Burning houses - past and present

God, I've literally just watched the house opposite ours burn out! I was mucking around in the bathroom and kept hearing sounds of breaking glass. My stupid thought was that we must have missed the recycling day - again! But when I looked out of the living room window, there was black smoke billowing out of the first floor window of a house a terrace below ours! What I'd heard were the windows exploding! I almost went into shock. This seems ridiculous, there was no danger to our house and I'd seen lots of fires before on TV, but this just sent my mind spinning. God, what do I do, do I call the fire brigade? Yes, of course that's what you do. Is 999 the right number for that??? I kept thinking 112, 112, but that's flipping Germany - I've not even lived there for 16 years!!! So I grabbed the phone and dialled 999, forgot to say what town I was in until prompted and when I put the phone down the sirens where already sounding anyway. I couldn't help but keep watching, my heart beating fast, as the smoke billowed and squeezed itself through every gap in the tiled roof. The fire started to eat a hole through the roof, threatening to spread down the terrace to the houses on either side. Not much later and I saw the first fireman on the groundfloor. I was relieved, this was going to be ok now. Perhaps 10 minutes and it was all under control. However, in those few minutes the first floor of the house had been almost completely burnt out and next door's curtains looked half gone - the fire had made it across after all.

I couldn't get over how shocked I felt and of course, as they always do, my meaning-making faculties set in. Given that I was writing about loss yesterday, this is the kind of random event that can put things into perspective.
I'm an optimistic kind of person, I don't normally assume that bad things will happen to me. It had never occurred to me that our house could burn out just like that. But watching it there, so close, in a house I'd seen out of my window for 8 years, looking just like ours, it suddenly felt real, possible, shocking. I couldn't help but wonder what it would be like to lose everything, not so much the material possessions, but the photos, my artwork, the many mementos of our life and actually the carefully and warmly created space that I loved. Painful! I'd still have P. though, we'd still have each other. We'd be ok.

Then I remembered how lightly I'd said that my family had lost everything in the war. While I'd heard the stories so many times and tried to empathise, it's also almost impossible to take in. When the Eastern front threatened to wash over Breslau and my granddad was called to the last civilian defence,  my grandma took my 14-year old mother and her young 2 year-old and caught the last train out. They had only just received the letter to tell them that their 18-year old son had just been killed trying to hold the German line. She was getting away to stay with her sister's family in the countryside. They had a mill, so there was going to be plenty of food there. They were safe there, even when the Eastern front passed over them. The women and girls were carefully hidden in the hayloft to keep them safe from the passing Russian soldiers. No matter how often I heard the story, I could never fully understand why my grandma did what she did next - she decided to go home. Not only did she go home, she WALKED home - in the winter, all of 100 km to a ruined city. She needed to check on the house! She and her husband had only just built it a few years before, carefully paying off the money they'd borrowed from their brother-in-law. We found the receipts when my grandma died at 87, my mother still has them now. My grandma found the house ransacked but still standing. It was right at the edge of the city and the defending Germans had taken everything they could to fortify their dug-outs. There was no one else there. She walked back to the mill to fetch her children and, armed with plenty of flour and even some meat, made the long way back a third time. Where her husband was then, she had no idea. So they lived in the half-deserted suburb for several months, only women and children. There are heroic tales of my mother being called to work by the Russians in the local sugar factory (still there today) and stealing the encrusted sugar remnants from the pipework. They met some crazy Italians who had got their hands on large quantities of pig guts from which they extracted the lard. My grandma got a proportion in exchange for her help with the messy business of boiling up the guts. Most stories revolve around food - not surprisingly perhaps. They did alright. The local Russian officer took a shine to my little two year old  pale blond uncle and on the whole they were fairly safe. Until one day, with little warning, they got an eviction notice. My grandma kept that too. They were to vacate their house within 24 hours. They packed a couple of cases, grabbed what photos they could and were taken to a holding camp. Women were pulled out by the soldiers at night to be raped, but again for some reason my family kept safe. They were put on a random train and kept going, going and going until it almost hit the Dutch border on the very Western edge of what was left of Germany. They had almost nothing, depending on the disgruntled locals to vacate a room to let them stay. They knew by then that my granddad had been captured by the Russians. He didn't return from Siberia until a year later.

So this is the tale, the big tale of loss. My Dad's family's tale is probably not that different, but he's not the holder of that tale and I've not been told it in the same way. It's the tale of many Germans in the old Eastern provinces of Silesia and beyond. But here in the UK, not many people even know what Silesia is. They haven't heard of the millions of women and children that had to leave their homes on treks in the depth of winter and the thousands and thousands of them that were raped or died. But it's not something that as a German you can complain about, not something that's even easy to mourn. So we try to be reasonable about it, swallow the pain and watch the BBC's 20th screening of the World at War.