What My Great-Grandmother Survived, and Why I Can't Let It Go
This is my great-grandmother Doris.
Smiling on a beach beside her husband, just before the war.
What they didn't know: it would be the last photo of them smiling together.
Not long after, he was sent to war. Declared missing. Presumed dead. For nearly a decade
, years after the war had actually ended, she heard nothing.
When the Red Army came she fled their home in Treptow an der Rega, now Poland, on her own with her teenage children by her side, and walked nearly 300 kilometers on foot to Berlin. Through bombed-out roads. Through collapsing borders. Through a world that no longer felt like hers.
She never went back. What happened to her on that road, none of us really know. My father remembers a woman who never spoke of it. My mother remembers her speaking about it, she just can't recall what she said (sooo frustrating to me!).
Somehow, she kept going. Somehow, she got her children to safety. Somehow, she raised them in a country that didn't want her.
We don't know how they survived. We only know that they did.
But the trauma lived on, in silence.
Her children were raised by a woman who had no space to feel. Who couldn't afford rest. Who learned that safety only came through control, through doing, through pushing through.
They passed that survival on, too. Because they lived through the same horrors, as teenagers themselves.
One of her children was my grandmother.
I would never meet her. She died before the age of 40. What she lived through eventually showed up in her body.
We carry those stories in our cells. In our breath. In the way we clench our jaws and keep going.
Let's honor the women who survived the unthinkable. Let's honor the women who still do.
The trauma didn't start with you. But it can end with you. Because we have a luxury they never had.
And that's exactly why I won’t let it go. Because they left me something that only means anything if I do something with it.
They survived without the time, the tools, or the space to ever understand what happened to them. I have all three. That's not a coincidence I get to sit on. That's a responsibility I don't put down.
When I understand my patterns, regulate my body, raise my children differently than I was raised, that's not just for me. It's the continuation of something that started on a beach over a hundred years ago and nearly ended on a road to Berlin.
Their survival wasn't the end of the story. It was the beginning of something only we can finish.
Comments