GERMANY: AN OLD POST, A NEW FRIEND, AND MANY LITTLE MIRACLES

 May 2025

And now I come to the part of the story of this trip to Germany that is nothing short of a miracle.

The very beginning of the story (if there is such a thing as a beginning of any story) was 85 years ago near a castle on the top of a rather remote hill in Southern Germany, but my part of it began just 25 years ago in December 2000 when Bob and I took our two sons, ages 15 and 12, to Europe with two objectives in mind: pick up our daughter from her study abroad program in France and spend time with my mother in Germany. 

Mom, our daughter, our sons, and I in the
Pforzheim cemetery, December 2000

My mother grew up in Pforzheim, a city that was bombed on February 23, 1945, killing 17,600 people, which was over 30% of the town's population. We met up with her in her hometown, spent the day seeing places that had been important to her, and then moved on to other cities in Southern Germany. 

 

My grandfather

My mother died in 2009, almost nine years after that trip, and in 2012 my sister Angie was looking up some information on our grandfather (our mother's father) in preparation for a Rhine River cruise that my siblings and I and our spouses were planning to take together. Our genealogy records showed our grandfather's year of death as 1940 and his place of death as Grafeneck, and when Angie looked up Grafeneck (thinking that perhaps she and her husband could visit it after our cruise), she discovered that it was a Nazi death camp--one of the earliest ones that was part of the Nazi's Aktion T4 program, an involuntary euthanasia program targeting the disabled and mentally ill. 

WHAT??!! Our mother had always told us her father had died from the delayed effects of a wound he suffered in World War I! It was a stunning revelation, and we had no information other than that our grandfather was murdered by the Nazis in a prototypical death camp. We sat rather uncomfortably with the information, and we had no idea how to learn more.

Fast forward twelve years. Our trip in 2000 was taken before I had this blog, and as I wanted an online record of that trip, in February 2024 I digitized the photos from the scrapbook I had made and turned them into eleven blog posts. One of those posts was specifically about our day in Pforzheim with Mom. I note in the post that at the time all we had was a 35 mm film camera, and we took a mere seven photographs while we were in Pforzheim. "If we could go back," I wrote in 2024, "we would take ten or twenty times as many pictures." Little did I know that we would go back in May 2025, and I would take at least twenty times as many pictures. 

But let's not jump the gun.

On May 5, 2024, not quite three months after I had written the post about our trip, I received a comment on my blog from someone named Alexandria Peary: "My mother was also born in Pforzheim and, like you, I'm an English professor. I would very much like to get in touch with you for a possible interview for a project I'm working on about Pforzheim. I have received a Fulbright to write and research two books (poetry and creative nonfiction) in Pforzheim in 2024-2025. My book projects concern, among other things, the 1945 bombing. I'd be thrilled to have the opportunity to speak with you soon!" Then she left her contact information.

Well, who could pass up an opportunity like THAT? I emailed her and we set up an appointment to talk on Zoom. I found Alex to be engaging, friendly, creative, and intelligent, and I we seemed to have a lot in common. (But not the Fulbright or her incredible writing skills--she was the poet laureate for the state of New Hampshire from 2019 to 2024. I WISH we had that in common!) I don't remember now exactly what we talked about, but I must have told her about my mother's life and shared her recounting of the bombing of Pforzheim. Although Alex's mother was younger than mine and was younger when she immigrated to the United States, I don't think I had ever met anyone else who had family members who lived through World War II in Pforzheim. It was an incredible connection.

Alex and I began to communicate via email, and at some point I told her about my grandfather, Karl Gustav Frey. She became more and more interested in his story, and when she found some connections to her own grandfather's story, her research focus shifted. 

The rest, they say, is history.  

Alex discovered all kinds of information about our grandfather that was completely new to us. Week after week, she would send new discoveries, new documents, new photos our way. When I saw her name in my email inbox, I would drop whatever I was doing and sit down in front of the computer.  Conversations with my siblings were often centered around her latest discovery. With each revelation, our grandfather became a little more known to us. Our mother had given us the briefest of information about him--he was a very strict disciplinarian, he was an excellent violinist and chess player, he was wounded in World War I--but not much more than that. Alex transformed him for us from a fairly meaningless name on a page to a complex, three-dimensional family member whom we have tentatively started calling "Opa." 

Alex's work ultimately led to my siblings, spouses, a cousin, and a nephew meeting up in the town where our mother was born (Giengen), traveling to an Airbnb near Pforzheim where we met up with Alex, spending an emotional day together in Grafeneck and surrounding areas, and attending a Stolpersteine installation on the sidewalk in front of what was once the apartment building where my mother lived with her brother, mother, and father.

Alex Peary (black shirt, center) with descendants
of Karl Gustav and Elise Frey at Grafeneck, Germany

Miracles, indeed--too many to count.

I won't divulge too many details about what Alex discovered as she has several projects based on her research that she plans to publish. When those come out, I will come back to this post and add a reference to her writings for anyone who is interested. I will share the basics related to our travel, however, so stay tuned!