“I will never forget what she told me.”

During my ASF volunteer service in Warsaw, I had the special opportunity to participate in a Deutsche Welle film shoot. They were looking for young people who had a personal connection to the topic of forced labor under National Socialism. My maternal great-grandmother was deported to Germany and had to work on a farm in Gera. The journalist came to Warsaw and interviewed me for the film.

Unlike my great-grandmother, many forced laborers did not survive the forced resettlement and exploitation. I encountered this repeatedly during my volunteer service at the Foundation for German-Polish Reconciliation. An important part of my work was to search for traces of people who were murdered by the Nazis. Often these were Polish forced laborers who had been deported to Germany. I searched for their personal details, occupations, or information about family members. All this information was entered into a database that helps people locate missing family members. My research in the archives contributed in a small way to ensuring that fewer people and their fates are forgotten.

On the other hand, there were also people for whom I could not find a single document. Their only mention by name remains in lists such as a community’s death registers or cemetery grave lists. Such people are forgotten—many of them already have been. Numerous documents were burned by the Nazis. It is therefore not uncommon for information to be missing and for people to remain largely anonymous.

Another topic is remembrance trips, such as an annual trip to Sobibór. There, over 90,000 Polish Jews were brutally murdered by the Nazis. On the grounds of the memorial, there is a large area that is now completely covered with countless white stones. These are intended to commemorate the victims whose ashes were scattered in this area. It is difficult to put into words the enormous impact this sea of white stones has when you stand directly in front of it.

In addition to my archival work, I was involved in the Jewish community in Warsaw. There, we delivered food to elderly or needy people once or twice a week, and every Wednesday I visited the Holocaust survivor Pani Ania (Pani = Mrs.). Pani Ania is now 99 years old and, unlike other Holocaust survivors still alive today, was no longer a child during the Nazi era.

Pani Anna likes to talk about happy childhood memories with her siblings that took place before the outbreak of war. For example, she enjoyed playing games outdoors. Pani Anna also likes to talk about her time a few years after the war, when she worked, traveled to many places, and lived in other countries, such as the USA. Throughout her adult life after World War II, she was always involved in charitable work. She volunteered in children’s homes and at soup kitchens for the needy.

She only occasionally talks about her time in the concentration camp in Stutthof and later in Auschwitz. We talked a lot about what is happening in the world right now. She listened to the radio every day for the latest news. Pani Ania found it incomprehensible that there is currently another war raging in the world. She knows what it is like to live in war, when people are tortured, when the dignity of the individual is not respected and others are not considered equal. She recounted with frustration how, after the Second World War, it was said that something like this must never happen again. Never again should people be persecuted because of a characteristic of their identity.

ASF stands for reconciliation between peoples, and I think that this continues to be an important issue, especially in my volunteer work. Most Polish families have experienced some kind of suffering in connection with the war crimes committed by the Nazis; most families had forced laborers or relatives who were in concentration camps. We must not forget this when we talk about Poland as a country or about the people there.

I am very grateful to have met Pani Ania. Her life experience, her way of looking at the world, her trust in us to listen to her story and treat it with dignity remains a unique privilege. I will never forget what she told me.