Actually, I wanted to finish telling my grandfather’s story first before I write what comes next. Because what comes next is so much closer to me. And because I have to talk about myself in doing so. Not indirectly, but directly. Even though none of this is my fault. But it is inside me. And that is why I can—or perhaps must—tell the story.

When my family used to sit around the breakfast table on Sunday mornings and my father was there, the first thing he would do was look in the bread box. Even though there were freshly baked, warm Sunday rolls on the table. He would take out a piece of bread, look at it from all sides—and then it would quickly become clear why none of us were eating that bread anymore. Mold! My father didn’t mind. He would take it to the sink, wash the mold off, and eat the bread. He did exactly the same thing with moldy cheese, moldy jam, and moldy fruit. To this day, I am cautious when my father offers me a piece of homemade fruit cake. For reasons.

My father was born in 1931. For anyone who doesn’t follow this blog regularly: My father is the son of resistance fighter Theo Hespers and grew up on the run. When he was two years old, he had to leave Germany. He grew up in the Netherlands and Belgium, with a father who was frequently away because of his political activities. For him, it was an adventure. Only the constant moving annoyed him. Things became truly terrible when the Nazis invaded the Netherlands in May 1940. My father experienced the first air raids. He spent nights in houses, pressed up against the walls with his family, hoping they would not be buried under the rubble if the bombs destroyed the house. He experienced one night of bombing in a cellar in Belgium. Everyone was packed tightly together. He remembers being given beer to drink because there was nothing else. And that he vomited terribly the next day because the beer was bad. Perhaps the adults simply got him drunk to spare him the fear. He knocked on strangers’ doors with his parents, looking for a roof over their heads at night and protection from air raids. Some people took the German family in and let them sleep in the stairwell. Others slammed the door in their faces because they were German. There was no time to explain that my grandfather was fighting against the Nazis.

Eventually, the family traveled via Brussels to Antwerp. From there they went to Halle in Belgium, where my grandfather worked as a caretaker in an orphanage. My father simply became one of the other boys there. The orphanage was strictly Catholic, which meant that the boys were not allowed to wash themselves “down there,” because touching themselves in that area was considered immoral. I don’t even want to imagine what the hygienic conditions must have been like. Food was scarce in Belgium, too, because of the war. The boys had to fend for themselves when it came to food. There was oatmeal porridge, which was diluted with more and more water. Oatmeal porridge “met strontjes.” “Strontjes” sounds like sprinkles—even though that’s what I always thought of when my father used to tell me these stories. In reality, however, “strontjes” were ground-up rat droppings. Because the boys hadn’t bothered to clean the grain properly beforehand and pick the rat droppings out of it.

After my grandfather was arrested in Antwerp in 1942, they sent my father back to his homeland. To Mönchengladbach. A homeland he no longer knew at all by that point. Of his nine years of life, he had spent seven on the run. In October 1943, he learned that the Nazis had murdered his father. Then he was buried under rubble during an air raid together with an aunt and her two children. His aunt did not survive the attack. My father’s eardrum was ruptured. And once again, he went on the run. This time to Aken on the Elbe. That is where he experienced the end of the war. What he experienced on the journey back to Mönchengladbach, he recounted in an interview in May 2015. It was the first time my father had not spoken about his time in Holland or Belgium, but about what happened to him afterward. I had never heard this story before. But it has stayed with me to this day. My father tells all these stories as though they were one great adventure. That makes it easy to listen to him. And yet I am horrified. Because on the journey back from eastern Germany to Mönchengladbach, in the far west, they had to pass Russian border posts. Alongside my father and my grandmother, one of his uncles and a neighbor or friend were also traveling with them. Quite matter-of-factly, my father’s uncle instructed the woman to disappear briefly behind the bushes with one of the Russians so that they could cross the border. When my father is asked how he processed or endured all of this, or what he felt at the time, his face suddenly turns to stone.

My father is 84 years old today. I am 37. I grew up with a father who never processed his severe war trauma. With a father who himself never really had a father. Not because my grandfather didn’t want to take care of him. But my grandfather devoted his energy to saving his country—and to feeding his family while they were on the run. He was away a great deal because of this. And my father and my grandmother were left to fend for themselves most of the time. I grew up with a father who is the same age as my grandparents. Who ate moldy bread. And who never showed much interest in his children. It took me a very long time to understand what that actually did to me. Why my father wasn’t interested in his daughter the way other fathers were. Why there was no love between him and me. Don’t misunderstand me: I certainly had fun with my father. We grew up with guitars and campfires. We had quite a lot of freedom, spent a great deal of time outdoors and in nature, and came into contact with many different people. And my father is a wonderful storyteller. His bedtime stories were fantastic! But ever since I was about eight years old, I have been missing what other children call a father. Someone who takes care of you. Someone who holds you in his arms when the world outside is falling apart. Someone who calls to ask how you are doing. Someone who makes you feel that, no matter what happens, you can always rely on your father. When everything goes wrong, he takes care of it. That father does not exist for me. That father was taken from me by a war that ended 33 years before I was born. A war that was not his fault, and is not mine. Because my father was severely traumatized by all these experiences. And I deliberately use the present tense. Because it was only a few years ago that his war trauma resurfaced. Perhaps, in fact, for the first time in his life in such a profound way.

For two years, he was severely depressed. He couldn’t leave the house, became extremely emaciated, and suffered from panic attacks and feelings of suffocation. And I am still afraid today, too. I grew up with my grandfather’s story. With the knowledge that it can be deadly to speak your mind. Or to publicly express an opinion that differs from the prevailing one. When I got my first radio job two years ago as a kind of co-host, this fear almost consumed me. It was only about football. Not politics. And yet there was that fear of expressing my own opinion. Of being in the public eye. Of becoming vulnerable to everyone who might dislike what I said. That fear almost destroyed me. It is the same fear I feel when I write blog posts like this one. The same fear I had when I launched this blog just under a year ago. 

Sometimes, it seems terribly absurd to me. Everyone around me is blogging or posting like crazy. No one but me seems to think that this might actually be dangerous. I’m the only one with this ridiculous fear. But at least I know where it comes from: It comes from the past. It has drifted down to me on the long breath of this family history. What I want to say with this endlessly long text (and thank you very much to everyone who has made it this far) is this: the people who flee to us from war, hunger, and hardship, who take the risk of drowning miserably in the sea because life where they come from is no more of an option—they need our help. They need our welcome. And above all, they need our human warmth. If we do not succeed in taking them in and giving them the chance to overcome their trauma, that trauma will be passed on to the next generation. Then violence will follow violence, and coldness of heart will follow coldness of heart. They will spend their lives fighting for survival. If not during the day, then at night in their dreams. And after them, their children and grandchildren. I have the incredible good fortune to live in a time when I can reflect on everything that happened. Because there is peace here. And because I have no other worries. I do not have to fight for my survival. I received a good education. I have a job. I can feed and clothe myself. And I can freely express my opinion, even though I am still afraid to do so. But that’s OK. To everyone who is already helping selflessly, I want to say: Thank you! You are doing an incredibly important job! To everyone who is still hesitating, I want to say: If you have the opportunity, help. It is an investment in the future. And to everyone who doesn’t see any way to help, I want to say: you will surely have an opportunity to do something. Sometimes it is the small gestures that help. Sometimes it is simply a friendly smile at just the right moment. A warm gesture of welcome.

(Nora Hespers, author and journalist, https://www.norahespers.de/)