Sandra Saliba and Lorenz Hemicker will both be speaking about their grandparents during an event to mark International Holocaust Remembrance Day in Malta today, the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp.

But the stories of Sandra’s and Lorenz’s relatives could not be more different.

Sandra’s grandmother is a Jew. Lorenz’s grandfather was a Nazi.

Ahead of today’s event, organised by the Tayar Foundation for Jewish Heritage in Malta in collaboration with the German embassy, Times of Malta sat down with the pair to talk about their respective family histories, how they shaped them and how they view the world right now.

Saliba, a Polish national who has been living in Malta for the past 13 years, says her grandma Krystyna grew up with no idea of her roots.

“The first memory she has is of being in an orphanage in central Poland. Aside from that, she didn’t know her date or place of birth, or who her parents were. She grew up believing she had been abandoned, and was bullied for being an unwanted child.”

She was eventually adopted and raised Roman Catholic, “a typical Polish granny,” Sandra says.

“She would always tell me that when she went to sleep, she hoped that one day she would see her mother’s face in her dreams. My dream was always to help her find the answers she was looking for.”

Sandra's grandmother Krystyna (right) with her sister Halina.

That answer came on January 1, 2022, when the results of a DNA ancestry test came in.

“At first she didn’t want to take the test because she thought it was too late to find answers. But we told her that at least she could have a bit more certainty about her origins,” Sandra says.

The test results could not have been clearer: Sandra’s grandma was almost 100 percent Ashkenazi Jewish. The results also showed she was from an area in eastern Poland with a sizeable Jewish population.

Such tests often tell people if they are related to others who have taken the test. It turned out that Sandra’s grandma shared over 50 per cent of her DNA with someone else, which meant she had a sister.

“The whole world stopped at that moment. How often does it happen that an 80-year-old learns she has a sister? We contacted her, hoping that she was still alive. She was, and lived 400 kilometres away from my grandma.”

After meeting with their newly discovered family, Sandra was able to find out more details about her grandmother’s origins.

“Her sister was able to tell us more. Their parents had left them both in cardboard boxes in the street. My grandmother ended up in an orphanage and her sister ended up in a town 50 kilometres away.

Given that the town where the sisters were born was not far from Treblinka, the second-deadliest concentration camp operated by the Nazis in Poland, it is highly likely that their parents died there.

“What probably happened is that their parents left them hoping they would be saved. As a mother myself, I can’t begin to imagine that level of desperation,” Sandra says.

Lorenz, on the other hand, was just five years old when he first heard about his grandfather’s dark past, during a car ride with his father from Cologne back to their hometown of Kierspe.

“For some reason we were talking about World War II. He told me that my grandfather served with distinction in the military. He would say the same thing at family gatherings and barbecues with friends. Later I learned that he was being sarcastic, and used dark humour to cope with the truth,” Lorenz says.

Eventually, Lorenz would go on to learn that his grandfather, Ernst, was an SS officer who played an active role in what is known as the Rumbula massacre, in which around 25,000 Latvian and German Jews were murdered in a forest outside of Riga over two days in November and December 1941.

“He was an engineer and his job was to plan out the mass graves ahead of the killings, which prisoners of war then dug with their bare hands,” he says, adding that his grandfather also coordinated the gathering of victims’ belongings.

Growing up, Lorenz did not believe his grandfather to be a bad man, since not all of this information was initially available to him. Ernst’s family had a vague idea of his past, but after the war he claimed he was disgusted by what he had participated in, that he was only following orders, and that he had tried to help as many Jews as he could.

“If every SS officer who claimed to have tried to help Jews had actually helped them, the Holocaust would never have happened. My grandfather was a committed Nazi, simple as that,” says Lorenz, who normally refers to him as a phantom or a monster rather than ‘grandfather’.

Like Sandra, love was the reason why Lorenz set out to find more details about his ancestor. In his case, love for his father.

“My father first learned about Ernst’s actions when he was in his 30s in the 1960s. From then on, he carried this trauma with him, and I wanted to help him get rid of the weight of uncertainty. In 2011, I planned a trip with him to Riga to meet survivors and go into the forest. But two weeks before, he died of a stroke. It was then that my research started,” says Lorenz, who now works as an editor at the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.

When Sandra first found out she would be meeting Lorenz, her instinctive reaction was one of anger.

“My first thought was, ‘I hate this guy’. I thought that, as the descendant of a perpetrator, he’d be arrogant, that he’s the bad guy. I guess it came from a place of pain. And then I read the speech that he will deliver at the event, and I cried and cried and cried,” she says.

Eventually, she came to sympathise with Lorenz’s grandfather more than he did.

“I put myself in your grandfather’s shoes, how he was brainwashed so badly that he could do the things he did. Would I have acted differently in his position? And then I became very keen to meet you, because being open about all this, telling these sobering stories and facing your past, means you aren’t hiding away,” she tells Lorenz.

In a way, Sandra says, they are both victims of the Holocaust, but also both survivors.