When you ask me if I'm a **person, what are you asking? Do you want to ask me which country, which city, which village, or something else? Do you want to ask about my hometown, or where I live now?
What do you remember about the clouds and people of your hometown? If you don't remember anything, is your hometown still considered a hometown? If the place of peace is my hometown, then what is the trouble of finding and exploring our hometown?
Christiana Hoffmann said she was the daughter of a refugee child and that it all started in January 1945 when the German army retreated from Poland and millions of people were forced to flee their homeland. Later generations called this a period of history of escape, expulsion, and reconciliation.
You're familiar with World War II, aren't you? When it started and when it ended, how did the choices of the big names affect the situation of the war, how did they affect history, and what else do you know? The big history is recorded in the history books, but what about the little people who are floating in the big history?
On Monday, January 22, 1945, the Soviet Red Army advanced near the Rose Valley to the Oder River. At the same time, the Germans forcibly evacuated, and the fleeing party in Rose Valley Village numbered more than 300 people, who loaded the ox carts and carriages and a small number of belongings, thinking that they would soon be able to return home.
At about the same time, a group of people from the Lemberg region of western Ukraine were also expelled from their homeland and resettled in the distant village of Rose Valley. Similar experiences and the pain of believing: carriages, handful possessions, violence, and resignation. None of them were able to return to their hometowns.
From January 22 to March 22, the 550-kilometre escape route from Rose Valley to Klinghardt took them 40 days, but now they only need to drive for five hours. The regions along this route were part of the German Empire, but now they have to cross the border four times: from Poland to the Czech Republic, back to Poland, a short distance through Germany, and back to the Czech Republic.
You're familiar with World War II, aren't you? When it started and when it ended, how did the choices of the big names affect the situation of the war, how did they affect history, and what else do you know? There are certain areas that the Germans are forced to give up, and the areas that the Germans are forced to give up are precisely what other countries have to accept, and they are reluctant to do so. However, no one asked the little people living in it if they were willing.
The silent generation is leaving the world, and the living know little about it. Once the generation that experienced the war has passed away, and young people are not clear enough about that period of history, what can they remember about the so-called history as a mirror? Once the generation that experienced the exodus is gone, what is left of the bond between the young and the so-called homeland of their ancestors?
The big people do evil, and the ordinary people are evicted and displaced. If there is always someone to pay for the sins that the Germans have done, why do they have to bear the retribution for their sins through ordinary people and their descendants becoming refugees, unclean people, sinners?
Even after 75 years, revisiting her father's path of escape and writing this book "Everything We Forget: The Road of Returning to My Father's Escape", Christiana Hoffmann does not have a definite answer, about the history of escape, expulsion and reconciliation, is the past really in the past? Thousands of people have shared the same catastrophe, is it really not worth the fuss to remember?
2024 Book of Answers