20 February 2013 | Category: All, Personal
While we were moving I found this picture of my grandparents. It sits now in my dining room and they look at me and my life and though I cannot hear them I am sure they are happy for me and what I do. They sacrificed their youth to find love and become a family.
My great grandparents moved from the Eastern part of Europe to the Ruhr area of Germany. My great grandfather was a pitman and in the years around 1900 a lot of them found work in this area of Germany. When my great grandmother died my grandfather was just 11 years old and he had to move for the first time in his life. He moved to a farm where his older sister married the farmer as his father was already too sick to take care of him. When he was 14 his father died, very poor in a little room that he rented for himself in a big house where other pitman used to live. By the time his sister died he had to leave the farm – the farmer got married again and the presence of my grandfather was not welcome anymore. Farms needed many helpers back then and so he went to another farm to have a warm place to sleep and earn a little money. The war arrived in Germany and didn’t stop from recruiting young men to fight for the country. It didn’t stop before my grandfather either and so he went into war at the age of 17. He was never a person who would hold a weapon so he did his drivers license during that time and learned everything about repairing cars. That moment as a young man in the second world war his passion for bus driving was born. Read the full post
