For my research, I have seen many sites from both World Wars across Europe over the years. Last weekend, I visited Auschwitz for the first time, and for me, this was a new dimension. I participated in a 3:45-hour-long guided tour and saw many of the original places but also piles of suitcases, dishes, shoes and glasses. This made it particularly concrete given that 1.1 million people were killed here. I talked to other participants in the guided group: Germans, Swiss, Dutch a

Recently, I was in Brno, a city where Czech, German and Jewish people had lived together for centuries. However, this coexistence ended with the rise of nationalism, the Holocaust and the expulsion of the German-speaking population. Meeting Brno is a Czech initiative that played a key role when in 2015, the city of Brno officially apologised for having imposed collective guilt on 27,000 people who were driven towards the Austrian border in the Brno death march. Several thousa

In my next book about remembrance cultures, I also want to include my search for my own family history. Recently, I dealt with two stories that have never been talked about and were nearly lost in my family: an expulsion and an “euthanasia”. Both of them, I found in present-day Poland. A part of my family was from Gleißen, formerly located in the Neumark region of East Brandenburg. After the Second World War, the people had to leave, the town came to Poland and is called Glis

Last week I was in Voorthuizen in the Netherlands again, this time for intensive research. I conducted eight Dutch-language interviews with people who had experienced the Second World War in the Netherlands. They were between 85 and 96 years old and lived in Rotterdam, Scheveningen, Barneveld, Voorthuizen, Meppel and Putten during that time. They told me about the bombing of Rotterdam, the fear of being betrayed by the neighbours when listening to the forbidden Radio Oranje,