Her grandfather drove trains to Auschwitz. My family was murdered there

Amie, a descendant of a Holocaust survivor, meets Cornelia, who is untangling her family's Nazi past.

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I never got to meet my grandfather Ludvig, who survived the Holocaust, or his mother Rachel. They were put onto a cattle cart to the Auschwitz death camp in 1944. Ludvig, who was about 15 at the time, was separated from his mother and sent to another concentration camp. But Rachel was tortured, gassed and murdered.

I grew up hearing so many stories about them, and spending time with other Holocaust survivors in my family in Australia. They were at the forefront of my mind when I found myself in Germany interviewing Cornelia Stieler.

Cornelia's grandfather was the main breadwinner in a household with very little income. He originally worked as a coal miner, but after a near-fatal accident which left him trapped under coal for two days, he decided to do something else. Things turned around when he eventually got a job at Deutsche Reichsbahn as a train driver. Cornelia's mother used to speak of that achievement with pride, saying getting the job was "the chance of a lifetime".

At first, he was transporting goods for the war effort. But it soon turned into something more sinister. "I believe that my grandfather served as a train driver, commuting between the death camps. He stayed in Liegnitz, now Legnica, in a boarding school, so there was a certain separation from the family and between the death camps."

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c863g9d6vyeo

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