Some things can't be explained. They have to be pulled like a thread to see what unravels.
The story of Wilhelm Heinrich Rummert is like that. He was the grandfather of my mother, a German war bride. I've been trying to get a sense of him and his times for the past year.
What kind of man was he? How did the times his lifetime spanned -- Prussian Empire, World War I, the Weimar Republic, the Nazi era, World War II and living under Communist rule in post-war East Germany -- shape him and our family?
I knew little about him until a trip to Germany two weeks ago to find traces of him in old records. I also visited a tiny village called Gross Vaeter in the Schorfheide, a forest region about 60 miles northeast of Berlin that once was the hunting grounds of the Kaisers, then the Nazis and later, East German Communist government officials.
I found his birth date, the year he retired from his job as a government forest worker/gardener and a few other records from the years he served as mayor in the town of 121 people that now has a population of about half that.
Miracles happen sometimes on genealogical quests. Mine occurred in Gross Vaeter with German friends who took me there. We were standing on the one street that runs through the village, searching for a house that looked like it could be the one in a 1930 photograph I had.
Three people walking by asked if they could help us. We told them we were looking for someone who remembered Wilhelm Rummert.
"Well, I do," said a woman named Renate. "But I was very young. Let me take you to my sister, Erika, who is older and will remember more."
Erika, 80, has lived in the village all her life. She recalled many things: My great-grandparents. Her early life in the village, stories her mother told about Kaiser Wilhelm coming to the Schorfheide to hunt. The mid-1930s when the second highest ranking Nazi leader, Hermann Goering, built his ostentatious hunting lodge Carinhall in the Schorfheide. Russian soldiers pillaging, looting and marching toward Berlin in 1945, and shooting and killing her deaf grandfather because they thought he was ignoring their questions, when actually he couldn't hear.
The visit stirred memories of often dreadful times, but I think she sensed I wouldn't have come so far if I didn't need to know all she could tell. Like me, she thought her sister's "chance" encounter on the street was more than coincidence, something that shouldn't be ignored.
I am grateful for the threads she passed on. The tapestries of history need to be honest.
Record-Eagle columnist Loraine Anderson can be reached at landerson@record-eagle.com
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