How A Writer's Winter Retreat Lifted The Lid On An Eight-Decade Old Family Secret
It started innocently enough with a 450km trip south of Warsaw to spend a month in Poland’s beautiful snowy mountains to work on two books, read, and enjoy creative rest - but through a bizarre chain of connections, I happened on an incredible discovery that could unravel an eight decade old WWII family mystery that went to the graves with my grandparents.
The beautiful view from my writing desk in Rabka.
And a mystery no one has ever been able to begin to solve.
Until now.
As I followed a very cold bread crumb trail, I discovered I had begun to open a Pandora’s Box of Nazis, Soviets, and perhaps, at last, the true reason why the KGB pursued my grandfather and his children for four decades...and why I was told I must never travel to Russia.
But first, let’s begin with the historical narrative that I was given since childhood with each of the unsolved mysteries that appear to point to my true heritage and ethnicity.
Mystery #1: I grew up with a false surname that didn’t match my ethnicity at all.
My mother came from a good British family, linked to blue blood and very easy to trace. My father’s parents’ story (as it was told) began in Ukraine after Stalin’s Holodomor genocide between 1932-1933. My grandmother, Natalya, was the daughter of an illicit liasion between the General of the Ukrainian Army and a beautiful young woman who went mad, was abandoned by the general, and died alone in abject poverty. I never knew her name. My grandmother never told me.
Her father married well and while Natalya was raised in the general’s home in Kyiv, her stepmother hated her and she was treated as a servant, forced to live in the cold attic and serve her step-sisters in a bizarre version of a real-life Cinderella story. Fortunately, Natalya had inherited her mother’s beautiful looks and as she grew older she began to attract the attention of many suitors.
One of these suitors was my grandfather, Piotr. He came to Ukraine from Moscow, presumably as part of the resettlement of Russians into Ukraine post-Holodomor, although why he was in Ukraine was never adequately explained, and is part of the mystery I hope to resolve.
I was told he was a tenor in the Moscow Opera, fell in love with my grandmother and pursued her relentlessly. It seems he came from a family with money because he was able to holiday in Odessa with his brother (there is a photo of them on the beach in 1934 and they look healthy and well fed), something Ukrainians would surely not have as they struggled to rebuild their lives after the Holodomor’s forced starvation of 12% of the population in just one year where 4.5 million died.
This is where the story becomes extremely scant in detail. Between when they met and the next “scene” of their story, we know almost nothing of what happened in the years between then and several years into WWII which began in 1939. We know nothing of where they were, what they did, if they were in Moscow as my grandfather continued to sing, or even anything about their wedding, where it happened. Nothing.
The next “scene” simply fast forwards us straight into 1943, almost a decade after the end of the Holodomor and they are on a train leaving (supposedly) Ukraine behind.
Mystery #2: Soldau was the termination point for trains coming from the east. For those who were not registered as part of the Nazi system, Soldau had a holding station for processing men, women, and children. My grandparents certainly arrived at this destination as their first port of entry since my father was born before they took the train and was only registered one month later after they arrived which means when they arrived, he didn’t even have papers. And yet, instead of ending up in Soldau’s death camp, he was given a Nazi birth certificate and a German name.
Mystery #3: My father’s birth certificate is stamped with the Nazi stamp of the eagle holding the swastika in its talons. His birthplace is stated as Soldau, (then Nazi Germany). His name is written as Wolfgang Vladimir, the German and Russian spelling of his name (not Ukrainian which is spelled differently).
In the next “scene”, my grandfather has somehow managed to secure work as an opera singer in Berlin where he claims to have performed before the SS, and even hinted, before Hitler himself, though no explanation was ever given how this could have happened considering he was most likely Russian and therefore a defacto enemy of Nazi Germany.
Mystery #4: If my grandfather, grandmother, and my infant father traveled by train from Ukraine (or Russia) into Nazi Germany, how did they not end up being processed into one of the labor camps as Russians? How did my grandfather speak German? How did they escape the fate of millions of others displaced by war?
The next “scene” came from my grandmother about her life in Germany during WWII, and how there was plenty of food, no bombings, and everything was calm, clean, and organized. They were given an apartment with running water and electricity in the city, and my father spent his first years there. At one point he wandered off as a toddler and a friendly policeman brought him home. Another anecdotal story tells of how, as my grandfather was performing before a packed house, a bomb fell through the roof and landed on the audience, killing many people, although it didn’t detonate.
Mystery #5: My grandfather claimed to have changed his true surname upon arrival to Canada in the early 1950s because he feared being tracked down by the Soviets and taken back to the USSR. However, my father’s birth certifcate issued in 1943 already had this false surname, which means my grandfather changed his surname with the help of the Nazis. The surname? Japanese (for reasons of privacy I will not share it here). So I grew up with a Japanese surname and never learned my grandfather’s true surname.
My grandfather died when I was two, so I barely remember him. That only left my grandmother, who lived until 2009 and died at the age of 93. In all those years, she gave no more information about her past than what I have shared here, although I did discover during my teens a wooden box under a bedroom dresser filled with letters from Russia. I knew enough Russian to be able to translate them only to realize they were letters from the KGB offering an olive branch to my grandfather, and then to my grandmother to “return to the motherland”. I asked my father about them, and wondered at how the KGB were able to find my grandfather when he had changed his name (and why they wanted him back so bad, since the letters spanned right up into the 1980s and followed their addresses as they moveed).
My father was circumspect in his answer, since he could only speculate from the the scant information we had. “The KGB are very good at finding people when they want to. I am sure they simply wanted their opera singer back, he was a national treasure after all,” he said, and then continued with this: “But Grandpa hated the Communists and knew they would punish him if he went back. He said that neither he, nor his children, or his grandchildren (so me, then) were to go back to Russia no matter what, that the KGB would even punish his grandchildren so serious was his crime.”
I questioned this: “I don’t think an opera singer would have that much worth that it would be dangerous for his grandchildren to go to Russia.”
And my father said: “There’s a lot we don’t know.”
And for decades that, it seemed, was that.
My desk (and writing companion Nova) at my cozy writing retreat in Rabka-Zdroj, Poland, close the Tatras mountains.
Fast forward to Rabka-Zdroj, Poland, 2023 and a completely random connection suggested to me by the woman whose apartment I was renting for the third time in as many years that I should meet her English tutor for coffee since she also lives in Rabka and it could be nice to meet another Brit. I was happy to arrange and so it was done. We chatted and the connection was great, I really enjoyed her company, a lovely woman who has mainly lived in Poland since 2003.
Now, Rabka-Zdroj is a rather small, special place, nestled into a valley and surrounded by mountains. It’s not a common destination (especially for internationals) since Zakopane further to the south became developed into Poland’s popular Tatra Mountains resort. So I asked her, how did she end up in Rabka of all places? And she then launched into an engrossing tale that spanned over a decade that at last, led her to Rabka through a man she met while back in the UK who had come from Rabka and was one of the descendants of the survivors of the “cleansing” of Rabka’s Jews. I learned then that in one day, the Nazis gathered up all of the Jews they could in Rabka and forced Poles to shoot them in the forest nearby. A few days later she took me to the memorial site of the mass grave. It was a terrible, and sobering experience. Up until she told me, I had no idea about Rabka’s gruesome history.
Her sharing this with me prompted me to share what little I knew of my family’s history, and she then mentioned perhaps I might want to dig a little deeper to learn the truth about my grandfather and how he really managed to get a nice life as a Russian in Nazi Germany.
I said to her, as she watched my reaction with an intensity that made me feel as though she could see into my soul: “After what you shared with me about what happened here in Rabka, I am not sure I want to know.”
She asked: “Why not?”
I said: “Because I am afraid what I will discover, maybe some secrets should die with those who kept them.”
And then she shared an astonishing thing with me: That she knew of Germans whose whole town had terrible misfortune over and over, and at last they decided to pull back the veil on their past and see what their grandfathers had done during WWII. It turned out, they had lied about everything to their family and in fact, had done dreadful things and were Nazis.
These grandchildren were deeply saddened to know that their history had not only been a comfortable lie, but also filled with horror dealt out by their own blood. They set out to try to make amends in any way they could and resolved to honor those Jews who had suffered at the hands of their grandparents. It was only after this that the misfortunes of this town ended with the healing of past wounds in the present, by those who perforce needed to expose the weight of their inherited burden.
Now, I had shared about my deeply traumatic marriage and divorce and of my exile in the UK for my own safety. During this (at times, tear-filled) conversation I had mentioned that I felt like I was being punished, that no matter how good I am to others, absolutely absurd and terrible things have been done to me.
And so her words about the Germans who learned about their true history took hold of me. I noted my resistance to find out the truth, my half-curiosity to get to the bottom of the many obvious inconsistences and mysteries that lay in my inherited past and decided it was time to get serious. So I did.
I contacted my father and found a bread crumb trail, one that had been there all along, hiding in plain sight.
Last autumn, I moved from the UK to live with my partner who is Polish, and when I investigated where my father’s birth certificate was issued, it turns out there was a labor camp / death camp for Poles and Soviets in Soldau which is now Działdowo, Poland. This place is less than a two-hour drive from where I now live. Strangely, my life’s journey had brought me back almost to the very place where my family’s mystery ripened. And this will be where my investigation will begin - in the archives at the museum of the Soldau Concentration Camp (opened in 2019).
To think I was born in Canada and have traveled and lived in many countries over the ensuing decades, but was always drawn to Poland as though it were my true home. That I fell in love with a Polish man, stayed three times over three years in a little town in the south of Poland to write, and on my third visit, met another British woman there who is an expert in the Polish history of WWII who opened my eyes to why I should not be afraid to explore my inherited past.
I have five mysteries to solve and have only my resourcefulness, will, and courage to do it. I have only a tiny amount of leads to work with: that my grandfather’s brother was active in Stalin’s regime and was part of the oppression, and that my grandfather hated Communism so much he wouldn’t let anyone wear red around him.
There are three possible theories I have so far:
1. My grandfather also worked for Stalin, and had knowledge of real value that he gave to the Nazis in return for the safety of his family upon their arrival in Soldau, but such information would have to be of critical importance, and it is hard to imagine what he could know that would be valued so highly that it would gain him such a generous reward. This theory aligns with the four decade long hunt by the KGB not only of my grandfather and grandmother, but also of my father’s siblings.
2. My grandfather was a spy and a Nazi, which would explain why he could speak German and why there is almost no information about what he did for the decade until they left either Russia or Ukraine for Nazi Germany. This also might explain why he and my grandmother were able to travel on a train with Nazi soldiers instead of one of the usual trains for people who are rounded up and taken to camps for processing.
3. In a hybrid mix of the two theories above, my grandfather was not Russian at all, but a German-born citizen who lived most of his life in Russia and who had access to state secrets through his opera connections with Russian high society. He never told us anything about his parents, or his siblings. We only know of the one brother who worked for Stalin and the one in the photo in Odessa. So two other known siblings (or perhaps there is only the one and they are same sibling). My grandmother also did not share anything about his family with us. Additionally, when my grandfather and grandmother left, her step-sister and her husband were sent to a gulag in Siberia shortly after in retaliation.
So here I am, finding myself researching history once more, only this time, it is not for a fictional book, it is to at last learn the truth of where I really came from, and how I can be alive today when really, my story should have ended before it even began on a cold 1943 December day in the Soldau concentration camp of Nazi Germany.