How the children of Nazi Germany remember World War Two.
A new book has gathered the memories of ‘Kriegskinder’, next to portraits of them as they are now. Photographer Frederike Helwig reveals how they remember childhoods in Nazi Germany.
The memories have the patina of childhood: fragmented, vivid, without resolution. They place us, as readers, immediately there. And next to them, portraits of the elderly people whose childhoods we’re glimpsing. These are the Kriegskinder, or ‘war children’: so-called because they grew up in Nazi Germany during World War Two.
One of her subjects has had to confront that more than most. Born in 1939, Niklas Frank is the son of Hans Frank, the Nazi Governor of Poland, and he travelled through Europe with the human rights lawyer Philippe Sands in the acclaimed documentary My Nazi Legacy: What Our Fathers Did. His memory in Kriegskinder is from a childhood shopping trip with his mother and nanny. “We are driving through the Krakow Ghetto where my mother buys her furs and scarfs for a price of her own choosing. I am standing
in the back of the Mercedes, my nanny Hilde sitting next to me, in front next to the driver my mother,” he recalls. “I am wearing a black and white Pepita suit.
“The people look on sadly. I stick out my tongue to an older boy. He turns around, walks off, I feel like I won. I laugh triumphantly, but Hilde pulls me silently back into my seat.” Although it describes a juvenile encounter, it’s a disturbing memory. “Most of the first-hand accounts in the book are quite anecdotal,” says Helwig. “What they say is interesting – but also what they don’t say.”
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