大象传媒

Up until 1946, my family lived in a small village in the Sudete mountains (a region which runs between the present-day Czech Republic and Poland). It was a remote area that only received electricity in the late 1930s. By the end of WWII, they hadn't seen one 'enemy' soldier, as the area was of no strategic interest whatsoever.

In the summer of 1945, the first Soviet soldiers appeared; looting and rapes followed their arrival. Soon after that, a Polish man took over our family home. My 14-year-old father, his sister and my grandmother had to move into the stables (my grandfather was a PoW in France at that time and was to remain so for another three years). Labour was required and they had to work for the new masters - the new 'owner' of the house and the Polish occupying forces.

This situation went on for about a year and a half. By the end of 1947, the entire German population of the village - together with 16 million other 'East' Germans, of which up to 3 million died - were ordered to leave their homes and homeland they had inhabited for many centuries. They had half an hour to prepare to leave and were only allowed 20 kg of luggage.

Everything else - including photographs and items of personal value that the new 'owner' wanted to keep - had to be left behind. They assembled at the local station together with hundreds of other expellees, whose only crime was to be the wrong nationality at the wrong time in the wrong place. Those who didn't want to leave their ancestral homelands were killed.

My father, his sister and my grandmother were put on a cattle train together with my mother's family, who had already been expelled from their home in Upper Silesia. They too had a suitcase of 20 kg, and had had to leave everything else behind, including my other grandfather; he eventually died in a Soviet camp in the Ukraine. It was on this that my father and mother met. Their journey lasted for a week and the train sometimes went eastwards (to their horror - some trains went as far as Siberia) and sometimes westwards.

They were lucky enough to end up in the British-occupied zone near Brunswick. They always wanted to return to their homeland, but, until nowadays, this was impossible owing to the Polish-Beirut decrees that did not allow Germans back into the region.

We managed to go back to my family's home last year. Although their property 'cross', with my grandfather's initials, is still there, the rest of the property is in ruins. Time has moved on and there is no way back, but the story of the biggest expulsion of world history - together with another very real holocaust of the East German prople - remains one of the great untold narratives of world history.

I have been living in Britain for many years now and I like this country. But when it comes to WWII, the only thing I ever get to hear about Germans are the old stereotypes. Whenever I tell my family's story, everyone is amazed. No one seems to know about it, which, given the scale of expulsion, hurts deeply and is almost unbelievable.

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