The future of the past: Uwe & Gabriela von Seltmann at TEDxKrakow

Challenged by an unknown Jewish man at a synagogue in Kraków, German journalist and writer Uwe von Seltmann began to research his grandfather's Nazi past. After publishing a book about this research, Uwe met and fell in love with Gabriela, whose grandfather was killed at the Auschwitz concentration camp. Their project "Two families, two pasts – one future" aims to demonstrate that it is possible for members of the victims' and perpetrators' families to live together, even if the past continues to have an impact on their lives.

Good morning, everyone.

I hope you are fine.

I'm German, and as everybody knows,

the Germans need and have
"ordnung" in their lives.

And so, I'm standing
at this kind of thing here.

I hope everyone in this room
knows Bob Dylan, yes?

No? Yes? So you are not alone anymore.

For me, Bob Dylan is the greatest.

I'm really a big fan, even if my wife
doesn't like him.

She always says,

"Dylan has been singing
the same song for 50 years."

However, for me,
and a lot of other people,

the lyrics of Bob Dylan
are like the Bible.

You can find the right words in his songs

for every situation in your life.

For example,
if someone has their birthday,

you can wish him all the best

with the lyrics of "Forever Young."

Or if you don't like your boss
and you want to quit your job:

"I Ain't Gonna Work
On Maggie's Farm No More."

And play it as loud as possible.

And if you feel down and out,

you can get comfort from...

"For the loser now will be later to win."

So for me, who is going
with Dylan together through life,

it was nothing special to find
the right words for our project,

which we would like to present today,

and which has the title
"Two Families, Two Pasts, One Future,"

or "The Future of the Past."

Dylan once said, in his radio program,

"It's always good to know
what went down before you,

because when you know the past,

you can control the future."

It was in 1979, more than 30 years ago,

when I became a Dylan fan.

"Slow Train Coming"
was the first album I bought.

And in the same year, 1979,
something happened to me,

which was really not like a slow train,

it was like a very fast train
which hit me.

I will never forget the evenings when we,

my parents and me,

were sitting in front of the TV screen

and watching the program.

The pictures which were shown

were a shock for all of us,
and made us cry.

Even my father cried.

What were we watching?

We were watching the story
of a Jewish family,

who was taken
to concentration and death camps,

the American series "Holocaust."

Of course, I had some information
about the Nazi time before,

a kind of abstract knowledge.

But now, something new
and different happened.

It was the first time
that the crimes of the Nazis

became realistic,

and that the victims got faces.

They were no more an anonymous number.

The people who were killed
suddenly became like friends,

neighbors that you know and like.

I, as a fourteen-year old boy,
could not understand

how human beings were able to commit
such horrible crimes.

And I think I will never understand it
until the end of my life.

And at that time, 30 years ago,

I started to ask questions.

Questions about my grandfather.

For a short time,
I have to go back to my childhood.

When I was a little boy,

I was very proud
to have four grandfathers.

No one else in my class
had four grandfathers.

Of course, two of my grandfathers
were not alive.

My mother's father, this I got to know,

died as a simple Wehrmacht soldier
somewhere in Russia.

Everybody was saying
only good things about him.

I knew nothing, however,
about my father's father.

No one was talking about him.

He was held taboo within the family.

I only knew that he had died
somewhere in Silesia in '45.

My father's mother died in November '45,

and so, my father grew up as an orphan

with foster parents in our village.

He never talked to us
about his real parents.

There was a second issue
of which I was proud as a child.

I once discovered,
in my father's passport,

that he was born in Kraków.

Wow, Kraków.

No one else in my class had a father
who was born in Kraków.

As a little boy, I did not know
where Kraków was.

For sure, somewhere far away,
like Timbuktu,

Samarkand or Machu Picchu.

(Laughter)

Yes, since my childhood,

Kraków has always been
a very special place for me.

Twenty years later,

after the Holocaust series,
in November '99,

I traveled to Kraków.

In fact, not for the first time,

but it was the most important
stay in Kraków.

Actually, I went there
to write a story about the city.

But then,
something completely unexpected happened.

I went to the old Remuh synagogue

in the former Jewish quarter, Kazimierz,

just to escape from the rain outside.

And in the synagogue,
I saw a Jewish man praying.

When he finished his prayers,

I introduced myself
as a journalist from Germany,

and I asked him if he would like
to answer some questions.

"Of course," he said.

But he only told me
that he was from London,

that he came to Cracow every year
to remember his parents,

and that his parents were burned.

And then he started to ask the questions.

"Why do you want to talk to me?

Why about Jewish life?

Why are you interested
in Jewish life and culture?

You could be interested in Buddhism,

or Hinduism, or Taoism.

So why in Jews?"

Gradually, I started to be uncomfortable,

but he didn't stop asking.

Also, questions about my father
and about my grandfather.

And then he said,
looking straight into my eyes,

"Your grandfather was a Nazi."

"Yes, yes," I stammered.

And then, he said,

"Do you know
why you are interested in Jews?

I will tell you why.

You are interested in Jews
because you feel guilty.

You feel guilty
for what your grandfather did,

whatever it was."

He was right.

I had been feeling guilty my whole life,

like a lot of other Germans.

It was not that I was walking
with a burden on my shoulders,

or that I was all the time depressive.

But deep inside I could feel
something had gone wrong

in our family.

After meeting the Jew from London,

I started to do what what I wanted to do
for a long time, but...

What I never did.

And now I began to research
my grandfather's Nazi past.

Until this moment,

I only knew my grandfather was an SS man,

3 of his 6 children were born
close to concentration camps,

and that he died
somewhere in Silesia in '45.

For years, I had asked questions.

My grandmother's sisters,

my father's brothers and sisters,

but I got always the same reaction.

"Sorry, we know nothing.

Ah, what do you think
about the weather today?

Isn't it lovely?

I started my investigation,

but for almost one year, nothing happened.

But then, again in a synagogue,

I met an old lady,

this time in Germany, in Bonn,

where I had a reading.

"I've read your name in the newspaper,"
she started to talk to me.

"Are you from Austria?"

"No, not me, but my father's family."

"Aha."

She hesitated, asked some more questions,

and then she said,

"I went to school with your grandfather."

And this old lady,
she passed away a few weeks ago,

was the first who gave me information
about my grandfather,

the first who showed me pictures.

And the meetings with her
were the breakthrough.

Thanks to her, I came in contact
with other witnesses.

I could find out more and more.

And what I finally found out
was not very pleasant.

My grandfather was working together

with SS Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler,

on the right,
my grandfather's on the left.

And as an SS man in Lublin,
Kraków and Warsaw,

he participated, for example,

in the put-down of the uprising
in the Warsaw Ghetto

in April and May of '43.

Some members of my family
still don't want to accept it.

And for other members,
especially for the Austrians,

I am now persona non grata.

Instead of doing honor to the family,

to my grandma, father,

I destroyed the honor
of the family, they said.

I have to sum it all up.

After three adventurous years
of investigation

in half of Europe,

I wrote a book about my research,

and about my grandfather.

And I said to myself,

"You wrote the book,
you did what you had to do,

and now, the story is over."

But that was the biggest error in my life.

No, the story is not over,

the story just has begun,
and it still continues.

And...

I'm still very involved
in this subject, very deeply,

because four years ago, 2006,

again something happened
that changed my life completely.

This time, not in a synagogue,

but again, in Kraków.

I was on the way back
from Ukraine to Germany,

and took a rest
in Café Singer in Kazimierz.

If you know this place,

you know that it doesn't take much time

to get in touch with someone there.

And it was like this.

Soon, I was invited to a table
and asked where I was from,

what I was doing, and so on.

At one point, I said that I had written
a part of my latest book

in Café Singer.

"Aha! What about?"

I felt a little bit uncomfortable.
(Laughter)

Unfortunately, I could not say
that I wrote a book about Bob Dylan.

(Laughter)

And also, I'm a bad liar.

(Laughter)

So, what to do?

I decided to tell the truth.

"I wrote a book about my grandfather,

who was an SS man in Kraków," I said.

Silence.

(Laughter)

And then one of the ladies
at the table said,

"Oh. My grandfather
was killed at Auschwitz."

And this lady will now come on stage.

After our meeting in Singer,

she asked for my book, wrote an e-mail,

and I wrote back to her,

"Should I send it via post,

or should I bring it personally to you?"

"Maybe, if you have time."

Thank God, I had time.

And one year later...

We got married.

(Applause)

And at our wedding,
one of our friends said,

"She wanted your book,
and you gave her your heart."

(Laughter)

Yes, but I must say
that Uwe didn't give me only his heart.

Uwe gave me his history, his past.

And this was the beginning
of our research together.

We discovered that behaviors
in our families

was quite similar,

even if our grandfathers
were standing in the opposite sides

during the war.

We discovered
that just in the second generation,

our parents don't talk about the past.

It's not only the problem
that they don't talk,

they just, very often,
push us to not ask anymore.

And Uwe was the one
who made it so that in my family,

we started to ask questions again.

It happened that my mother
first answered "No."

"I will not answer you, no,
it's a too difficult subject."

So I asked again and again.

And of course, she was crying,

and of course,
one day she started to answer,

and to tell me the story.

In 1944, my grandfather was killed,

died in the concentration camp
in Auschwitz.

And this was this taboo subject
in our family.

Because of the work
we started together with Uwe, we could...

We still continue to discover the story,

and the past of my family.

We decided to make the project together,

to create the foundation.

And we are now [in the process]
of creating this foundation.

And we must say the similar behaviors

from two pasts in the families

were so interesting
that we continue the subject,

and Uwe will start soon to write a book

which describes the behaviors
of the 2nd and 3rd generations

after the war.

Yes, because our project
is not only connected with the past.

We also want to demonstrate
that it's possible for members

of the victims' and perpetrators' families

to live together,

even if the past continues
to have an impact

on today's daily life.

To many Germans aged 16 or 14 today,

war, elimination, and the Holocaust

are just a few pages in a history book.

But to the descendants of the victims,

the Nazi period is still present,

even 70 years after the attack
of Nazi Germany on Poland.

Present as a trauma.

We see it every day.

I am an artist,

and I was trying to imagine

and to talk about the subject
we are working on

in my own artistic way.

And I was thinking that a good idea
would be to compare

the war, and what is happening
with people,

to [the Gorgon] Medusa.

You know, for sure, the woman
with the snakes around the head,

from the time of Greek mythology.

This was the monster
which was changing people into stone.

And this is actually what is happening...

with our parents and grandparents.

Actually, with old people
who were born during the war,

or who just participated in the war.

So [the Gorgon] could kill people
and change them into stone,

but there was a "medicament"
against this...

Against this spell, let's say.

This was [unicorn] tears.

And this is actually what is happening
when we ask questions

of our parents, and people
who participated in the war.

The tears are coming,

and these tears are healing them.

This is actually what we continue
in our project, what we want to do,

is to ask questions,

and to know more and more
about what happened,

because this is actually
the healing process for the future.

It takes time, but we have to finish.

And I want to finish not with Bob Dylan,

but with a quotation
from the German Nobel Prize winner,

Herman Hesse,

and he said words
which sum up our whole project

in one sentence.

"Anything that has not been suffered,

and solved to the end,

will return."

"Anything that has not been suffered,

and solved to the end, will return."

Thank you for listening.

(Applause)