Throughout the war, Helmut took photos, and he bequeathed the remarkable album he produced to my father-in-law.  I’ve spent hours examining that album and followed the journey of this young German paratrooper, who both wandered the streets of occupied Paris as if he were a tourist and not a soldier, and suffered unimaginably on the frozen Russian front in March 1942, in temperatures of -35 Celsius.  A year later he was transferred to the Netherlands, where he was stationed an hour’s drive away from my grandparents’ small town.  They almost certainly never met, or even saw one another, yet through my daughter, they are connected.

It is easy to build a family tree given all the resources available online.  It’s much harder to reconstruct a life.  I find photos, and newspaper clippings, but those do not add up to a life.  Gravestones tell me when a person was born, and when they died, but tell me nothing about the life they lived.

Every morning when I open my family tree, I am humbled by, and thankful for those who came before me. I am grateful to have been born in Canada, after the wars and in a time of prosperity where health care is widely available.  My tree, and likely yours too, is filled with children and adults who died young, very young, throughout the 19^th and early 20^th centuries.  My great-grandmother passed away giving birth in her home, in a working-class Ontario city, in 1929.  She was only 38-years old.  The son she bore died that night too.  I think of the legacy that those deaths must have had on that family. 

My foray into genealogy has reminded me that no person or group has a monopoly on suffering.  It is a part of the human condition. 

Above all, delving into the past, reminds me of the importance of the present moment, and reinforces for me that nothing matters more than the love and well-being of our families and those we love.