The author relates how one generation of a family fell victim to the wars and tribalism of the twentieth century, as he follows seven siblings in their lives in the U.S., Germany, and Poland. They abandoned their ancestry as they sought to survive assaults from racist regimes that recognized eugenics as science.
Six brothers and a sister born during the last quarter of the nineteenth century into an ethnic minority family in Prussian-occupied Poland were thrust into World War I. Five of them served in the German military, just four survived and returned home to the newly reconstituted Polish Republic. The promise of a new Poland in a changed Europe was not enough for Sigmund, who left for the United States, claiming German race, slipping through the closing entry gate that would end most immigration to the U.S. for forty years. Johann, who had immigrated to Germany before the war, hired a genealogist to prove his (non-existent) German roots from the distant past.
The three who remained in Poland between the wars became a national police officer, a successful industrialist, and a prosperous shopkeeper. When Europe lurched again into war, the five brothers and their sister were spread out in Poland, Germany and the United States. Three lost virtually everything in the German occupation of Poland from 1939 to 1945. Wladyslaw was sent to a Nazi concentration camp as was his wife; their two pre-teen sons were fostered by family members. Anastazy was captured and executed on Stalin’s order with 22,000 other Polish military officers, politicians, and intellectuals.
Klemens was arrested for loudly proclaiming his ancestral ethnicity and was sentenced to a Nazi work camp from which is escaped after a year. Johann died surrounded by the ruins of a collapsed Germany. Those who survived Nazi occupation of Poland lost what little they had left to forty years of Soviet occupation. Only Sigmund, the brother in the U.S., remained personally unscathed, but not unmarked by the fate of his family in Europe. Their true ethnicity remained hidden for decades.