Writer uncovers her gran’s 60-year secret from Nazi Germany She hid her rape horror
WHEN curious Svenja O’Donnell decided to pay a visit to her beloved gran Inge’s Baltic birthplace, she unlocked a chilling secret.
Because her journey led her into a tragic dark past that quiet Inge had hidden from her family for more than 60 years .
Now, Londoner Svenja has revealed her German gran’s gripping tale of Nazi oppression, heartbreak, betrayal and rape in a moving memoir.
Inge, who died in 2017, would have taken what she regarded as her shameful secret to the grave.
TEARS
But when Svenja told her she was going to her birthplace Kaliningrad – the old Prussian city of Königsberg – in 2006, her normally reticent gran broke down in tears and said: “There is so much I have to tell you.”
She told how she ended up in the hell of Hitler’s Berlin in 1940 as a 15-year-old schoolgirl and fell in love with a pupil’s older brother.
Wolfgang had been to school in England and disliked the Nazis but was soon called up for the
Russian Front. In a night of passion before he went to war, Inge got pregnant with Svenja’s mother, Beatrice.
She returned to her family in shame. They survived bombings and near-starvation to flee to Denmark as the Red Army stormed across Germany.
But when the war was over, Inge’s suffering went w on. In 1946 she experien experienced what she told her granddaughter gra was “the worst time of all”.
While living in dire poverty near n the German City of Kie Kiel, she was raped by a man she s trusted, got
preg pregnant and had a daughter she gave up for adoption. Astonished Svenja – a political journalist – went on to trace the aunt she never knew she had.
“Her life was a hard one,” she says, before revealing her aunt, “full of anger and resentment”, had eventual ly found Inge.
Svenja, 40, thinks her gran was “haunted” by failing her second child.
Her book, Inge’s War, took 10 years to write. Asked why Inge kept the secret for so long, she
says: “I think women of that generation dealt with trauma largely through silence. Shame and the stigma of sexual violence was never talked about.
“And for German women, there was the shame of being associated with a r e g ime th a t committed so many atrocities. There was no room to tell their story.”
But thanks to Svenja’s book, Inge’s story has been told at last.
Women of that era dealt with trauma in silence WRITER SVENJA ON HER GRAN’S SECRET