An inconvenient truth swept under the carpet? An inconvenient truth that after World War 2, ten million ethnic German civilians were subjected to deportation, compulsory labour, expulsion and, sometimes starvation and physical attack? An inconvenient truth that a minimum of 470,000 of those ethnic Germans expelled from Russia, Poland and the Sudetenland died during these expulsions due to hypothermia, starvation and violence?
Seventy-five years have passed since the end of WW2, and year by year there are fewer and fewer people who can talk about their own experiences of that time. This means that witnesses to the expulsion off ethnic Germans from, for example, Czechoslovakia, Silesia, Pomerania and East Prussia are, literally, dying out.
So disgusted was I/am I about this sweeping-under-the-carpet-of-inconvenient-problems for the EU, I decided to use these "problems" as a backdrop to my novel, Lost Property. Fittingly, the cover was designed by the German artist, Andrea Price - https://www.facebook.com/hashtag/andreapricedesign
Recently, this article (from 13 August 2020) appeared in a local paper. The piece is entitled: "Ich hab' noch Sehnsucht nach Silesien" or "I still have a yearning for Silesia" in which 90-year-old Marga Springer-Heinz talks about the expulsions from Silesia in the postwar period. "Geblieben ist die Liebe zur Heimat," she says, "auch nach fast 75 Jahren." "Remaining is the love of your homeland," she says. "Even after 75 years."
The same may be said for the lady who wrote the comment at the top of the article. "Schau mal: koennte das nicht Oma Rosa sein?" "Just look: couldn't that be grandma Rosa?"
Lost Property by Robert John Goddard
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