Should Hilary Freeman become a German citizen? The BBC helped her discover her roots By Hilary Freeman. In a small Jewish cemetery, on a traffic island in the middle of a housing estate, I am meeting my great-grandmother, Hedwig Baruch, for the first time.
Without the help of a map, I might literally have stepped over her grave. Her headstone, long-neglected, like those that lie alongside it, has almost disappeared beneath a knot of entwined weeds and foliage.
It is as if the landscape is trying to reclaim it. I tug at the weeds with my bare hands, brushing away the soil until her name becomes clear. She died in October , just a few weeks after Hitler invaded Poland, and less than two months after her son — my late grandfather Sidney Brook born Siegfried Baruch and known to me as Saba — fled to England at the age of She was only 46 almost exactly my age today , and it is said that she died of a broken heart.
At least she was spared the horrors of what was to come for the rest of her family. Two years later, her husband, my great-grandfather Eduard Baruch, was deported to the Riga Ghetto, where he was shot, along with 50, other Jews.
Until last year, I had no idea that I was entitled to reclaim the German citizenship that was stolen from my grandparents, and it was not something I could ever have contemplated. I had never been to Germany, having been brought up to view it as a bad place, its produce and its people forever sullied by the Holocaust. Despite being a quarter German, I felt absolutely no affinity with the country, its language, or its people.
